When the NPB season will begin this year still remains an open question. It won't begin until sometime in June at the earliest. The most recent thing I heard was that the league was still going to attempt to have each team play 125 games - basically their original number of games minus the 18 interleague games. This seems somewhat aggressive to me - I suspect that the number of games will turn out to be more like 100 or so per team, unless NPB either schedules Monday games or doubleheaders. Obviously I'll take whatever I can get under the circumstances. I expect we'll have more NPB games than MLB games this year.
I've been monitoring Takeya Nakamura's progress towards 500 home runs for the past few seasons and I'm wondering how much an abbreviated schedule is going to affect the likelihood of him reaching this milestone. He's 36 years old (and will turn 37 in August) and is 85 home runs away from 500 home runs. He's been remarkably productive over the past few years despite having somewhat diminished playing time - he's averaged almost 30 home runs a season in the seven seasons since he turned 30 despite only playing in over 120 games in two of those seasons (he's averaged 117 games a year over that time). Even if the Lions somehow end up playing 125 games this year I figure he will not play in all of them. A schedule of double headers and no off days will be tough on all the players and especially an older one with a history of nagging injuries. I was worried already that his production was going to diminish over the next few seasons and this will probably put a further crimp in it.
As I've mentioned before, if Nakamura doesn't reach 500 home runs, I don't know who might. The most home runs by any active player under 30 years of age is Tetsuto Yamada with 202. If he stays in Japan he's certainly could make a run at it (especially if he continues playing in Jingu Stadium) but obviously he's a long way off.
Here's a card of Nakamura from the 2004 BBM Lions set (#58):
1 comment:
That's an interesting question, not just in NPB but also MLB. A few years from now we might be looking back at 2020 and tallying up how much it cost certain players/teams in stats, like with the 1994 strike. I'm curious if Nakamura's 500 HRs will be one of the casualties!
Post a Comment