Here’s a Hideki Matsui card for the Meikyukai collection. (Earlier write-up
here.)
As I suspect anyone reading this knows, Matsui defected from Yomiuri after the 2002 season, signing with the Yankees. He stayed with them through 2007, after which he spent a few seasons with the Angels/A’s/Rays to finish out his career. When he left Japan, Matsui had 332 career home runs and 1390 hits. He added 1253 hits and 175 home runs on this side of the Pacific.
What I want to do today is estimate what his career would have looked like if he hadn’t left Japan. Of course you can’t actually know this, but an educated guess is possible. Here’s how I’m going to do it. The Davenport Translation of his 1996 is about 25% better than his actually 2003 MLB performance. So I’m going to take his actual 1996 stats, and reduce them by 25%, and use that as his projected 2003. After that I’m going to find changes in his actual performance from year to year, and adjust his projected performance by the same amount. So, say that his performance from one year to the next decreased by x%. I’m going to take his projected performance for the first year, and multiply it by 1-x to get his projected performance for the next year. That way his projected aging pattern matches his actual aging pattern.
My calculations give him an additional 803 hits and 312 home runs, for career totals of 2193 hits and 644 home runs. Fewer hits because the season is shorter, but more home runs, because Japanese players tend to lose a lot of power when they come to MLB. If this is right he would still have gotten Meikyukai membership, and would have ended up third all-time for home runs in Japan. It also gives him a career slash line of 297/399/611. There are some oddities of this little system that aren’t especially believable. Most notably, the fact that his home run total doubled from 2003 to 2004 makes his 2004 projection a bit screwy. But this is just for fun, so it’s good enough.
Meikyukai:
Yes – Hall of Fame –
Yes
1999 Calbee SP. This set is a premium that you could only get by sending in “winner” cards from packs of Calbee chips.