ESPN.com: MLB – Report: Ishii, Dodgers agree to deal
How good will Ishii be?
He’s coming off a down year for him, in which he had a 4.01 ERA, struck out 7.6 per 9 IP while walking four. His career numbers are all better than that, which either means he’s on a downslide or he’s likely to bounce back.
He’s 28 years old and has been pitching for Yakult, a park that favors hitter, for seven years. He moves to a park that favors pitchers.
Clay Davenport at Baseball Prospectus recently published an indicative but not conclusive study of Japanese Baseball Equivalencies, using the stats of Major League and Triple-A hitters who have gone back and forth. You’ll find it here.
Roughly, he found that pitchers stats decline by about 10 percent when going from Japan to the Majors, which I think means that without taking into account park effects his ERA in LA in 2001 would have been about 4.40. Given the park effects both in Japan and LA it would more probably be about 4.20.
If he’s healthy and last year’s decline in strikeouts per nine innings was a blip, then I’d expect him to win 10-12 games with an ERA of about 4.20. But the blip is troubling (he’d never before struck out fewer than 9 per game since his rookie season). So while you can hope for those numbers, you have to be prepared for him to give up a lot of walks and nearly a hit per inning pitched, in which case he isn’t really draftable.
My bid price right now? $4.