Who Are These Guys?

Not too many years ago, any mention of a foreigner in a mainstream baseball story would elicit the comment, “Who’s he?”

Tracing the influx of born-overseas players in the Major Leagues (with only a handful of exceptions) really only takes us back to the early 1950s when Chico Carrasquel was the first in the great line of shortstops from Venezuela and Minnie Minoso was one of the first big stars from Cuba.

Now, roughly 30 percent of big-league rosters are populated by players whose roots stem from Latin American countries. And we have seen the arrival of Major League ballplayers from Japan, China, and South Korea, not to mention Canada and Australia and here and there a fellow from another country.

More than ever (though not nearly as much as in basketball), baseball has evolved into a worldwide sport. In order to truly compete, a club should know who’s who in nations where their own scouts don’t even speak the language. It may not be terrifically important to be able to make small-talk with a superior slugger from Seoul, but an earned run average of 1.81 translates into any language pretty clearly.  I don’t know if they have Berlitz course offerings in the language of baseball just yet (we probably will someday), but the numbers of baseball need no interpreters.

The amazing thing to me at this stage of baseball’s development is that not only scouts know the name of Yu Darvish, the extraordinary Japanese pitcher who could be The Next Big Thing in the majors, but that baseball writers living thousands of miles away, who have never seen him throw live and who have never seen him pitch on TV, know it as well.

He is the man of the four-season 1.81 earned run average for the Nippon Ham Fighters who would bring five years of Japan League experience to a Major League team. You can never know these things for sure, but certainly the sport’s dreamers would love to see the Whirling Darvish become the Ichiro Suzuki of the mound. Is he that good? Could be.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder and with players from far away who aren’t scouted every day and who don’t follow the traditional American path up the ladder, there is probably more iffiness in predicting greatness. We know from experience that just because a pitcher is from the Dominican Republic he is not automatically going to be the next Juan Marichal.

Something to think about: Right now the jury is still out on Aroldis Chapman. In 2009, the southpaw with the 100 mph fastball defected from Cuba. His representatives put him up for auction as if he was an heirloom being bid on at Sotheby’s and the Cincinnati Reds won the sweepstakes. Well, two years into his relationship with Cincinnati, Chapman is neither a starter nor a closer. Fans at the great American Ball Park applaud each time one of his heaters cracks the 100 mark on the radar gun, but he is being nursed along and has yet to justify his multi-milli0n-dollar contract.

Chapman is only 23 and still has plenty of time to become great. It may be that in March Chapman’s time will come to be the whiz-bang guy in the rotation the Reds hoped for. He seems to have the raw stuff, but right this minute he has been no better an investment for Cincinnati than a middle reliever who was a 20th-round pick out of Cal-State Fullerton.

The fact is in a sport with no sure things, if Darvish decides to make the jump to the U.S., the team that gets him will be taking an expensive risk guessing that Yu is da man.