Masato Nakazawa - Tokyo Yakult Swallows - Japanese Baseball Draft Analysis NPB

Masato Nakazawa - Pitcher - Toyota Motors  

Masato Nakazawa- Yakult Swallows

   DOB : 2/16/85  
   age : 25  
   throws / hits : L / L  
   height cm : 179  
   weight kg : 80  
   height inch : 70.5 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Yakult Swallows 
   weight lbs : 176.4 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　round 1

Masato Nakazawa is a game-ready pitcher who is polished and should fill a role as a starter. He is not a flame thrower, but he is a very good technician with his off-speed and breaking pitches. He has a great breaking slider, a very good change-up and likes to use his looping drop curve to get batters out. I would like to see more velocity on his fastballs, but his style is to use his fastball as a decoy rather than a weapon. At 25 years old, there is not a lot of room to develop. His curves are pro level and the rest of his game is fairly average. He will start but he won’t light anything up. He should be a dependable, but slightly inconsistent, NPB pitcher.

Outlook: Yakult has Nakazawa pegged for their rotation as early as 2010 or 2011. He is a seasoned and experienced lefty, but he won’t light the world on fire. He will have good and bad outings. Overall he should develop into a fairly average pitcher who has a healthy arsenal of pitches to throw at batters. Yakult envisions Nakazawa, Yoshinori, Tateyama and Muranaka as their future rotation. That is not exactly top-class, but it is better than what they have now. This was a fair pick for a proven game-ready stater at SP for the Swallows.

Brandon Siefken has covered Japanese pro and amateur baseball since 1991. He is currently an intern for a Major League Baseball team and has been quoted in Bloomberg, The New York Times and other publications regarding Japanese baseball. Brandon is a regular writer for Bob Bavasi’s JapanBall.com site and has authored several articles including “The Kuroda Index” and “Yu Darvish: A 315 Pitch Scouting Report.”

Each year Brandon publishes the “Japan Baseball News Weekly”( http://www.japanbaseballnews.com/?page_id=1543 ) newsletter with updated weekly stats for every player from April to October. Brandon can be contacted at brandon@japanball.com.