The Red Sox bullpen has a new finesse guy.
Who is he and where did he come from?
He’s Naoyuki Uwasawa, and he signed a minor league deal with the Tampa Bay Rays this past offseason. After an up-and-down spring training, he triggered an out-clause in his contract, inducing the Rays to trade him to the Red Sox for cash.
Uwasawa comes from Matsudo, a city in the greater Tokyo region. Matsudo is also the home of Japan’s second female astronaut, Naoko Yamazaki. Yamazaki spent 15 days on the shuttle Discovery in 2010, so if Uwasawa has trouble adjusting to the increased travel in MLB, he should give her a call.
What position does he play?
For his entire career, Uwasawa has been a starting pitcher. Then, this past weekend in Minnesota, he did something he hasn’t done since he was a kid: pitch in back-to-back days out of the bullpen. Consider him a swingman for now.
Is he any good?
Uwasawa represents something of a rarity in MLB: he’s a Japanese player who wasn’t a superstar in NPB, but rather, was just a pretty good player. In his 9-year career with the Nippon Ham Fighters (the former ball club of both Yu Darvish and Shohei Ohtani), he made the All-Star team three times and posted a career 3.19 ERA. That’s a strong number! But for context, there were 17 different starters who put up ERAs below 3 in Japan last season, a feat that only 5 starters in all of MLB matched. His good but less-than-stellar numbers aren’t surprising when you find out that his fastball sits at about 90 MPH.
But there are plenty of things to like about Uwasawa. For starters, he has a deep six-pitch arsenal that, like many Japanese pitchers, includes a tough splitter. And more importantly, he absolutely pounds the strike zone with all of them; he threw strikes at a 66% rate last season, which would have put him in the top 20 in MLB. And even that somnambulant fastball has some intriguing characteristics:
I’m hearing that Naoyuki Uwasawa will be posted soon by his NPB team. His K rates haven’t been amazing in Japan, but he has some interesting characteristics to his stuff. His fastball vertical movement (19 IVB) and spin (2650 RPM) would be top 5-10% percent in the league.
— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) November 22, 2023
Induced Vertical Break essentially measures how much a fastball moves vertically as a result of the spin a pitcher puts on it. It goes without saying that the more a fastball moves the harder it is to hit, and IVB is one of the big reasons why Kutter Crawford’s fastball plays up so well.
Put the whole package together and most scouts pegged Uwasawa as a guy who could stick in the back end of an MLB rotation, which isn’t bad considering the Sox didn’t give up anything significant to get him.
Show me a cool highlight.
Here’s something cool. Despite the fact that the Red Sox are the only MLB team Uwasawa has officially played for, he has faced and struck out Rafael Devers:
Also cool? Complete game shutouts:
What’s he doing in his picture up there?
Convening a press conference to introduce his new haircut, which is totally a thing ballplayers should start doing.
What’s his role on the 2024 Red Sox?
He was brought it to be a depth piece, and that’s exactly how he’s being used right now. But obviously Craig Breslow and Andrew Bailey like his stuff, and if he keeps getting people out he could turn into an important piece of the bullpen.