We all know at this point that long-term contracts for pitchers are very risky; after all (to paraphrase one of your recent posts), pitchers get hurt a lot.  Given that fact, let’s entertain a hypothetical scenario: Let’s say an ace hits the free agent market in his prime, and teams are lining up to woo him.  Conventional wisdom says that, most of the time, the team that ponies up in dollars and years will get the prize, right?  Well, what if a rogue team took a different approach, and instead of offering, say, a six-year, $140m deal, offered a three-year, $90m deal instead?  What do you think would happen?  Would the pitcher scoff at the lower total contract, or would he be interested in the higher annual payout and the lure of another round of free agency in three years?  I’d bet the pitcher would at least think twice about it.  As for the team offering those terms, it would be mitigating the risk of injury to the player; it would save itself money in total dollars committed; and it would have greater flexibility in player personnel decision making in the medium-to-long term.  Food for thought.

– Nate, via e-mail.

Hmm. Hmmmmmmmmmm. That is some tasty food for thought.

It seems like a reasonable enough idea that I’m trying to figure out why it hasn’t happened. I suppose it mostly depends on the pitcher: If he has been so thoroughly injury-free that he and his agent are confident he will be healthy in three years, a deal like that would make  a lot of sense for him. Of course, if that were the case, the team would also probably be reasonably confident that the pitcher would be healthy in three years and might prefer to lock him up for less money per year over a longer term.

I guess the only even vaguely comparable situation is when Roger Clemens signed a couple of massive part-year deals with the Astros and Yankees in 2006 and 2007 (Ed. Note: And he is BAAAACK!), but in those cases I’m pretty sure it was Clemens limiting the length, doing his own version of the Favre festering-boil thing, only in Clemens’ case with an actual festering boil.

Otherwise, maybe it has something to do with the way teams want to structure payouts? As Mets fans have all now seen, teams can invest and earn interest on the money they owe players in the latter years of contracts, so perhaps it behooves the team to avoid giving a player so much money so quickly?

But really, I don’t know. If I had to guess, I would figure it is the agents — smart enough to vote down a confident player who believes he’s invincible — that get in the way of that type of deal. They probably convince the pitchers — rightfully — that they’re in a dangerous trade, and that the security of a $140 million deal (in this example) is better for them and their families. But I’m probably missing something. Some union thing? Any ideas?

With red wristbands and a thick mane flowing out the back of his helmet, Nishioka was standing on second base in the eighth inning of a quarterfinal game against the United States in the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006.

Japan’s batter had just been hit by a pitch when time was called so the trainer could come out. Nishioka seized upon the lull to fulfill a dream. He stepped off the bag, walked over toward Derek Jeter and introduced himself.

– Brad Lefton, N.Y. Times.

Good read from Lefton and the Times about the Twins’ newest infielder, Japanese import Tsuyoshi Nishioka. Nishioka briefly used only one name — Pele-style — and had only “Tsuyoshi” on the team roster, which I imagine could not have gone over well with our hero.

Anyway, this article seems like as good a segue as I’m going to find to bring up something I’ve been thinking about in terms of Japanese baseball, and which I can’t find a whole lot about online.

Toward the end of the fall, as numbers started dwindling at our weekly pickup baseball game in Brooklyn, we found ourselves with only enough guys to field one team. We sought out competitors, and found a few rogue teams from other leagues that themselves weren’t yet ready to shelve their bats for the winter. We played against a team of Mexican dudes called the Aztecs from a Red Hook league, and then a couple of games against the Cubs from the New York City Metro Baseball League, a wood-bat league that plays in Central Park.

For our last game of the season, we played a group of Japanese guys that play in a Japanese league spanning the Tri-State area. Unlike the Cubs and the Aztecs, though, these guys used some different equipment than we did. Most notably: The nanshiki ball.

I can’t find much about the nanshiki ball online in English, but one of the guys told me it’s essentially the standard for every amateur-level league in Japan, Taiwan and Korea. It is slightly lighter than a regular baseball, and made of rubber. It has raised “seams,” but they’re the same color as the ball. The guy said it is used for safety, but also to save space — because the ball doesn’t travel as far, fields where it is used do not need to be as large as they would with a harder baseball.

Our pitchers were unwilling to use the nanshiki ball and theirs were unwilling to use our ball, so we agreed that they would use the nanshiki ball when they were in the field and we would use ours.

Because the ball compressed when it made contact with the bat, it was very difficult to drive. And since it was impossible to read the seams on pitches, it seemed to reward the slap hitters over the more powerful guys.

The opposing fielders, for their part, seemed way more eager than we were to use their bodies to knock the ball down, perhaps because the cost in pain is less (or perhaps because they were generally better fielders than us).

Anyway, I wonder if this in any affects the development of Asian players. I have no idea how long the nanshiki ball has been in use and at what levels exactly, so it could be that no current Major Leaguer has ever used the thing. But as younger Japanese players like Nishioka start switching leagues, it’s at least an interesting thing to consider, I think.