And stride

And stride

Stride

Stride

Stride

Hello and welcome to episode 2015 of Effectively Wild.

A gangravs baseball podcast brought to you and us by our Patreon supporters and also by our

Fangress overlords. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangress and I am here with Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer and also of the

Internationally renowned Ta-Koro Nakashima article that has just been published on this Friday morning and

I am I am excited. I am so excited. I got a sneak peek into a into this article and I can't wait to talk about him immediately.

Are you are you let's do that? I'm good. I have a new favorite player. So that's fun. I got the name right right?

Ta-Koro Nakashima Takuya Takuya Takuya Takura. Yeah, this is embarrassing should have prepped this little

Nakashima. You know, we never really used first names anyway. Yeah, right. Yeah, Nakashima son. So Ben if you would do us the pleasure of

explaining in I don't know 500 words to less why Nakashima is your new favorite player in the world. I'll try because I wrote a lot more than that. So this came to our attention via a

listener email from friend of the show Kazuyama Zaki. He emailed us because there is a player on the Hokkaido

Naponham fighters, which is Shohe O'Tani's team and this player is essentially the guy that we have talked about we talked about not long ago. I think maybe multiple times has been talked about on this podcast, but the hypothetical

player who can just keep fouling off pitches indefinitely until the pitcher just can't their strikes anymore inevitably misses and then he walks and people keep asking us how much with that guy be worth and we answer.

And then it turns out that he's real and his name is Nakashima and on this podcast last year we talked a lot about Shohe O'Tani and of course he's fascinating for you know he's I mean he's the best titter in Japan. He's the best pitcher in Japan. Everyone's interested in O'Tani and so now you have to have a hipster Hokkaido Naponham fighter favorite and Nakashima fits the bill because he's like the most effectively wild player ever in ten years.

He's in ten different ways and he's incredible like we like outliers we like people who are unusual I guess just because it grabs our attention or because we talk and write about baseball players and most of them are close to the average and they don't really stand out in any way and so when someone does when he's on some extreme end of the scale then we write about him and we talk about him and maybe we have some affection for him and he doesn't really even have to be good at baseball and even the thing that he's an outlaw.

He's not even the thing that he's an outlier and doesn't really have to be good like Seth Lugo for instance you you wrote about him once last summer and he's like Mike Petriello's favorite player because he has this curveball that has a spin rate that is much higher than anyone else's curveball and it's not clear that Seth Lugo is good and it's not even clear that

Seth Lugo's curveball is good for that matter but it does spin a lot more than other curveballs and so we like him and we pay attention to him and we think that must mean something.

So Nakashima is just I like fouling off pitches is the thing that has emailed us about specifically so basically he is fouled off something like 250 more pitches in the last NPB season than any other NPB player.

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