One of my favorite selections from my true collection.

There was chance.

One of my favorite selections from my true collection.

Hello and welcome to episode 1316 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Bandgraphs presented by our patrons and supporters.

I am Ben Linger of the Ringer joined by Jeff Sullivan of Bandgraphs.

Hello happy new year. Happy new year Ben.

Thank you.

We are going to talk later on this episode to Jim Allen of the Kyoto News who's been covering Japanese baseball for quite a long time.

He's going to tell us about Yusuke Kukuchi and Yuki Anagira and some other interesting players, although he will, I think, very carefully avoid mentioning the name Kei Agawa, which you will hear or not here at one point.

But we want to talk about Kukuchi because he is now the newest Seattle Mariner.

And of course because it's the Mariners and because it's Jerry DePoto, that news had to come out on New Year's Eve, late on New Year's Eve.

As many people were preparing to celebrate ring in the New Year, we got news that the Mariners had made a move.

So this was the most stereotypical thing DePoto has done since he made a trade from his hospital bed.

The move itself, it's never that surprising when a Japanese player signs with the Mariners because I believe they have had a Japanese player every year since I believe it's 1998, something like that.

Maybe since Sasaki came over, I don't remember if he was the one who started the string, but there has almost always been a Japanese presence on the Mariners, largely because of their geographical location.

So not surprising to see Kukuchi go there for that reason.

Sort of surprising for some people, I suppose just because of all the other moves the Mariners have made this winter, which largely have made them worse, although maybe not quite that much worse when you really drill down and think about it.

Yeah, you can think about it. Well, how good do you think Justice Sheffield is going to be? How good is Eric Swanson going to be? How good is JP Crawford going to be?

But what's interesting here, the consensus on Yusuke Kukuchi, if there is one is that he'll be something like a mid rotation major league starting picture, I think he's drawn comparisons to a pre breakout Patrick Corbin, if that makes anyone feel better, I don't know.

But he was a fairly prominent available player and the most prominent available Japanese player this winter, and had the Mariners just gone into the off season with the team they had and had they signed Kukuchi, you think, oh, well, they're going to be there.

They're going to be there in the hunt for the wild card. You know, still not a great team, still not as good as the Astros, maybe not even as good as the Angels of the A's depending on what you think.

But the Mariners plus Kukuchi and plus some sort of hitter, whether that's resigning Nelson Cruz or just bringing some of the bed, you think, well, that team could still kind of hang around. But now it's interesting timing.

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