Chien-Ming Wang, Best Taiwanese Player in MLB History
Chien-Ming Wang suffered another injury setback yesterday, as continuing hip soreness forced the Nationals to pull him from his rehab assignment. He’s only 32, but he’s pitched a grand total of 223 innings in the last five years, and even if he returns to pitch meaningful innings for the Nationals this year or for another team next year, it’s looking increasingly likely that the bulk of his career is already behind him. So it might be appropriate to look at the career he’s already had, as the best Taiwanese player in major league history, and possibly the best Asian pitcher born outside Japan to come to the Major Leagues.
His body is a scar map. He’s been on the disabled list seven times, suffering multiple injuries to his shoulder, hamstring, and hip. His medical bills could probably put your kids through college. (Arthroscopic shoulder surgery costs around $20,000. A year of CUNY tuition for a kid living at home costs about $10,000.)
The Nationals were hoping that Wang could help bolster their rotation as they plan to seriously limit Stephen Strasberg’s innings, but Wang has only managed 23 2/3 ineffective innings this year, and his availability for the rest of the campaign is in doubt. Of course, that’s not to say that a serious comeback is impossible: after all, Ben Sheets is pitching effective and meaningful innings for a playoff contender this year, and if Wang can get healthy that’s exactly what he’d be doing in Washington.
Still, it’s worth taking a look at Wang’s career in retrospect, because from 2005 to 2008 he was one of the better pitchers in the American league. His best year was 2006, when he led the major leagues with 19 wins and finished second in the Cy Young voting, which is the highest any Asian pitcher has ever placed in the voting. In the last two decades, other than Wang, only three Asian pitchers have even gotten votes: Daisuke Matsuzaka, who finished fourth in 2008; Takashi Saito, who finished eighth in 2006; and Hideo Nomo, the 1995 Rookie of the Year who finished fourth in the Cy Young voting in both 1995 and 1996.
That’s a short list of the best Asian pitchers in the major leagues since Nomo blazed his trail, with a couple of notable exceptions, like the durable but rarely dominant Chan Ho Park, and the dominant but rarely durable Hiroki Kuroda. Wang was not quite truly Cy Young-caliber at his peak, but he wasn’t far off — he was worth 12.9 Wins Above Replacement in 628 2/3 innings from 2005 to 2008, which is essentially three All Star-caliber seasons in four years.
Wang debuted for the Yankees on April 30, 2005, the second pitcher and third player from Taiwan to reach the major leagues. The first was Chin-Feng Chen, who debuted for the Dodgers in 2002 after having been signed in 1999. Another 1999 Dodgers signee made his debut later in 2005, Hong-Chih Kuo. At the time, the Dodgers were very active in Taiwan. Three of the eight Taiwanese players in major league history were originally signed by the Dodgers: Chen, Kuo, and Chin-Lung Hu. As it happens, Chen, Kuo, Hu, and Wang all had the same birthplace: Tainan City, a Little League powerhouse whose dominance of the sport was so thorough that authorities from the United States investigated claims of cheating and briefly banned Taiwanese teams from competition.
His success is honestly a bit hard to fathom. Sure, sinkerballers typically pitch to contact, but he never struck anyone out. Moreover, before he signed with the Yankees for a $1.9 million bonus, he wasn’t even the most highly-regarded player in Taiwan. “In high school, he was kind of terrible,” a Taiwanese sportswriter told Sports Illustrated in 2008. “No one thought he could be a star.” As a matter of fact, he learned his signature pitch relatively late in his career. According to the SI piece, after he blew out his shoulder in 2001, the Yankees forbade him from throwing his slider, and a Triple-A coach taught him a different grip for his fastball in 2004, less than a year before his promotion to the Show.
Wang has a career K/9 of 4.1, which is sixth-lowest among all pitchers with at least 600 IP in the last 20 years. His swinging strike percentage is 6.4 percent, which is tied for 11th-lowest. (The astonishing Kirk Rueter puts him to shame, however, with a career K/9 of 3.8 and SwStr% of 4.0%. No wonder Rueter’s 4.27 career ERA is 0.76 runs below his xFIP.) He was basically a one-and-a-half pitch pitcher, throwing his trademark sinking fastball more than three-quarters of the time, and then he’d mix in a slider and changeup. Over his career, the slider has had modestly positive value, the changeup modestly negative value, but the fastball was obviously his bread and butter. Everyone knew it was coming, but no one could get under it.
Obviously, he was a groundballer. His 0.63 HR/9 is seventh-lowest in the past two decades, tied with Brandon Webb, and his GB% is third-highest, behind just Webb and Derek Lowe. A whole lot of batted-ball sins can be forgiven if you never, ever, ever allow home runs, and Wang could do that.
SI argues that Wang’s injury history — which Kuo certainly shares — could have something to do with the tremendous workload faced by Taiwanese prep talent:
At the start of the 2008 season there were 25 Taiwanese players under contract to MLB organizations, roughly a quarter of whom were pitchers who have spent time on the disabled list.
Grueling training regimens in Taiwanese colleges and professional leagues have been blamed for the short careers of pitchers. When he was 18, Tsao says, he followed a half hour of long toss with a three-hour bullpen session and an hour of pitching live batting practice. He once started three games in a four-game tournament. But many believe that the arm abuse begins even earlier. “By the time they get to college, they’re already damaged,” says the director of Asian scouting of one major league team.
For Chien-Ming Wang, there is a risk that the damage may be done. But even if he doesn’t pitch many more innings this year or next year, he has already had a terrific career. Not many pitchers can say that they were the ace of the New York Yankees. He’s got a great pennant race to look forward to if he can heal this season, but he’s already got enough memories to last his fans and countrymen a lifetime.
He was my favorite player 06-08. Damn you NL baseball!
Chin-Lung HU??
Hu’s on first, Kuo’s on second, and Fu-Te Ni’s on third!
Ni just got released by the Tigers from AAA. I was legitimately sad. He was one of those guys who I inexplicably became attached to.
I think I may be one the few people in the world who owns a signed Ni photo. I hope he signs on somewhere soon.
Wang was signed by the Yankees as an amateur. It seems to me he is more aptly compared to other amateur signees and not to professional players from Japan who made the jump to MLB.
As a strict point of apples to apples comparison, that’s a fair point — that would limit the pool to players like Byung-Hyun Kim, Chan-Ho Park, and Jun Tazawa who were signed out of high school or college.
But I don’t just want to compare prep talent. I want to compare Wang to all other pitchers from East Asia. And he has very few peers. Even true star pitchers in Japanese baseball have stumbled in the major leagues, whether it’s due to hype or other problems, as with Hideki Irabu, Kei Igawa, and Daisuke Matsuzaka. Wang was greater than them.
What is the importance of being from East Asia? I think the inclusion of other amateur signees makes the pool much bigger. Latin American players are signed as amateurs too, right?
Because the phenomenon of Latin Americans in baseball began earlier and is probably more scrutinized. With very rare exceptions, East Asians have really only been playing consistently in the major leagues since Hideo Nomo debuted in 1995, and there have only been a few true stars. There has never been an Asian Cy Young; Ichiro is the only Asian MVP, and he won that award during his rookie year.
I think it’s very easy to think of the greatest Latin American players in Major League history. But if I asked you to think of the greatest players to come from the Pacific Rim, would you automatically think of a list that included Hideo Nomo, Chan Ho Park, and Chien-Ming Wang?
Remington is so racist.
Being anal-retentive here, but Jyunichi Tazawa was not a HS/University guy. He played for ENEOS in the industrial league, declared his intent to forego the NPB draft and then signed with the Red Sox.
Thank you for the correction. The main point is that he didn’t play in NPB before he played in MLB.
Just to clarify, would you include Hideo Nomo in that group? I’d say Nomo had more success than Wang. In general, Japanese/Asian pitchers typically haven’t fared too well in the majors. Only other name that comes to my mind is Koji Uehara. I’ll never forget watching him make hitters look silly with 87 mph fastballs.
Worm Killer Wang
While his innings pitched could be higher, Kuroda only missed starts in his 1st season in MLB; isn’t that durable?
Not quite, but it’s a fair point. In 2008, he was on the DL with a shoulder injury; in 2009, he went to the DL twice, the first time with an oblique injury and the second time with a concussion. Since then he’s been relatively injury-free.
Thanks for the response, Alex.
Agreed; when I read that I thought “durable but not quite dominant” was an excellent descriptor for Kuroda, not the other way around.
“Grueling training regimens in Taiwanese colleges and professional leagues have been blamed for the short careers of pitchers.” Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s because they’re pitchers.
Well, okay, sure. But grueling training regimens can certainly increase the chances of injury.
Of course. As can rock climbing and glass eating. But without a control group the statement is meaningless. Do Asian pitchers in MLB get injured with any greater frequency than non-Asian pitchers in the same age cohorts?
I’m not saying that the independent variable is his Asianness. I’m saying that it’s his prep workload. Do you believe that workload has nothing to do with injury?
Of course I believe workload has something to do with injury. I’m just saying you can’t look at a group of pitchers that has gotten injured with some frequency F and say “Oh, look, they all do X… X must be the reason they got injured,” if F is the same frequency with which all pitchers get injured. And I have never seen anyone present convincing data that pitchers from Asia, with their supposedly deadly workload, get injured more than pitchers who did not follow the same regimen.
It depends a lot on the type of workload. Guys who do a ton of long toss seem to be more durable than the average pitcher. Guys who do a lot of bullpen sessions and carry a higher workload seem to be equally likely or more likely to get injured.
Of course, that’s just my impression from random observations. Nothing particularly systematic. But it seems like a lot of the really durable pitchers I can think of do a solid amount of long toss: Livan Hernandez, Zito, Haren, Cliff Lee, Halladay… all these guys seem to do a decent amount of long toss. Livan Hernandez is the obvious exemplar, as I recall reading an article that noted long toss as a big part of his training.
I think it’s been pretty convincingly shown that long toss doesn’t improve velocity (especially compared to weight training). However, it seems that a rigorous long toss program may be an important part of staying healthy.
Wei-Yin Chen will have something to say about this in a few years.
plus, his awesome tshirt for tonight’s game:
https://twitter.com/EddieInTheYard/status/232542657765842944/photo/1/large
If Chen is on, he is REALLY good. Unfortunately, he’s a flyball prone pitcher who pitches at Camden Yards, which might hurt his career.
Props for the CUNY reference. A year at CUNY Law School costs the same. Crazy good value.
“Crazy good value.”
If one can find a job as a lawyer these days… :)
One can, indeed. The Whattaburger AND Bob’s Big Boy are both hiring! Jobs galore and employment aplenty!!
Wang’s most recent “injury” isn’t really an injury, but rather a way for the Nationals to retain control of him.
He was on an injury rehab from his last injury, and a team can only let a player rehab for 30 days before the team must place him on the 25 man roster. The Nats #5, Ross Detwiler, has been pitching exceptionally well recently, so Wang would have to move to the bullpen, and force out one of the Nats current relievers, all of whom have been pitching quite well. This is coupled with the fact that Wang’s been pretty bad in his rehab stint, and certainly not better than the players who would be demoted/released for Wang to make the big league roster.
It seems like the Nats found a minor problem to send him back to the DL, to give them another month to figure out what to do with him, which coincides well with the September roster expansion.
That’s certainly always a possibility, especially with lingering ailments like this hip thing. But it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t particularly healthy even when he was pitching earlier in the year, as he allowed 20 earned runs in 23 2/3 innings, along with career-high walk and home run rates. I think he probably is indeed injured, even if there were gamesmanship involved in the way the Nats handled his rehab.
Since Wang is a 1 and a half pitch pitcher and has lost velocity and has shoulder concerns…wouldn’t he make a good reliever? I think the Nationals are not a good team for him due to their abundance of RP right now but, can you see him being a setup man somewhere (or closer for the Astros’ of the world) spiking his velocity up a few ticks and getting that hard sink back he had when he was dominant for the Yanks for an inning+ at a time?
Wang has a notoriously long warm up process. It would require him to start getting ready several innings before he’d enter the game.
The Nats tried it (albeit briefly) to poor results.
I lost all respect for Alex Remington after he wrote the Milton Bradley article.
What did you disagree with in that article? My argument was that while Milton Bradley had a lot of problems and brought a lot of his troubles on himself, it’s very likely that he also faced racism.
You can read it here: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/milton-bradley-and-the-race-card/