OK. Joaquin Andujar is not pitching in Fukuoka, at least not
in person. But his legacy lives on in Hawks pitcher Kenichi Wakatabe's
multiple personalities.
Wakatabe is, as Andujar was, actually two different pitchers. One is a solid starter on short rest between his starts: cool and composed when runners get on base. The other fellow is a journeyman who pitches with six to seven days between his starts and gets rattled too often for his own or his team's good.
This pattern first emerged in the early '90s when Wakatabe was fresh out of Komazawa University. From 1992 to 1994, he was a 12-8 on shorter rest and 12-20 on longer rest.
Unfortunately, the Fukuoka Daiei management has followed the farcical baseball habit of allowing a player's shortcomings to blind themselves to what he can do. For most of Wakatabe's 11-year career, has been waiting for his neurotic darker half to be successful.
The same thing happened to Joaquin Andujar. He wanted to pitch all the time and when he went too long between starts he was bad on the mound and belligerent in the club house. With frequent work he was a lovable, quirky superstar.
Until Andujar linked up with Cardinals managing great Whitey Herzog, the pitcher who referred to himself as "One tough Dominican," was known around the majors as little more than trouble.
But Herzog solved the riddle and managed his starting pitching rotation to keep Andujar on four days rest.
Although Wakatabe does not have the reputation of a walking time bomb, he is still far better on short rest.
Most pitchers like to start on short rest for mechanical reasons: The more often you work, the easier it is for you to find your rhythm. But for Wakatabe the issue has always been nerves and concentration.
"If I go too long between starts, I get nervous. I start thinking about what the manager says and what the pitching coach is telling me," said the right-hander who was named to the Pacific League All-Star team this year and who went into the break with a 6-0 record in six starts.
Wakatabe's best two games so far this were a four-hit shutout on four-days rest followed by an eight-hit complete game on five-days rest that was a shutout through eight innings. His zero streak was stopped by a leadoff homer in the ninth inning.
"I've never done it (thrown back-to-back shutouts) before, so that's what I was thinking about instead of the hitter," the 32-year-old said. "That's why leadoff hitters are tough. If you come out to the mound and not concentrating completely, those things happen."
As of Tuesday, he was 6-1 with a 4.38 ERA in his other five starts.
You'd think that the Hawks would have figured out by now that Wakatabe is less than terrific when he doesn't get frequent work. Pitching coach Takao Obana has a reputation as a sharp cookie, but the Hawks pitching staff has yet to recover from the loss of Kimiyasu Kudo to free agency following the team's 1999 Japan Series victory.
You have to wonder why Obana and manager Sadaharu Oh just don't throw Wakatabe out there every fifth or sixth day and let him do what he's best at.
So far in his career, Wakatabe has gotten starts in proportion to his success on six- and seven- days rest.
Perhaps the Hawks know what's going on but don't want to give in to the notion that what is best for individual players might also be best for the team.
Actually the biggest mystery is not that teams rarely adjust their rotations to the individual needs of their pitchers but why Japanese teams--and those in the majors for that matter--insist on using so many starting pitchers.
Through most of the history of baseball, the norm has been for a team's best starting pitchers to work on three-days rest.
Japanese teams used to have their best pitchers start three games a week with a relief appearance or two thrown in for good measure. But now they are adamant about protecting starting pitchers by giving them five- or six-days rest--while still playing Russian Roulette by letting their stars throw absurdly high numbers of pitches when they do go to the mound.
This practice not only risking the best pitchers' arms, but also takes innings away from the top pitchers so that lesser lights can give opposing teams more opportunities to score.
In baseball, this comes under the heading of standard operating procedure.
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .