Masahiro Tanaka

Nippon Professional Baseball
W L W% GS CG SHO IP H R ER HR BB K ERA WHIP LgERA
19 5 .792 27 14 6 226.1 171 35 32 8 27 241 1.27 0.87 2.95

Tanaka was enjoying good-but-unspectacular success until last year, most notably getting selected to the Japanese Olympic teams when he was 18 (!!!). It was this year though, in his age 22 season, that he put up the above numbers, which earned him the Japanese equivalent of the Cy Young award, edging out Yu Darvish in the latter's best season. It's expected that he'll now succeed Darvish as Japan's best pitcher and will eventually follow his predecessor to the majors leagues, at which point the media will falsely lead Blue Jays fans into thinking we're getting him before cold, hard reality sinks in (Still bitter).

Tanaka isn't as tall as Yu at 6'2", but the numbers are obviously sickening. Unlike so many Japanese pitchers, his arm hasn't been massively abused: 2011 was his first year north of 200 IP. All told, it feels like an enormous steal who was admittedly off our radar until a couple of hours ago.


Team ZBT Wise

C Travis D'Arnaud
1B Freddie Freeman
2B Dan Uggla
SS Yunel Escobar
3B Gordon Beckham
RF Mike Morse
CF Jcoby Ellsbury
LF Mike Trout
DH Lucas Duda

SP Stephen Strassburg
SP Neftali Feliz
SP Shelby Miller
SP Masahiro Tanaka
SP Manny Banuelos

RP Casey Kelly