Japanese Baseball Foreigners: Fun With Wlad and Wily Mo

Browsing through the Japanese leaderboards at baseball-reference is a strange occupation. The first thing you notice is all of the old friends who are doing well over there: boldfaced names who played in the majors once upon a time and took the transpacific voyage to keep playing baseball.

Of all of the hitters with at least 55 at-bats, 16 of 130 have played in the majors. Of the 200 pitchers listed, 25 have played in the majors. Some of them are foreign-born players who wound up in Japan after they couldn’t hack it in the majors any more. For example: …