Junichi Tazawa

[Jake Taylor]

A 22-year old Japanese pitcher who supposedly has been clocked as high as 97 mph on the gun. Talk from Rotoworld is that the Indians, Tigers, Braves, Red Sox, and Phillies have been showing the most interest in him.

A lot of you seem to have the skinny on these potential players, and I can say I've honestly never heard of the guy. Anyone have any further information on him?

[TonyIBI]

Never heard of him either and know nothing about him. I leave it to the experts at digging up info on the guy on the web to fill us all in.

[Duane Kuiper]

James (Chicago): Can you give a quick assessment of Junichi Tazawa? I assume you've never seen him but have you heard any reports?

Keith Law: Seen some video clips and talked to folks ... he's pretty promising, sounds like a first-round talent. Sits low-90s with good offspeed stuff - saw a very good splitter on a video clip that the NPB Tracker blog found.

Also this
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3672409

[Hermie13]

This is the kid that wanted to bypass the Japanese draft right (then didn't get drafted)?

Here's what I found:

This YouTube video shows an inning’s worth of work in which Tazawa shows off a 90-93 mph fastball, a 12-6 curve, and a shuuto. Note that his fastball has some movement and he can run it in on righthanded batters. I have no idea about the quality of competition in this game.

This much worse amateur video is from a pro-am game versus the Chunichi Dragons. He hits 150 km/h (93mph) on the gun and you can get a sense of the movement on his stuff, but other than that you can’t tell much about how he did. The video is more watchable from about 04:00 in.

This Japanese scouting report includes Tazawa’s stats for this season. I’m not going to translate the whole thing but I’ll give you the bottom line: 54 IP, 46 hits, 56 K, 4 BB, 6 ER, 1.00 ERA. Fastest recorded pitch speed is 153 km/h (95.625 mph) according to this.

From: http://www.npbtracker.com/2008/09/more-on-tazawa/

Vids on that site.