By Robert Whiting (2011)
There should be a picture of Kei Igawa in the dictionary under “persistence.”
Since signing a five-year, $20 million contract in 2007 with the New York Yankees (who paid another $26 million to the Hanshin Tigers of the Central League for the right to negotiate with the team’s left-handed ace), Igawa will have spent five consecutive seasons in the Yankees’ minor league system. He has been on the farm for so long, and pitching well enough, that he is breaking minor league career records.
Igawa first appeared in a Yankees uniform in 2007, widely touted. He lasted all of 16 games, most of them embarrassing outings in which he was booed. He was clearly overmatched and called one of the worst free agent signings in Yankees history. His complete MLB record for 2007-2008 was 2-4 with a 6.66 ERA.
After his last losing appearance for the Yankees in early 2008, he was banished to the Yankees’ AAA franchise in Scranton, never to come back. The Yankees adjudged him to be a fly ball pitcher, not good for the MLB game, especially in a home run haven like Yankee Stadium. At first, the Yankees coaches tried to change his pitching motion to alter the plane on his fastball, which they said was too flat. But when that experiment did not work out too well, the Yankees came to the conclusion that they had made a giant mistake in signing Igawa in the first place—a decision that had been made in some haste by Yankees GM Brian Cashman, who felt he had been outshone by the Boston Red Sox in the bidding for Daisuke Matsuzaka (the Sox paid $51 million for Matsuzaka) and felt he had to compensate by going after another top pitcher from Japan.
The Yankees tried to return Igawa to Japan. In fact, in 2008 and 2009, Yankees GM Brian Cashman had twice negotiated deals to return Igawa to two different Japanese professional teams. Each time he drove to Scranton, sat down with Igawa and told him that he had no future with the Yankees, that Igawa’s abilities did not translate into a major league career. Said Cashman, according to an article in the July 24, 2011 New York Times, “I told him that it was our fault—our mistake—not his. But I said, ‘If you stay in our system, you’re not going up to the big team.’” But Igawa refused the trade both times, standing fast to what he called his childhood dream of pitching in the American major leagues.
Other MLB teams have expressed some interest in Igawa. During the 2007 season, the San Diego Padres, for example, claimed Igawa off waivers, and Cashman was ready to let him go. But at the time, Yankees ownership still had some hopes for Igawa and nixed the deal. There have been other feelers, but Igawa’s high salary has deterred other teams unwilling to pay it. So he remained in the minor leagues, shuffled back and forth between AAA Scranton, where he spends most of his time, and the Yankees’ AA franchise in Trenton, New Jersey, forging on.
He has been in the minor leagues so long that he set a franchise record for career wins at Scranton with 33. His best year was 2008, when he went 14-6 with a 3.45 ERA, using a sharp curveball and a sneaky changeup. Overall, he has pitched in more than 100 minor league games. Other players came and went. Igawa stayed. He was the only player left who could tell new arrivals on the team where to park their cars. His paycheck is 130 times higher than the average AAA salary of $2,500 a month. His teammates are 8-10 years younger. Although he plays in regular poker games with them and lets teammates borrow his iPad, he does not socialize with them off the field.
Through it all, Igawa has remained, steadfastly, a resident of New York City, in a fashionable East Side apartment in Manhattan. He has a chauffeur-driven Lexus pick him up every morning for a ride to Scranton, Pennsylvania, two hours away, where he pitches for the Scranton Yankees, or sometimes to the Double A team in Trenton, New Jersey, almost as far. After each game, he returns to Manhattan. On occasion his car has passed Cashman’s on the highway. Said Cashman, drily, “He drives faster than his fastball.”
In Manhattan, his wife and kids visit, but he has few friends outside baseball. His interpreter of five years has only been inside his apartment once, and has never met any member of Igawa’s family—a contrast to George Rose, who was a frequent guest in Hideki Irabu’s home. The New York Times recently ran a three-page feature on him by Bill Pennington, noting Igawa has learned enough English to order at restaurants and peruse the electronics stores, but not enough to read the paper itself. Here, Igawa is continuing a pattern he displayed in Japan, where his hobbies were also solitary—radio controlled toys, computer games and anime. He once complained about being forced to start a game by Hanshin when one of his favorite TV programs, the anime Meitantei Conan, was on.
Still, Pennington was impressed enough with Igawa to describe him as a “quiet, mysterious Japanese pitcher with a sense of honor and a durable love of the game.” Not a bad character endorsement.
Since last year, Igawa has been saying he is not going back to Japan, telling acquaintances he will get another job in the US professional baseball minor league system, and that he still feels the same as he did three years ago when he told reporters:
“I love baseball and I have had a dream to pitch in the Majors since I was in Japan. This dream won’t change in the future. I think this opportunity is part of the process where I can realize that dream. I am not going to Japan and still believe there will be chances here. I will keep challenging myself with a positive outlook, until I can play in the Majors and consistently have good performances.”
In a way, Igawa was a victim of New York. Expectations there are enormous and immediate. If you are a Japanese player and you don’t succeed right away, the pressure is enormous. Igawa concedes he did not pitch well in his time with the Yankees, but he also thinks he could have done better had he been given more than 16 pitching appearances. As he told the Times recently, “I never pitched out of the bullpen before I came to America. I never pitched on four days rest. The hitters here have more power and I had to adjust. I developed a cut fastball and I throw my changeup differently. I think I understand American hitters better. So I think I would have done better if I had more time the first season. And I wish I had then what I have now.”
So what will happen? The end of August will end Igawa’s fifth minor league season and his contract with the Yankees. The landscape will change. He will be cheaper. And there will no doubt be interest from some American clubs. Everyone wants pitching, and with Igawa available at a reasonable price, he might find interest in the National League with its larger parks, like San Diego’s Petco Park.
He is still 32, with several years of pitching left in his arm. As Bobby Valentine recently put it, “There are left-handed pitchers succeeding in the major leagues today with less talent and less stuff than Igawa.”
Whatever happens, Igawa told an interviewer, he does not regret what has happened, even though he realizes everyone thinks he is a huge failure. “Yankee fans may not think of me as being successful, but I have grown as a pitcher and as a person. I will be better because of these five years.”
Let’s hope he is right.
Tokyo Junkie 