Orix has too many exciting young players

In 2023, the Orix Buffaloes recorded 86 wins, 53 losses, and 4 ties, for a winning percentage of .619, winning their third consecutive Pacific League championship, beating second-place Lotte by 15.5 games.

This season, the team will be aiming to win the league championship for the fourth consecutive year, for the first time since 1975-1978, when the team was called the Hankyu Braves.

However, last season, the ace pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who won the four pitching crowns, Sawamura Award, and MVP for three consecutive years, moved to the major leagues. Furthermore, Fukuya Yamazaki, who had 11 wins, also left for Nippon Ham as a domestic free agent.

If you think about it normally, the hole left by these two pitchers is too big. In terms of wins alone, the two of them combined for 27 wins, which is 31.4% of the team’s wins last season. In terms of innings pitched, they pitched a total of 294 1/3 innings. This also corresponds to 22.8% of the team’s total innings (1,290 innings). Even though they are a team that has won the league three times in a row, such an exodus of players should be called an “emergency situation.”

But why? There is no such sense of despair or frustration in the Orix Buffaloes this season. In fact, with the season about to begin, many media outlets are predicting the team’s rankings this season, with many baseball pundits naming the team as a “contender for the championship.”

There are several reasons. One is the overwhelming trust in the pitchers of his team. It is true that the holes left by pitchers Yamamoto and Yamazaki are large. However, the current Orix has enough pitchers to fill those holes.

The most prominent of these are Miyagi Taiya, who won 10 games last season, and Yamashita Shunpei, last season’s rookie of the year, who is expected to make further progress, but they are still young, in their early 20s, and it will be difficult for them to fill the “holes” left by Yamamoto and Yamazaki. However, there are many candidates for the next breakout among pitchers who were not able to effectively become first-team players last season.

Kyosuke Saito, in his second year after graduating from high school, Ryuhei Soya, the 2022 first-round draft pick who only made 10 appearances, and the development players Kazuma Sato, Kento Kawase, and Kaito Saiki are all potential greats. There is also the TKG trio of Yasuto Takashima, Seiryu Furutajima, and Ryusei Gonda, all rookies from the professional league who were drafted.