Dodgers could have statistical egde in Masahiro Tanaka sweepstakes

Masahiro Tanaka reportedly has the choice of taking 6-year, $100-plus million contracts from the Cubs, Diamondbacks, Yankees, White Sox or Dodgers. The Diamondbacks might have gone to $120M and the Cubs might have gone to 7/$160M.

Tanaka has made some announcements about what he cares about beyond money.  He cares about pitching in a big market, winning now, being a legit star, a Japanese community in the city and being on the West Coast (which could be interpreted partly about being close to Japan, partly about being close to the entertainment industry for his wife). 

Out of that list, only the Dodgers and Diamondbacks will probably be any good next year (and with the Diamondbacks, Tanaka is actually what pushes them over the edge to probably being a playoff contender whereas the Dodgers are more robustly a good team and will still be so if a few things go wrong for them).

Only the Dodgers obviously are on the West Coast, although the Diamondbacks can be considered West-ish.  New York is a viable place to have an entertainment career obviously, as is Chicago.  Los Angeles has the largest Japanese population in the continental United States. New York has one-third the Japanese population of LA, and Chicago one-seventh. So, the Dodgers look pretty good here.

What about “being a star”?  Well, one way beyond being on a good team, making the playoffs, etc., that we can think about that statistically is via his traditional metrics.
 

What would his win-loss record and ERA be on each team? For each team, let’s think about the league (American League has designated hitter), park factor, quality of offensive support, defense and bullpen.

Team	Lg	Park Factor	Defense	Bullpen	Run Support	W	L	ERA
Dodgers	NL	0.95	Good	Good	4.5	16	10	3.50
Cubs	NL	1.04	Great	Bad	3.7	11	12	3.83
Yankees	AL	1.03	OK	Bad	4.2	12	11	3.99
D'Backs	NL	1.04	Good	OK	4.1	13	11	3.83
White Sox	AL	1.04	Bad	Bad	4.1	11	12	4.03

Behind the defense, bullpen and run support are actually my 2014 detailed projections. I’m still tweaking those a bit, but preliminarily, it works out something like the above. I thought about his winning percentage based on how league, park factor, defense and bullpen lead to each team's runs allowed in his starts vs. the team's run support level. I took his innings pitched per start down for the tougher environments and gave him less decisions for teams where the runs scored is close to the runs allowed.

If the money is even close, the rest of what the Dodgers’ situation offers completely dominates all his other options.

Photo credit: STB-1, Wikimedai Commons