Does the fact that Daisuke Matsuzaka was one of the best pitchers in Japanese pro baseball during his years in Japan make him a good professional baseball player overall in spite of his craptastic MLB tenure? Kei Igawa? Hideki Irabu?
Euroleague is high quality basketball just as NPB is high quality baseball. It's better than college and the minor league but the ultimate level of competition is AAAA at best and there is still a huge difference at the end of the day. It's why we don't see Euroleague teams beat NBA teams during the preseason games.
As a Japanese citizen with pride in Japanese baseball, I feel your pain but at the end of the day the leagues are too different to take much from them in comparison to their American big brothers.
Yeah but Shohei Ohtani was the best story in baseball this year until he needed TJ surgery. To me he's the most exciting rookie since Mike Trout. Even though he plays for a division rival I hope he bounces back because he was fun to watch and MLB needs players like him if they're going to survive once my generation (the last generation that was actually alive when baseball was still considered the national pastime) is gone. And Daisuke finished fourth in Cy Young voting and was basically unhittable his second season with the Red Sox before blowing out his arm the following year and never recovering. The 8 full seasons pitching in Japan before he came to the US was a bigger issue than lack of talent. The average career of a major league pitcher is only about 10 years and trending even lower. That's probably why Ohtani took a massive pay cut to get his MLB career started earlier. But then he still couldn't escape the injury bug.
The problem with Igawa and Irabu is that they both got sucked into the black hole of suck that is the Yankees organization. With the exception of Mariano Rivera, that organization murders pitchers one after another and then their entitled fanbase spits on their graves. And yet they keep getting them anyway because they have bottomless pockets and the best brand recognition in professional sports. Almost any other organization wouldn't have expected them to dominate from day one and then jerked them around and discarded them like broken toys when they didn't. The Yankees seem completely oblivious to the fact that most teams cultivate pitching talent over multiple years. That's why they waste exorbitant sums on free agents every other year and then almost immediately need to replace them when they underperform in that environment... (get out as soon as possible Sonny Gray!)
But anyway, the point is top of the scales talent still plays from one league to the other. It only gets you so far without the mental commitment and you could maybe question if too much success too soon gets in the way of that but I suspect there are examples and counter-examples for both sides of that argument. I don't see how anyone can argue that Doncic isn't the most accomplished international prospect to enter the NBA at his age, ever. To act like that means nothing is a major cheat in my eyes especially with the amount of traction that Harry Giles gets around here for being the number 1 rated prospect in his 10th and 11th grade class. Everyone still has to prove it at the next level but more often than not you can recognize elite talent early.
That's not to say that Bagley isn't an elite talent in his own right. I'd rather talk baseball than basketball at this point and I've already written as much as I intend to about Bagley's credentials as a prospect (both good and bad). I'll just say that for me the crux of the issue here had always been playstyle not talent. Elite homegrown talent still dominates the MVP race every year and Bagley is clearly in that category as a prospect.
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