Kazuma Okamoto is a 29-year-old, right-handed hitting corner infielder from Gojo, Japan. He\u2019s played 11 seasons in the Nippon Professional Baseball. The Jays signed him to a four-year, $60 million contract (Ben Clemens at FanGraphs figured him to sign four years and $72 million).<\/p>\n
Not that it means much, but he\u2019s shown a nice sense of humour (he is serious and manly) and sense of fun in the few days he\u2019s been at the Jays spring camp.<\/p>\n
Rogers hopes to grow the Blue Jays\u2019 brand in Japan. We are going to Japan next month. I\u2019m going to bring a bunch of Blue Jays caps with me. Every holiday, I end up trading a Jays cap for something<\/p>\n
Career he\u2019s hit .277\/.361\/.521, with 248 home runs. Last year, he was limited to 69 games with the Yomiuri Giants because of an elbow sprain, but he hit .327\/.416\/.598 with 15 home runs. FanGraphs notes that he has the second-most homers in NPB since 2019.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s lowered his strikeout rate the last two seasons (15.9% in 2024, 11.3% last year). And there is a note that he\u2019s hitting better against fastballs the last couple of years. He\u2019s a pull hitter.<\/p>\n
There are questions about his defense at third. FanGraphs says this:<\/p>\n
Okamoto can show you nimble lower body stability and has feel for bouncing off the dirt and spinning into accurate throws, but he lacks range and struggles making plays to his glove side.<\/p>\n
Baseball America likes his defense more:<\/p>\n
In the field, Okamoto is an above-average defender at third base, and he\u2019s won multiple NPB Gold Glove equivalents. He\u2019s a plus-plus defender at first base and offers his signing team defensive versatility.<\/p>\n
With Vlad at first, third is Kazuma\u2019s spot. I am interested in seeing his defense this spring. I\u2019m guessing he\u2019ll move to first on Vlad\u2019s DH days.<\/p>\n
How will he hit? I\u2019d like to think he\u2019ll be around 25 home runs, maybe a .250ish average, .340-.350 OBP.<\/p>\n
Steamer? They have him playing 130 games, 22 home runs, a .251\/.323\/.446 batting line with a 2.3 fWAR.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kazuma Okamoto is a 29-year-old, right-handed hitting corner infielder from Gojo, Japan. He\u2019s played 11 seasons in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2378],"tags":[5,377,2554,4,282,70,38962,2553],"class_list":{"0":"post-583460","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-toronto-blue-jays","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-blue-jays","10":"tag-bluejays","11":"tag-mlb","12":"tag-toronto","13":"tag-toronto-blue-jays","14":"tag-toronto-blue-jays-opinions","15":"tag-torontobluejays"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116104798173623069","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}