Carlos Peguero plays for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, my favorite NPB team. He did some really cool stuff this week, and has helped propel the Eagles to an extremely unexpected 34–13 start. This has obviously made me happy as a fan, especially since I started cheering for the Eagles the year after they won the Japan Series (they have not made the playoffs since).

Peguero’s exploits have recently captured the attention of international media, which has highlighted issues surrounding the coverage of baseball in Asia. While this story isn’t really intended to be about Peguero himself, let’s first cover what he actually did, since the facts are important.

On Saturday, May 27th, Peguero came to bat against former Padre Frank Garces. The Eagles had already chased Seibu Lions starter Yasuo Sano, and the Lions brought in Garces to face the lefties Eigoro Mogi and Peguero. Garces hung a slider over the inner half of the plate, belt-high. Peguero did not miss:

The Eagles broadcast estimated the homer to be 151m (495 feet). Joseph Aylward, who runs the twitter account DingersThisWeek, estimated the homer to be 482 feet (with some margin of error). The homer was extremely impressive because it was off a left-handed pitcher, and was also right down the line (huge bombs often are not).

Five days later, Peguero was facing Yomiuri Giants starter Mitsuo Yoshikawa. Yoshikawa hung a curve. Peguero did not miss that one, either:

The broadcast estimated this homer to be 495 feet as well. Aylward estimated 484. A second titanic shot against two left-handed pitchers in less than a week. Neither could be contained by Kobo Park.

Two days later, Peguero’s homers began to catch the attention of western media, starting with a tweet from his agent which, uh, stretched the truth:

This was then amplified by the well-meaning CespedesFamilyBBQ folks, and that was enough to capture wider western attention.

This culminated with a truly awful piece published by Fansided, which is every problem with coverage of Asian baseball, distilled into 400 words of clickbait garbage. This isn’t the first piece of content like this and won’t be the last, so I don’t really want to pick on it in particular. Instead, I want to highlight two overall issues.

Bad facts

This isn’t really an issue with just Asian baseball coverage, but in this case it comes across as at least culturally insensitive. Calling Peguero’s dinger 584 feet is a more innocent version of this, but there have been other, more high-profile mistakes.

At the beginning of May, a home run call for Manny Ramirez dinger went viral. Ramirez just wrapped up his first half-season with the Kochi Fighting Dogs of Japan’s independent Shikoku Island League (he hit .460). However, USA Today’s For The Win did this:

The home run call in question was from Manny’s stint in Taiwan in 2013. USA Today is supposed to be a journalistic outlet, and this factual inaccuracy goes against what they should stand for.

That lack of attention to detail is not uncommon. Later that very same day, Sports Illustrated published an article on fun things in baseball, which highlighted bat flips. They focused on Taiwanese sensation Wang Po-Jung, who has torn through the CPBL and is likely NPB-bound before much longer. However, the initially published article called Po-Jung Korean, and identified the homers as being in KBO (to Sports Illustrated’s credit, the issue was quickly corrected after it was pointed out). Even CBS’ mostly-good Shohei Otani profile had factual errors, such as crediting manager Hideki Kuriyama for developing Yu Darvish as a manager (Kuriyama’s first year as the Fighters manager was 2012, the year after Darvish departed for MLB).

This type of problem is easily avoided with just a little bit of research, and there are so many people knowledgeable about these leagues on Twitter. They’re not hard to find. Finding facts are easy enough that this type of error comes across as laziness. If you don’t actually care about Asian baseball, hire somebody who does to write for you instead.

2. Denigration of the league

Returning to our favorite article for a second:

That is the conclusion. Covering a fun thing by denigrating everything around it. “Inferior pitching of the Japanese league.” The article also insults Peguero’s weight and approach. This isn’t limited to this particular article, either. Every time I post a dinger from NPB on Twitter, the first comment I usually see is “wow that pitch was awful.” This is often extended to insult the pitching of the league as a whole, as seen above.

But, if you think about this for even two second, of course that was a bad pitch. Nobody hits a 490 foot dinger on a good pitch. Let’s turn this around for a second:

Wow, look at all of those fat pitches. MLB pitching must be terrible. It’s almost as if judging a whole league based on a few stat lines and long dingers may not actually be a good way to go.

NPB pitching is closer to MLB pitching than many give it credit for. My Eagles have at least three starters who would likely be above replacement-level in MLB. Takahiro Norimoto just set the NPB record for most starts in a row with 10 or more strikeouts. He started a combined no-hitter against MLB stars in 2014. Takayuki Kishi doesn’t throw quite as hard, but has good control and a plus change, which would probably put him closer to a number four starter. Manabu Mima isn’t far behind with a slider that ranges to plus, and he’s probably about an NPB-average pitcher, more or less. Takahiro Shiomi might be in that same range as well, though he’s only made one start this year.

“Inferior” NPB pitching held a red-hot team USA to two runs in the semi-finals of the WBC, and could have held them scoreless if not for a bounce off of the normally sure-handed glove of Ryosuke Kikuchi and a double-clutch by Nobuhiro Matsuda. “Inferior” NPB pitching has helped Samurai Japan reach the semi-finals in every WBC. “Inferior” NPB pitching no-hit Team MLB in 2014’s All-Star Series.

Hell, just look at Carlos Peguero as an example. Peguero’s success is held against the league as a whole, but after a red-hot start he’s 17th in NPB in wRC+. Here’s a GIF from yesterday’s game. He’s facing Yuya Yanagi in his first career top-level NPB start. Here’s an “inferior” Japanese pitcher making Carlos Peguero look foolish.

It’s incredibly rude that people stick their heads in and judge a league based on a few highlights on the internet and a few stat lines on Baseball Reference. When a foreign player does post a good stat line, it’s often held against the league instead of credited to the player getting better, or adjusting well to the Japanese style of pitching. Not every foreign player can do that. Many can’t.

Simply put, there’s not a lot of reason for anybody other than scouts to rank the quality of NPB as a whole. It’s different. In a lot of ways, I like it better than MLB. Stop telling foreign fans that their game is worse. Don’t call it inferior. It’s really shitty of you.

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The internet has a long ways to go in its coverage of Asian baseball. Facts matter, and tone matters. There are so many people who can and do get it right. There’s no excuse for getting it wrong again in 2017. Do better.