Posted by Michael Street on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 7:04 pm

Fans of Asian baseball and the Seattle Mariners were excited when the Ms signed Japanese catcher Kenji Johjima before the 2006 season. And why not?

Not only did he have some excellent tools behind the dish, he averaged .299/.360/.517 with 699 RBI in ten seasons with the Fukuoka Daiei (now Fukuoka Softbank) Hawks. In his best season, 2004, he mashed .338/.432/.655, with 36 HRs, 25 2Bs and 91 RBI. That was no fluke, as he’d hit .330/.399/.593, with 34 HRs, 39 2Bs and 119 RBI the year before.

So fans cheered and skeptics watched as Seattle inked him to a 3-year, $16.5 million deal in 2006, and the reactions were largely positive. Then, in one of his last significant acts as Mariners GM on April 25, 2008, Bill Bavasi extended Johjima through 2011 in a 3-year, $24M deal that has since been debated for a variety of reasons.

On the plus side, Johjima had proven himself to be very durable to that point, catching 2444.1 IP in his time with the Mariners, third in the majors during that span behind ironmen Jason Kendall and Russell Martin.

As a rookie, he’d set a record for first-year catchers with 147 hits, and led all rookies in multi-hit games, RBI, HRs and total bases. The following season, he’d ranked in the top 5 among AL catchers in BA, H, 2B, HR, and RBI and caught stealing. In his first two years in the majors, he’d hit a combined .289/.327/.442, very good stats for a backstop, particularly ones with his catch-and-throw skills.

On the downside, this seemed to be but another overpaid deal to an aging star given out by Bill Bavasi, who was fired less than two months after that ill-fated extension. The deal had already been criticized before the ink was dry because of how it blocked the path of rising young catcher Jeff Clement. Also, at the time of the signing, Johjima was hitting  just .197/.270/.239 on the season.

Though some hoped the extension would relax Johjima, the slump continued. His OPS tumbled 146 points, as he hit a lackluster .227/.277/.332 for the year. That line would have been worse had Johjima not salvaged it by hitting .333/.397/.474 in a meaningless September for the worst best-paid team in baseball history. His caught stealing percentage slid to 32% (from 47% in 2008) as he gave back gains in virtually every fielding metric.

With the weight of expectations and criticism on his shoulders, Johjima vowed to improve this past offseason, and seemed to be a man renewed at the WBC, as he hit .333/.353/.467 for champion Team Japan. This year has also been an improvement over 2008, despite Johjima’s two DL stints (which have already caused him to miss 40 games).

Sharing time with Rob Johnson, he’s currently hitting .271/.297/.376 and throwing out 56% of attempted runners, and most of his fielding stats are well above what they were in 2008. Clearly, he’s benefitting from the 50/50 split he’s getting with Johnson, but it does lead to the question of whether the contract extension been worth it.

It’s hard to justify those gaudy figures for a part-time catcher who doesn’t hit well enough to be a DH (on a team that already has several other DH candidates, including Clement, who’s wasting away at AAA as the Seattle DH of the Future). Johjima could throw out every runner that tries to steal against him (only 34 this year) and it still wouldn’t be worth $8M a year for a part-time backstop, not with that lowly .673 OPS (only 22 MLB catchers with more than 50 PAs have a lower OPS than that).

A third aspect to consider is how he handles the pitching staff. Not only did he have to learn a completely new set of hitters when he made the move to MLB, Johjima had to learn the umpires, the strike zone, and a different style of pitching. Not only is the physical ball itself different in the Japanese league (it’s smaller), but the pitchers there lean on the breaking ball more.

How has Kenji done?

Measured by the success of opposing hitters and the ability of his own pitchers to throw strikes, not very well. In the latter category (K/BB), Johjima has consistently been the worst of the Seattle catchers throughout his four-year tenure as backstop—only 2008 featured any kind of close race in that department, with his 1.62 barely squeaking past Clement’s 1.61 and a skosh better than Rob Johnson’s rookie 1.48. And lest anyone blame this on a learning curve, he’s been getting steadily worse: 2006 (1.86), 2007 (1.74), 2008 (1.62), 2009 (1.49).

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the opposition’s OPS has been consistently worse on his watch, among catchers with more than 10 games under their belts. Once again, 2008 is the outlier, both in terms of his ranking among fellow catchers and the overall trends: 2006 (.788), 2007 (.801), 2008 (.777), and 2009 (.823) are as depressing a slide to Seattle fans as the K/BB numbers. 2008 saw Jamie Burke (.779) and Clement (.786) score similar OPS numbers.

And as another unsurprising development, virtually every starting pitcher for Seattle during his tenure have been worse in those two categories with him back there. The notable exceptions have been Cha Seung Baek in 2007, and Felix Hernandez in every year but 2009. Some of this can be explained by the poor Seattle rotation, but you’d think they’d perform poorly across the spectrum, not just with Johjima back there.

Clearly, he’s got some trouble calling games for them. While it’s hard to heap the blame for Seattle’s awful downturn in the past few seasons entirely on his shoulders, it does suggest a reason for some of that decline.

This all leads to the unfortunate conclusion that Bavasi screwed up again by overpaying a player not only about to decline, but already slipping away in some important categories. Worse, Johjima is not only difficult to trade because of his average skills, he may be untradeable, period. As Jim Street (no relation), beat writer for the Mariners, points out in a recent Q&A, Nintendo of America (a majority owner of the Ms) would be unlikely ever to approve any swap of their popular Eastern commodity.

Ichiro sometimes catches flak as some sort of symbol, a kind of Asian Equal Opportunity beneficiary whose only on-field virtue is his marketing draw. This is an absurd conclusion, given his historic accomplishments in MLB.

However, Johjima is clearly another story, and while it’s wonderful to have the first catcher from Nippon Professional Baseball making the jump to the States, that’s no reason to make him a better-paid catcher than Brian McCann ($4.47M per year from 2007 deal), Yadier Molina ($3.88M per year from 2008 deal), or Victor Martinez ($3.1M per year from 2005 deal).

Sadly, it’s all too familiar to Mariners fan, and Johjima is likely to be the last of the Bavasi Era signings to whom they bid a not-too-fond farewell. The pity is, unlike Richie Sexson, Jose Vidro, Carlos Silva,  or any of the other aging vets that Bavasi threw buckets of cash at, Johjima is actually deserving of a contract and at least a part-time role on the team.

Just not at the rate he’s being paid.