The Worst Offense in Japanese Baseball History
The 2023 Chunichi Dragons
The Worst Offense in Japanese Baseball History
I read an interesting post on Twitter the other day:
Yeah, that’s a pretty bad offense. I don’t pay enough attention to modern baseball to recognize names like Santiago Espinal or Harrison Bader. In fact, the comparisons Baseball Reference gives me for both of those players are a bunch of really obscure names that I’m not all that familiar with.
And, yeah, it’s a bad sign if your entire offense is hitting like that.
But are the 2023 Chunichi Dragons (中日ドラゴンズ) historically bad?
Domination Index
I decided to take a look at this using the Domination Index.
We’re going to focus only on the offensive side of the equation.
Now, I know that the Domination Index doesn’t account for park factors at all. The park factors do come out in the wash when you combine the offensive and defensive totals. However, when you look at only one side of the equation alone, things may be skewed because of the ballpark.
In this case, though, I think something more than a pitcher’s park is going on.
Here is what the 2023 Japan Central League (セ・リーグ) Domination Index looks like after all games played up through September 16:
First of all, I’m aware that the run totals don’t add up. I copied the numbers from Baseball Reference and checked them twice. The difference is probably not relevant to our discussion; I’m guessing we’re missing a run allowed for some random reason.
Second, the Hanshin Tigers this year are absolutely awesome. This might be one of the best teams in Japanese baseball history.
And third… well, Chunichi’s offense is bad. Their offense just simply hasn’t produced runs. They are 2.15 standard deviations below league average — and it probably isn’t going to get much better.
But is it historically bad?
Simply Awful
Yeah — it’s historically bad.
Here are the worst offensive Domination Index scores in Japan Central League history:
Chunichi’s -2.15 runs scored domination index rating is worse than any of these teams — even worse than their 2021 production.
For the sake of comparison, here are the numbers from the Japan Pacific League (パ・リーグ):
In other words, you could make a good argument that Chunichi’s 2023 offense is the worst in Japanese history.
Just for fun, here are the worst offenses in American League history:
Chunichi is even bad by American standards. They’re up there with the hapless 1998 Tampa Bay Devil Rays in terms of offensive incompetence.
And here are the National League numbers:
The 1899 Cleveland Spiders shouldn’t count, since every good player the team came across was promptly shipped to St. Louis.
Chunichi’s offense is on par with the 1993 Florida Marlins and the 1922 Boston Braves.
I mean, this isn’t just bad. This is historically bad.
Ballpark?
The most obvious question, of course, is whether this is due to the ballpark.
Honestly, I’m not quite sure. Baseball Reference doesn’t give us any ballpark factors, which makes things somewhat mysterious. There are Japanese language resources out there for this information, though it seems to be controlled by NPB: for example, I could find play by play data for Chunichi’s 8-3 loss on September 15 here.
The Nagoya Dome (ナゴヤドーム) just might be a major pitcher’s park. This is what Chunichi’s Domination Index ratings look like since it opened in 1997:
I stuck in a few earlier years for good measure as well.
Chunichi has been consistently below average int erms of runs scored, usually right around 1 standard deviation below league average. The last time they were over average was 2009.
I will note, though, that they did appear to have a good offense in 2006 — the season they advanced to the Japan Series, only to lose in 5. If you’re interested, you can find most of the games of that series on YouTube, including the first game here in 18 parts.
It seems that the record setting offensive futility only began in 2020. And I’m really not sure why.
If you want to play around more, you can find the complete Domination Index spreadsheet in the Members Area!