Enter The Matrix

The NPB Draft in Japan is very weird. In America the baseball draft is structured in a way where if you draft someone, you have exclusive rights to sign that player to a contract. In Japan the baseball draft is structured in a way where multiple teams can put in a bid for a player and you literally have to hope your team gets drawn from a hat (a box to be more accurate) in order to get exclusive contract negotiation rights.

This is one of the reasons why the Chunichi Dragons have never really been able to build a great farmsystem despite finishing among the worst 5 teams in the NPB these past few years. They'd usually lose the negotiation rights to whichever coveted amateur they were after in the raffle.

But in the 2018 their luck changed. They actually won the rights to negotiate with elite high school prospect, Akira Neo.

Neo was basically the number one high school prospect coming into the 2018 NPB draft. Even the Yomiuri Giants and Nippon Ham Fighters put in a raffle bid for him. He's got solid contact skills and an impressive amount of pop for a high school kid in Japan. He's a shortstop by trade but he does also have a low-90's fastball. Prior to the draft he had aspirations to be a two-way player like Shohei Ohtani, but has since decided that he wants to be a more complete shortstop.

This EPOCH One card (here's NPB Card Guy's write-up on what these cards are) is Neo's first official card to hit the market. I got it right on release day from my favorite card shop for Dragons cards BITS!.

The public consensus on Neo appears to be that he's a really really good player who people would be really excited about if he had been drafted by any team other than the Dragons.

This negativity comes straight from Dragons fans I know BTW. The Dragons do not have the best track record when it comes to developing talent. In 2018 they saw their 2017 Central League Rookie of the Year middle-infielder Yota Kyoda suffer a terrible case of the yips, former top pitching prospect Shinnosuke Ogasawara took major steps back, Yuya Yanagi had an up-and-down 2018, among other such development issues.

I think Neo will be an interesting player to watch though. Where he plays long term is kind of up in the air, but having him and Kyoda in the middle infield would be fun. The Dragons have a pretty nice core, all things considered. If they can just get some pitching help they do have a chance to make shit happen. Will they? I doubt it but we'll see.

So good luck to Neo. Give the fans something to look forward to.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).