The Joys of Persistent Curiosity By Sarah Zobel
Big Red ace James Clavel ’23 first played baseball in Japan, where he lived from age 8 to 12, so it was fitting that he returned there this summer as an intern with a professional team. Thanks to his Japanese maternal grandmother and family trips to Japan every summer until COVID hit, Clavel has stayed fluent in the language and interested in the culture. Through some local contacts, he secured an internship with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, a member of Nippon Professional Baseball. Clavel spent three weeks conducting statistical analyses for the team, which has won 11 championships. “They liked me because I understood both U.S. and Japanese baseball,” Clavel says. His primary focus was on trends among American batters in Japan, analyzing what made some more successful there. He looked at walk rates and noted that the higher the rate, the more successful the Americans were in Japan. Interestingly, he also determined that players who tend to strike out in American baseball, where success is measured in home runs, did well in Japanese baseball, where the game is less focused on power. The internship reinforced Clavel’s plans to make a career of scouting or other off-the-field work in baseball.
And though he would have welcomed the opportunity to throw a few pitches, Clavel was happy to spend time focusing on a sport he loves in a country that means so much to him. “I was really interested in working with a baseball team; I would’ve done anything,” he says, acknowledging that he did some homework on stats and Excel spreadsheets before heading to Japan. “Once I got there, they showed me a lot of it’s just using your eyes and looking for trends.” He also used his eyes and his expertise to scout high school and industrial league tournaments in Osaka, tracking pitchers with video and a radar gun. At least two of those pitchers are likely to be drafted this winter. With a population of 1.5 million, Fukuoka, in southern Japan, is not a small city, but Clavel, who lived there on his own, was noticed enough to be interviewed on national television. “I guess it was a bit of a novelty to have an American person there,” he says. “My boss told me they thought it was really interesting that there was a foreigner who was working in baseball.”
JAMES CLAVEL ’23
Baseball Statistician PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN HARRISON
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