{"id":399177,"date":"2026-01-08T06:33:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T06:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/399177\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T06:33:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T06:33:08","slug":"takahiro-norimoto-weighing-offer-from-mlb-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/399177\/","title":{"rendered":"Takahiro Norimoto Weighing Offer From MLB Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

Free agent relief pitcher\u00a0Takahiro Norimoto<\/a> has received an offer from a major league club, reports Mark Feinsand of MLB.com<\/a>. The 35-year-old righty is weighing a move stateside but not firmly committed to making the jump. He\u2019s also considering offers from clubs in Japan.<\/p>\n

Norimoto has played 13 seasons in Nippon Professional Baseball, all with the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. A starter for most of that time, he has transitioned into the Eagles\u2019 closer over the past two years. Norimoto has gone 48-53 in save opportunities. He posted a 3.46 earned run average in 2024 and is coming off a 3.02 mark across 56 2\/3 frames last season.<\/p>\n

Despite his decent numbers at the back of the Eagles\u2019 bullpen, Norimoto isn\u2019t a power arm. He hasn\u2019t recorded a strikeout rate above 20% in any of the past four seasons. Norimoto fanned just 17.2% of batters faced against an 8.4% walk rate last year. FanGraphs<\/a> writes that he sits around 92 MPH on his fastball and features an above-average splitter as his best secondary pitch. He seemingly projects as a middle reliever or depth arm at the major league level.<\/p>\n

It\u2019d be a surprise if Norimoto commands more than a cheap one-year MLB contract. It\u2019s possible he explores major league interest as a leverage play in negotiations for potentially bigger money in Japan. Norimoto has nine-plus seasons of service time in his home country, so he\u2019s an unrestricted free agent who can sign with any club in NPB or a foreign league. An MLB team would not owe the Eagles a posting fee. Feinsand notes that Norimoto is likely to decide whether he\u2019ll make the move to MLB within the next few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Free agent relief pitcher\u00a0Takahiro Norimoto has received an offer from a major league club, reports Mark Feinsand of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85,212537],"class_list":{"0":"post-399177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-takahiro-norimoto"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}