{"id":381673,"date":"2026-01-01T13:31:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T13:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/381673\/"},"modified":"2026-01-01T13:31:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T13:31:07","slug":"spencer-howard-to-sign-with-yomiuri-giants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/381673\/","title":{"rendered":"Spencer Howard to Sign with Yomiuri Giants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nippon Professional Baseball\u2019s Yomiuri Giants are signing right-hander\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/players\/h\/howarsp01.shtml\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Spencer Howard<\/a>, according to multiple reports.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Howard and His Time in Major League Baseball<\/p>\n<p>Howard, 29, was once a promising prospect with the Philadelphia Phillies. Unfortunately, he was unable to translate his minor league success to the majors. Across parts of five MLB seasons with four organizations, he posted a 7.00 ERA with 136 strikeouts in 144 innings. His underlying metrics were somewhat more encouraging, but his performance even slipped at the Triple-A level, where he recorded a 7.07 ERA and 6.20 FIP over 70 innings from 2022 to 2024. This prompted a move to Asia.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Howard joined the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in 2025 and was generally effective when healthy. However, a slew of smaller injuries limited him to just 48 \u2154 innings across nine starts. He finished 5-1 with a 1.28 ERA+, striking out 18% of hitters against a 6% walk rate. Howard averaged 91.6 mph on his fastball, pairing it with a slider as his primary secondary pitch against right-handed hitters.\u00a0The righty\u00a0also had a changeup as his best weapon versus lefties.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The San Luis Obispo product now heads to the Tokyo-based Giants. It is a club working to stabilize its rotation after losing frontline starters <a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/players\/s\/suganto01.shtml\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Tomoyuki Sugano<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/register\/player.fcgi?id=griffi000fos\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Foster Griffin<\/a> in consecutive winters. With <a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/register\/player.fcgi?id=whitle000for\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Forrest Whitley<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/register\/player.fcgi?id=mata--000bry\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Bryan Mata<\/a> also signed this offseason, Howard will likely slot in as a back-end starter and should face less pressure to shoulder a heavy innings load than he would have in Rakuten, where a larger workload was necessary.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>For more baseball news: <a href=\"https:\/\/worldbaseball.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/worldbaseball.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>PHOTO: Philadelphia Phillies starting pitcher Spencer Howard throws during the first inning of a baseball game against the Washington Nationals, Monday, July 26, 2021, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo\/Laurence Kesterson)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nippon Professional Baseball\u2019s Yomiuri Giants are signing right-hander\u00a0Spencer Howard, according to multiple reports.\u00a0 Howard and His Time in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381674,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-381673","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-mlb","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}