Trying to evaluate top talent based solely upon international competition is not going to be a valid assessment when the compensation structures of different localized events vary wildly. For instance, let's see how the top 5 pitchers in the world* did during international baseball competition (the World Baseball Classic): 0.0 innings pitched...ah yes, none of them considered international competition worth participating in, because none of them wanted to jeopardize their highly lucrative careers in the US's domestic baseball leagues. Only 1 of the top ten 2013 pitchers in the world competed internationally(Anibal Sanchez) and he pulled the go equivalent of getting knocked out in the first round (yay for small sample sizes!).

Does this mean that I think Japan has some secret contingent of super strong players that just get unlucky internationally? Of course not, however I think that saying Iyama Yuta has no claim at being the top performer in 2013 simply because he chooses not to compete in international tournaments is not a strong argument in and of itself. Similarly, I would think it silly to claim that Clayton Kershaw wasn't the best pitcher in 2013 just because he didn't play in the WBC.

Of course some may say, "Oh this isn't the same because Koreans can't compete for Japanese titles!" but that's has absolutely no bearing on this subject. Regardless of who is competing for the local Japanese titles, the focus of the strongest Japanese players is going to be on the local events because there is so much more money in them. Iyama isn't going to turn down half a million dollars or the Kisei just because Koreans couldn't compete for it. Does this mean for certain that Iyama is performing better than the Koreans? No, of course not. Does this mean he is necessarily performing worse? I wouldn't say so. At the end of the day you have to pick some other metric to evaluate them, which apparently many at L19 did, and decided Iyama put up the best show in 2013.



*You could try to argue that the top 5 pitchers in the MLB are not the top 5 pitchers in the world, but that is an awfully hard case to make. The best pitcher in the Japanese leagues, Masahiro Tanaka, just got signed by the New York Yankees and projects to be their #3 starter. That's the third best pitcher on their team, which had one pitcher who was perhaps a top 25 starter last year. Even if he excels to the point of his counterpart Yu Darvish (a questionable assumption) that puts him as a fringe top 10 candidate. Fact of the matter is, any way you care to slice it, a huge amount of the top baseball talent is in the US and chooses to never compete internationally.

This is one of the reasons I tried to use pitchers as the basis for comparison. Pitchers performances are highly individual based and most modern pitcher evaluations will remove external effects (team defense, park factors, etc). A pitcher is a one on one contest much like go, there is perhaps a weakness in the analogy in that pitchers do not directly compete with each other instead they are evaluated by proxy. When evaluating how a pitcher is expected to perform, they use rate stats to assess his past performance (something like FIP, fielding independent pitching), regressed statistics to predict how he should have performed (xFIP - FIP but normalized for places the pitcher may have gotten lucky, like having a large number of flyballs but low number of home runs), and counting statistics trying to estimate overall value (WAR or Wins Above Replacement - it compares both rate stats and the total amount of time played in a season so that you get a total value produced). In theory you could try to derive similar metrics like this for go, normalizing wins based upon the context. Blitz wins might not count as much as wins with long timesettings, wins in later rounds may count more, wins may have more or less value based upon the state of a series (Is it easy to put away an opponent when they are facing elimination? or is that a game where the person who's ahead tends to take a breather and give up a loss?). Ideally putting everything into a normalized context could help you project expected performance, and maybe find places where players got lucky.

The other amusing reason I picked this analogy is because baseball pitching has this literal exact dilemma going on right now (which I alluded to in my previous post). There is a pitcher from the Japanese Leagues who was absolutely dominant last year and they need to project how well he will do when he makes the transition to MLB. Masahiro Tanaka went 24-0 and posted very strong "traditional" baseball stats over 212 innings pitched (2.29 FIP if you care to look at that...lower number is better, like an ERA). Of course the challenge is projecting how moving to bigger ballparks with stronger hitters and a ball with more bounce will affect his performance. Luckily there are people who run the numbers and do the projections, and they think he'll end up being somewhere around the 25th-35th best pitcher in the league.

The overall analogue to go is quite striking. Japan's baseball leagues are good, but generally considered not quite as strong as the US. There is only limited mixing between the two groups, but there are some comparisons that could be made for reference. Hiroki Kuroda is sometimes given as a good comparison for Masahiro Tanaka, he was about 22nd or 23rd in WAR last year depending on who you ask. If we use Dr Bae Taeil's ratings and we figure Iyama falls somewhere in the 20-50 range of best players, that's actually about what they're expecting from Tanaka as a pitcher both from projections and from comparisons...it's actually a little funny how these things seem to parallel. Of course the one problem we have moving over to go is that there really isn't a good recent comparison for Iyama that we can use to assess outcomes in international play, the last time someone was this dominant in Japan the international go scene was also dominated by Japan. Perhaps he will make the jump and we can use him as the baseline for future players.