Playing as a teammate with Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh was awesome. Yu Darvish should win more than 15 games this season with the Texas Rangers.

There is not much a Japanese ballclub can do about losing a free agent star player. The Yokohama DeNA BayStars, under new ownership, will be vastly improved and a pennant contender within three years.

Those were some of the observations made by BayStars general manager Shigeru Takada at a meeting of the Association of American Baseball Research in Tokyo last week. At age 66, Takada has taken on his latest job in a long baseball career as a player, broadcaster, field manager and GM with four NPB teams.