2) Hideki Okajima
The Contract: $2.5 million for two seasons (2007 and 2008) with a club option that was exercised for $1.75 million in 2009. (The club option was mentioned here and on Okajima’s Wikipedia page, but the link Wikipedia sites is broken. I was shocked by how hard it has been to find contract data on these relievers).
Performance:
| Season | IP | SV | K/9 | BB/9 | ERA | FIP | WHIP | FIP- | fWAR |
| 2007 | 69 | 5 | 8.22 | 2.22 | 2.22 | 3.33 | 0.97 | 77 | 1.1 |
| 2008 | 62 | 1 | 8.71 | 3.34 | 2.61 | 3.62 | 1.16 | 86 | 1 |
| 2009 | 61 | 0 | 7.82 | 3.1 | 3.39 | 4.2 | 1.26 | 97 | 0.5 |
I really struggled to decide between Hideki Okajima and Junichi Tazawa for the number 2 spot. I ended up choosing Okajima because if a competitive team had the choice between a reliever that is really good right now or a reliever that will be really good for slightly longer three seasons down the line they would certainly take the former and for the 2007 Red Sox, Okajima was just that.
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Okajima’s signing prior to the 2007 season was overshadowed by the news of another Japanese pitcher defecting to the Red Sox. Daisuke Matsuzaka and his gyroball were all the rage that winter. But, despite the initial gap in excitement, Okajima will certainly be remembered more fondly than Dice-K among the Fenway Faithful.
Among AL teams in 2007, the Red Sox’s bullpen placed 1st in ERA (3.10) and 4th in FIP (4.01). Boston’s relief corps that season were a huge part of their championship run and while Jonathan Papelbon was the headliner of that group, Okajima was easily Boston’s second-best reliever. That one season would easily have made his contract a bargain regardless of what happened over the duration. But Okajima delivered two more solid seasons and between 2007 and 2009 the southpaw maintained a 2.72 ERA while striking out nearly three batters for each walk and generating 2.6 fWAR.
And for all of that success, the Red Sox paid roughly the same amount to Okajima over three years that they paid Joel Pineiro to pitch at replacement level in 2007.