Cubs BCB After Dark: Should the Cubs sign Kazuma Okamoto?

It’s the first week of the offseason here at BCB After Dark: the hippest hangout for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Please come in out of the cold. We’re open for business. There’s no cover charge. The dress code is casual. The hostess will season you now. Bring your own beverage.

BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.

Last week I asked you whether the Cubs should try to trade for Orioles catcher Adley Rutschman, who may or may not be on the trade market. Most of you thought it was a dumb idea, with 83 percent of you being against it. I can’t say it was my best question, but at least it got a lot of you to vote.

Here’s the part where we listen to jazz and talk movies. Our offseason movie tournament starts today, so if you’ve been thinking about getting more involved in the non-baseball parts of this feature, now is a great time to start.

DeJohnette was probably better known as a member of other combos than a bandleader in his own right. And no work of his was more famous than his work playing for Miles Davis on his seminal 1970 album of jazz fusion, 

Bitches Brew.

So here is Miles in Denmark in 1969 with DeJohnette on the drums playing the title track “Bitches Brew.” This video doesn’t list the other members of the band playing with Miles that day, but I think I recognize them all. I believe that’s Wayne Shorter on sax, Dave Holland on bass and I know that’s Chick Corea on keyboards in addition to DeJohnette and Davis on trumpet.

Tonight is the night we start the BCB Winter Science Fiction Classic. We’re going to vote on 32 of the best science fiction movies of the 20th Century until only one remains.

In case you’re new to this, on Mondays and Wednesdays (generally), I pit two of these films up against each other. I try to write a little something on each film to give you some insight into my thinking of the film. I say “a little something” mostly because if you’ve been reading me for a while, I tend to be long-winded and always want to share one more thing with you. I’m going to try to keep these writeups to around 500 to 750 words each this time. We can see how I do on that front.

After I have my say, it’s your turn to vote. Whichever film gets the most votes moves on to the next round. You’re not required to watch the films to vote (because how would I know?) but I do encourage you to check out as many of them as you can. The most fun part of the tournament is discussing the films in the comments.

I picked 32 sci-fi films for the tourney. All of these films are widely-regarded as being among the best science fiction films made in the last century. I’m sure we missed some great ones and some got left off just because they aren’t all that easy to find and watch.

The films are split into four brackets, consisting of the “classic” era (1902 to 1960), the “New Hollywood” era (1961 to 1976), the “Star Wars” era (1977 to 1983) and the “modern” era (1984 to 1999). We’re going to start with the “classic” era because I think it’s best to start at the beginning.

Before we start, here’s the tournament bracket:

I forgot to put in the seed numbers in that bracket, but the four number one seeds are The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner

 and The Matrix. With that information, you should be able to figure out where I seeded every other film.

Up first, we have a 4/5 matchup between Forbidden Planet

 and The Incredible Shrinking Man.

4. Forbidden Planet. (1956) Directed by Fred M. Wilcox. Starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen and Robby the Robot. (That’s what the opening credits say, anyways.)

Forbidden Planet is remarkable for being a rare science fiction movie in this time period that was taken seriously and produced as an A-picture. It was filmed in color, given a big budget, a big star in Pidgeon and a rising star in Francis. The plot is loosely-based on William Shakespeare’s 

The Tempest. The results showed that science fiction could be more than just Saturday morning kiddie matinee fare, although this film was versatile enough to be at home with the kiddies as well.

Pidgeon stars as Dr. Morbius, the sole survivor of a 23rd century scientific expedition to the planet Altair IV. The only other person on the planet is his daughter Altaira (Francis), who has lived her whole life on the planet, alone with her father and her animals.

Nielsen is Commander John Adams, the leader of a starship assigned to find out what happened to the expedition. Morbius warns Adams against landing on Altair IV, but Adams has his orders and lands anyway.

Adams learns from Morbius that there is some unseen force/invisible monster on the planet that killed the rest of the members of Morbius’ expedition. Morbius, his wife and daughter were somehow immune, although Morbius’ wife died of other causes anyway. Altair IV was also the home to an extinct race known as the Krell, whose scientific knowledge far surpasses anything that humans have learned. Morbius, a literature/linguist scholar by profession, has been able to decipher the Krell language and learn their secret knowledge.

One of the things that Morbius learned from the Krell is how to build Robby the Robot, who works as a servant for Morbius and Altaira and serves mostly as comic relief for the rest of us.

Most of the rest of the plot is dedicated to uncovering the secrets of what happened to the Krell and what exactly is that monster on the planet that’s killed everyone but Morbius and Altaira and has begun to kill members of Adams’ crew. There’s also a romance that breaks out between Altaira and Adams, with a kind of rote love triangle involving another crew member. It is worth mentioning that for someone supposedly as well-versed in earth literature as Altaira is, she seems completely ignorant about sex and romance. I can only imagine how many books Morbius banned her daughter from reading.

Freudian psychology also plays a big role in the plot of Forbidden Planet, which serves to remind us of just how big Freud was in pop culture in the first few decades following World War II.

The first thing you notice about Forbidden Planet is how great the whole thing looks. If you’re a fan of the stylings of what we today call retrofuturism, Forbidden Planet

 is the film for you. The set design and background art are just gorgeous. The special effects may not be anything by today’s standards, but the don’t have the cheap look of so many films of this era. MGM imported animator Josh Meador from Disney to create the monster and he did a great job, basically hand-animating the thing.

Robby the Robot became kind of a thing after Forbidden Planet, getting his own kind-of sequel in The Invisible Boy and showing up on various tv shows over the next decade.

Forbidden Planet was also a major influence on Gene Roddenberry in creating Star Trek a decade later. There are several episodes of the original series that are basically variants of the setup for 

Forbidden Planet and its influence on the franchise has continued throughout the decades.

While Forbidden Planet certainly wasn’t the first science fiction movie to take its premise seriously as an art form, its box office success taught Hollywood that such an approach could be 

profitable. It’s hard to see a major studio bankrolling 2001: A Space Odyssey without the example of Forbidden Planet.

Forbidden Planet was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2013 for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

Here is the trailer for Forbidden Planet. You can get a sense of how fantastic this film looks just from this.

5. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) Directed by Jack Arnold. Starring Grant Williams and Randy Stuart.

I had never seen The Incredible Shrinking Man before scouting films for this tournament. I had always assumed that it was one of those films with giant props for the star to run around so he looks tiny, as in the later Irwin Allen TV series Land of the Giants. To be honest, there is a lot of that. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how deep and philosophical the film was. For a cheap B-movie made for drive-in theaters, there’s a surprising amount of deep stuff going on here.

Williams plays Scott Carey, whom, while on a boat excursion with his wife Louise (Stuart), is engulfed by a strange and apparently radioactive mist. Louise escapes the mist because Scott had semi-jokingly ordered her to go down below and get him a beer. It goes away and doesn’t seem to do anything until six months later when he’s exposed to an industrial insecticide.

After that, Scott notices that his clothes don’t fit. A doctor reassures him he’s just lost weight, but Scott insists that he’s lost height as well.

But Scott keeps shrinking and even the doctors have to admit that there is something going on. Needing money after losing his job as a an ad executive, he sells his life story for money. He becomes a media sensation and is constantly hounded by the press. He also becomes a kind of jerk as he deals with the depression of his shrinking. He meets Clarice (April Kent), an attractive dwarf from the circus, and she teaches him that the world can be a wonderful place for little people. This cheers him up temporarily, but eventually Scott gets smaller than even her.

After that, the film turns into an adventure plot where common household things become giant threats. He battles the family’s pet cat and falls into the cellar trying to escape. There he’s trapped amongst the common basement things, searches for food (crumbs) and battles a tarantula.

There’s a lot going on there. The biggest thing, other than the fear of radiation and other environmental threats that we can’t see, is the way that one’s masculinity can be stripped away. Scott starts out the movie by ordering Lou around, although she’s not really having it. But as he gets smaller and smaller, Louise stops becoming a wife and starts becoming a mother, because Scott can’t take care of himself in his diminished state. He becomes angry and lashes out at her. Scott finds wisdom and solace in Clarice as long as he’s still taller than her, but once he shrinks to be smaller than her, he runs from her, embarrassed that he’s no longer feels like a man around her. Scott can only regain his manhood when he engages in combat with the spider and is forced into use all his wits and muscles to find food and water. It’s definitely a picture of the 1950s. Or maybe also the 2020s.

I’m not going to spoil the end of the picture, but the whole thing gets very existential and religious at the end. It’s weird, but it works quite well and avoids a typical Hollywood wrap-up.

The special effects are about what you’d expect, but they are pretty well done for the era in which the film was made. It helped that Arnold used cheaper, little-known actors that enabled him to spend more money on getting the effects right. The giant props don’t look cheap like they did on Land of the Giants ten years later. I would guess shooting in black-and-white helped on that front.

The Incredible Shrinking Man was a box-office hit in 1957 and reviews were good, but not great. But the film’s reputation has grown over the years as it is often mentioned among the top science fiction movies of the decade. In 2009, the Library of Congress put it in the National Film Registry of films that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” praising the “sparse direction” of Arnold and the “poignant script” of Richard Matheson, whose 1956 novel was the basis of the film.

Here is the trailer for The Incredible Shrinking Man. They get Orson Welles to give a quick endorsement to the film.

Forbidden Planet can be seen on Hoopla, a free service that you can sign up for with your library card. It’s also available to rent and there is is a copy on the DailyMotion website that’s of very good quality.

The Incredible Shrinking Man is available for rent, is on the Darkroom steaming service (whatever that is) and I found you a copy on the Internet Archive.

Now let’s vote!

You have until Wednesday to vote. Up next will be Invasion of the Body Snatcher (1956) and Godzilla (Gojira) 1954.

Welcome back to everyone who skips all the music and movies.

It’s Hot Stove season so I guess it’s time for the Cubs to consider possible acquisitions. And in recent years, the Cubs have been increasingly interested in signing players out of Japan with Seiya Suzuki and Shōta Imanaga.

There are several players from NPB interested in making the jump to MLB and the biggest name among them is 25-year-old corner infielder Munetaka Murikami. Murikami is a guy with tremendous power, but there are some real questions as to his ability to make contact in MLB with a 29.8 percent strikeout rate in Japan. That could translate into some real problems against tougher major league pitching. On top of that, there are a lot of teams that don’t think Murikami can play third base in the majors. So Murikami is a high-risk, high-reward, big contract player who might have nowhere to play with the Cubs unless they decide to trade Michael Busch, which would be silly.

There is a lower-risk (and presumably cheaper contract) corner infielder also coming over to America in 29-year-old Kazuma Okamoto. Okamoto doesn’t have Murikami’s contact issues with a low 11.3 percent strikeout rate for Yomiuri last season. Okamoto only played in 69 games last season after an elbow injury in May, but he was extremely productive after returning to the lineup, hitting .327/.416/.598 with 15 home runs in 69 games.

Okamoto doesn’t have monster power like Murikami, but he is a power-over-hit bat and he did hit 27 home runs in a full season in 2024 and 41 in 2023. He hit a 407-foot home run off of Kyle Freeland in the last World Baseball Classic as well, so he did show some skill against major league pitching. There is some concern that he’s struggled against higher velocities, although many think that’s just because he hasn’t seen much of it and that he will adjust reasonably quickly when he comes over. It should be noted that Okamoto’s stats in Japan compare favorably to Seiya Suzuki’s.

Okamoto might have a better chance to stick at third base, although some observers, like Keith Law, are skeptical that he can be an everyday third baseman in the majors. (The Athletic sub. req.) . Eric Longenhagen of Fangraphs is more optimistic he’s at least playable at third base. Should the Cubs sign him, he would serve as insurance against a backsliding season by Matt Shaw at third and as a right-handed platoon partner for Michael Busch at first base. So basically, an upgrade over Justin Turner’s role of the team in 2025—maybe one that can actually be make 100 starts in a season between third, first and designated hitter, as well as serving as a strong bench bat.

At almost 30 and without Murakami’s upside, Okamoto won’t command the same kind of money. Most estimates that I’ve seen give Okamoto a three- or four-year deal in the $50-to-$85 million range.

Of course, there’s always risk with players coming over from the Far East. They don’t face the same kinds of velocity in NPB and MLB is just a lot faster in the field as well. Scouts in Japan praised Suzuki’s defense in right field before he came over to the Cubs, but while his bat has come around, his defense is certainly below average for a right fielder. Should Okamoto prove unable to handle the hot corner in MLB, then he’s a short-end of a platoon with Michael Busch and part-time DH. The Cubs could certainly fill that role a lot cheaper than what Okamoto will likely command.

So what do you think? Should the Cubs pursue Kazuma Okamoto?

That’s all for tonight. Thanks for stopping by. We hope you stick with us all winter. Please get home safely. Don’t forget any items you may have checked. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow evening for more BCB After Dark.