Aki has high dreams this year of playing baseball in October, hitting .300 (or you know, a .400 OBP would be fine Aki), and scoring 100 runs. There seems to be a common thought that players will improve in their second year, after looking over some of the improvements from recent Japanese position players I'm not enthused to say the least:
Player Year One OPS / Year Two OPS
H. Matsui .788/.912
I. Suzuki .838/.813
T. Iguchi .780/.774
S. Taguchi .871/.829
K. Matsui .727/.652
T. Shinjo .725/.664
A. Iwamura .770/???
Shinjo and Taguchi weren't exactly good players, and Kaz Matsui went through a ton of struggles in New York, but outside of Hideki Matsui no other hitter seemed to adopt and improve in their second year in America. Aki seemed to take a ton of strikes looking last year - apparently about 30% of his strikes were looking, compare that to 24% from Carlos Pena, 18% from Crawford, and 37% from the Greek God of Walks Youkilis. He just needs to start whining like Youkilis to get the borderline calls, but for some reason I don't see Aki doing that.