Japanese fans stand in front of a huge ad with Ichiro. (Toru Hanai/Reuters) It was almost a month ago now, but Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics played an Opening Series in Japan. I was lucky enough to go to Japan for Opening Series between Boston Red Sox and Athletics in 2008 (photo from the trip [...]
I was reading Patrick Newman’s NPB Tracker (excellent blog) and his entry caught my eyes: Darvish K’s 1000, Iwakuma Throws 147, Kanemoto Still Runs. First, Yu Darvish, who is very likely to come to U.S. next season, has struck out 1,000 hitters in his 7th season. He reached the milestone in 1,058 and 2/3 innings [...]
2011 Japanese (Nippon) Professional Baseball regular season has began this week, little later than scheduled because of the earthquake on March 11. Here is some links to good write-up of what to watch for in 2011 Japanese Professional Baseball league by Asahi.com’s Rob Smaal. NPB/ Central League ’11: Usual suspects led by Giants expected to [...]
If you haven’t, watch this movie called Kokoyakyu: High School Baseball. It was directed by Kenneth Eng and written/produced by Alex Shear. Was aired on PBS in 2006 as part of its “Point of View” series. To those kids, baseball is life the Universe and everything. (I am reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [...]
There is an awesome Japanese Baseball blog called Yakyu Baka, which is updated daily and with bunch of great information. I noticed couple of articles about Japanese “Knuckleball Princess” Eri Yoshida on WSJ and NYTimes and posted a link on my facebook/twitter acounts, (follow me at @DaigoFuji for English and @DaigoRedSox for Japanese) but Gen [...]
Valentine in the air after winning the Japan Series in 2005 “You gotta have Wa” (one of my favorite book of all time) author Robert Whiting has just concluded crazy 4-part series about how once-super-popular Bobby Valentine was almost jettisoned from Chiba Lotte Marines, on The Japan Times online. Part 1: Clandestine campaign led to [...]
JapaneseBallPlayers.com is a unique bilingual* website that provide information, news and stats for MLB players from Japan. This is a blog, written by Daigo Fujiwara, who created the website over 10 years ago.