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Toreba no Toraba – Warm Stove League

Toreba no Toraba – Warm Stove League

As seen in Daily Sports (Japanese) – トレバーの虎場 As the cold of winter sets in and the long (shortened?) offseason officially gets underway, there are two main things that keep die-hard baseball fans like myself warm. The first is the hot-stove league, which we all gather ‘round and anticipate which players will move to which…

Tigers Losing Their Tails

Tigers Losing Their Tails

It is that time of year again. After welcoming in 9 new guys via the draft, the team has to part ways with roughly the same number of men. At present, only one will be retiring, while the rest are likely to be looking for work elsewhere. And for a couple of these, that “elsewhere”…

Big Data Baseball

Big Data Baseball

Stop me if you’re familiar with this narrative… A yellow-and-black-wearing baseball team from a blue-collar city has fallen out of postseason relevance for two decades. A new manager comes in, makes necessary adjustments, and the team experiences a revival of sorts, luring people back to the ballpark once the snakebitten fairweather fans saw that the…

Toreba no Toraba – Humbling Heroes with Japanese Requests

Toreba no Toraba – Humbling Heroes with Japanese Requests

Daily Sports Column (Japanese) here / トレバーの虎場(デイリースポーツ)から I can still remember July 1998 like it was yesterday. I wouldn’t call myself traumatized by what happened. Just shell-shocked. I had just come to Okinawa, Japan, and the town Board of Education threw me a welcome party. There I was, sitting at a table with a bunch…

2020 Post-Draft Report

2020 Post-Draft Report

Unlike most teams, Hanshin manager Akihiro Yano did not divulge the team’s direction as to which player they would enter the sweepstakes for in Round 1 of the draft, which took place on Monday, October 26 in Tokyo (but mainly via online meetings). The team has not yet finished cutting unneeded players, but typically by…