Yes, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Last season, if you’ll recall, I did an informal “Fantasy Tigers” league with two of my friends. We drafted almost all the Tigers players, and kept track of first squad and farm stats to determine a winning manager. It was a little too simplistic, and lost its excitement when…
Over the years, Hanshin has been known as a big spending baseball club. This is true to an extent, with the team consistently ranking in the top half of the salary rankings. It looks like this coming season, the team will rank #3, well behind the top two clubs, Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks and Yomiuri Giants….
As a relative newcomer to Nippon Professional Baseball, it has been a lot of fun learning of ex-pats who have come to know the game and its history well. Among those I look to for wisdom that extends beyond my time in Japan (and even my entire life, for that matter) are Robert Whiting, Jim…
New manager Tomoaki Kanemoto participated in his first draft on October 22. What transpired early on was interesting. The Tigers and Swallows both put in a bid for Shun Takayama, and so they drew ballots to see which club would get negotiating rights. Kanemoto drew first, grabbing one ballot, then putting it down and picking…
They should not be here. And yet here they are. After last Sunday’s loss to the Carp in a game that could have clinched third place, the Tigers were left to hope the lowly Chunichi Dragons would knock off the hungry and surging Carp on Wednesday night to break the tie for third. With 50-year…
I have tried to focus on NPB and specifically the Hanshin Tigers as much as possible since last year. However, as someone who has mostly followed the game on paper for the better part of the last two decades, I thought I needed to get an education from someone who played the game on the…
It is hard to believe Robert Whiting waited 15 years after publishing the groundbreaking You Gotta Have Wa (1989), but with all the changes in professional baseball, The Meaning of Ichiro presents several new angles on the Japanese-American relationship as seen on and around the baseball field. Instead of looking at how Americans adjusted (or didn’t) to Japanese…
It is often said that the second part of trilogies is the hardest to write as an author and the least enjoyable for the viewer. Although not formally part of a trilogy, You Gotta Have Wa by Robert Whiting is the second of three major books he wrote on the subject of Japanese baseball. The…
Interleague play begins today! If you are like me, you may not know a whole lot about the teams the Tigers will be facing over the next three weeks. Here is a brief look at each of them, in schedule order: Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles Joined NPB in: 2005 Also Known Simply As: Rakuten Eagles Located in: Sendai,…
“I was a big baseball fan in Japan and found that looking at the different way the Japanese approached the game provided a window into the Japanese culture as a whole. Friends encouraged me to write a book about it and so I did. Took a year to write 100,000 words. The result was The…