NPB Tracker

Sorry for the lack of updates over the last few days… took a little bit of an extended holiday weekend and did a little traveling. Hope my readers in America hada nice 4th of July. Here are today’s bullet points:

• Hanshin is cruising with a 7-game winning streak(link in English) and has opened up a massive 12.5 game lead on 2nd place Chunichi. They’ve also “lit up” their magic number to clinch a playoff spot. It currently stands at 55.
• In other Hanshin news, pitcher Wakatake threw a no-hitter for the Tigers’ farm team.
• Yu Darvish will be starting the All-Star Game for the Pacific League. Colby Lewis gets the call for the Central League.
• MVPs for the month of June. Central League: Kenshin Kawakami (Chunichi), Tomoaki Kanemoto (Hanshin); Pacific League: Hisashi Iwakuma (Rakuten), Craig Brazell (Seibu). Note that a profile on Kawakami is on my to-do list.
• I stumbled across a new English-language Korean Baseball Blog. Here’s a link.
• Deanna at Marinerds, etc posted a blog about her trip to a minor league game in Japan. Lots of good photos.
• In another stumbling, I found this guy’s YouTube page. Tons of game highlights, posted regularly. All videos in Japanese.

Just picked up this thread from JapaneseBaseball.com that says that Hanshin has purchased the contract of reliever Chris Resop from the Braves. Interestingly, shortly before reading that thread, I saw this re-run of an article on Sanspo, which said that Hanshin had a scout in the US looking for relief help for when Bullpen aces Kyuji Fujikawa and Tomoyuki Kubota will be away for the Olympics.

I’ve never seen Resop pitch, but he’s appeared in parts of four MLB seasons. He might be kind of a AAAA guy since he’s put up respectable numbers in minors but hasn’t found sustained MLB success yet. Check out his full stats here. Resop is still only 25, so there’s room for him to develop as well.