NPB Tracker

After a short break from writing, I’m back with a few highlights from my weekend reading. I’ve been enjoying Sanspo’s Baseball Photo Ranking lately.

The next big piece of content I have on tap for NPB Tracker is (surprise) an essay on the Junichi Tazawa situation. Look out for that in the next day or two.

Japanese Articles:

• Construction of the new Hiroshima Citizen’s Stadium is underway, and you can follow its progress on this blog. Thanks to Erik Schullstrom for the link.
• Nippon Ham Fighters starter Ryan Glynn has a 28-inning scoreless streak going.
• Who says Japanese players don’t play hard? Here’s a shot of Yakult’s Masakazu Fukukawa taking out Yomiuri’s Shigeyuki Furuki on a slide into second base.
• Yokohama’s teenage righthander Atori made his first career appearance and hit 94 mph on the gun.
• The Eneos Industrial League team will be travelling to Brazil to play a seven-game exhibition series with Brazil’s national team to commerate 100 years of Japanese immigration to Brazil. I think this is great, I’d love to see baseball expand more deeply into Brazil.
• Obligatory Junichi Tazawa item: here’s a blogger who couldn’t care less if Tazawa skips NPB. “A guy who wants to go to the Majors can go. That’s it.” Well said.
• Hanshin has won a number of games in walk-off fashion recently, here are some YouTube clips of the team’s win on Sept 11: Jeff Williams shuts down Yakult in the top of the ninth, K’ing Norichika Aoki for the final out, Shinjiro Hiyama and Ikuro Katsuragi start the comeback, Akihiro Yano ties the game, and Makoto Imaoka wins it.

English Articles:

• Wayne Graczyk gives us a little insight into what makes fireballing Giants closer Marc Kroon tick.

Back on to current events… here’s today’s collection from around the ‘net.

Japanese Articles

• Yu Darvish made his first start since returning from the Olympics, throwing 96 pitches over eight innings of one-hit ball.
• Kazumi Saito has completed the US stint of his rehab and has returned to Japan to finish up. I wonder if we’ll see him in a game this season…
• Updates on Hanshin’s three foreign-born relief pitchers: Jeff Williams was dropped to the farm team for rest after two bad outings; Chris Resop is also on the farm team getting a look as a starter, but meanwhile Scott Atchison has been holding down the fort with 10 consecutive scoreless outings.
• Chunichi Dragons owner Junnosuke Shirai has suggested that rather than rely on Senichi Hoshino for next year’s WBC team, Japan goes with the manager of this year’s NPB champion.

English Articles

• Deanna posted a great interivew with Rakuten slugger Fernando Seguignol. For anyone who hasn’t seen Deanna’s site, I highly recommend it — she gets some excellent interviews.
• Koji Uehara returned to Yomiuri’s starting rotation last week and picked up a win.
• The Softbank Source reports on last weekend’s Hawks-Marines series, where all three games ended in ties. This the first time in NPB history that’s happened.

Following up on last week’s post on blogs by Japanese NPB players, here’s a quick rundown of blogs that are written in English by foreign-born NPB players. The selection is thinner, but there are a few good ones out there.

Of course, the best English content on NPB is maintained by fans — namely Deanna, Simon, the Tsubamegun guys, EWC, and the community at JapaneseBaseball.com. But I think just about 100% of the visitors to this blog are already familiar with those excellent sites, so let’s move on to the player’s blogs.

• By far the most insightful and entertaining of the lot is CJ Nitkowski’s blog. CJ, if you’re reading this, well done!
• Another left-handed reliever, Hanshin’s Jeff Williams is good for about one post a month in his blog. Jeff is one of the longer-tenured gaijin players in NPB, and that shows through in his writing.
• Giants closer Marc Kroon has a blog as well, but hasn’t updated it in a while.
• Yet another reliever, Nippon Ham closer Michael Nakamura has a blog on ballplayers.jp, where a number of notable players maintain blogs.
• Finally a batter: Alex Ramirez’s site isn’t so much of a blog as a photo gallery, and as you might expect the photos are very Rami-centric. Note the Engrish in the page title.
• Bobby Valentine has got to be the most fan-friendly manager in Japan right now, and accordingly mantains his blog in English and Japanese. I’m not aware of another NPB manager having a blog, but I could be off on that.
• And least but not quite least, it’s worth mentioning Brad “the Animal” Leslie’s site. Animal pitched for in Japan for a few years after his stint in the big leagues, then retired to a career in the nutty Japanese game shows that eventually made it to American cable.

Anyone know of any others that I’m missing?

English Links:

• Veteran NPB journalist Wayne Graczyk made a trip to Starfin Stadium in Asahikawa.
• Jim Allen has an article on Japan manager Senichi Hoshino’s decision to include Koji Uehara on the Olympic roster. Gutsy call by Hoshino; I think it was the right move.
• Looks like Jeff Williams updated his site.

Japanese Links:

• New Hanshin reliever Chris Resop has arrived in Japan. “Great!” he said adding, “they really cheer feverishly. I’ve never been to this kind of ballpark before. I’ve never seen this in America.” (note: translation of a translation).
• Uehara pitched two innings and struck out three in Yomiuri’s 4-1 loss to Yokohama.
• Former Twin Lew Ford has been demoted to Hanshin’s farm team for the third time this year.