NPB Tracker

It’s not Dallas McPherson, but SoftBank has acquired a bat. The Hawks have signed former Chiba Lotte Marine and Orix Blue Wave Jose Ortiz to a one year, $500k deal. Ortiz had been tearing up the Mexican League (.412, 7 hr in 68 ab), and has a track record of solid play in NPB, so this looks like a good move by the Hawks.

Ortiz will be available for game duty from the 28th.

The 2009 NPB season is underway, and I’m happy to say that there are more places to catch up on Japanese & Asian baseball in English than there were last year.

We already had these fine websites:

• Deanna’s Marinerds, etc
• Simon’s jhockey, which covers baseball in hockey’s offseason
• EastWindupChronicle
• Tsubamegun: The Tokyo Yakult Swallows
• True Stories of Korean Baseball
• The venerable JapaneseBaseball.com

Over the last couple months, I’ve discovered a few new ones:

• Yakyu All-Stars, a blog started by a member of the JapaneseBaseball.com community
• Japan Baseball News, a sister site of JapanBall.com
• Baseball81.com, a repository of English-language Japanese scouting information
• Steve Says Kanpai, a blog kind of in the vein of EWC
• A Noboru Aota Fan’s Notes, a blog that looks to mostly be about Japanese baseball history
• Gen’s NPB reports at Sim Central
• welovemarines, a new blog for Chiba Lotte Marines fans

I’m sure there are a few more out there — what else should be on this list?