Dead Ball (JPN Baseball Thread)

[AssKissinger]

Well, we're in the heart of winter so of course what's on everybody's mind? Baseball, of course! Captain Japan periodically posts some baseball news so I thought we could put a thread together for it. To get things started I just want to say I just finished reading You Gotta Have Wa and wow! I recommend this book. Out of all the books I've read on post WWII Japan this is my absolute favorite. I didn't expect a book about baseball to make me cry but this one had tears running down my cheeks. Imagine your gaijin experience multiplied by 100. That's what it was like for these guys who broke into Japanese baseball. It's about the discrimination and the reverse discrimination and the backlash from the reverse discrimination and everything that sums up the gaijin experience. I'm surprised that Dogs and Demons has generated as much interest (at least in terms of numbers of reviews on Amazon) because this book is way better. The most amazing story I thought was about Randy Bass. Even after a great season he was fired for taking leave when his son had a brain tumor. Hanshin was too cheap to live up to their responsibilities to his son's healthcare in violation of his contract and the managing director of the Tigers committed suicide because of the incident.

And this got me thinking about something else. It wasn't in the book but does anybody remember when Daisuke Matsuzaka was pitching in the koshien (high school tournament) and he pitched, I think, three full games in a row, one with extra innings? As much as I always want my team, the Atlanta Braves, to win, shit like that just breaks my heart. Because destroying some kid's arm in turn destroys the game. If it's not fun it sucks. I don't see how any real baseball fan could have cheered when Matsuzaka walked out on the mound after 18 straight innings or whatever it was. If I was his dad I would've walked out on the field and kicked his high school coach's ass right in front of the 60 some thousand spectators.

[Captain Japan]

I truly think "Wa" is held in at least as high of a regard as "Demons." As far as Amazon goes, "Wa" came out about 15 years before "Demons." I don't think it is popularity at all; it really is more about when Amazon started letting people give their views on books.

The first chapter of "Wa" is one of the funniest things I've read, I've gone through it quite a few times. Bob Horner...

Ok, I'm going to stick with this thread for baseball news.

[AssKissinger]

Have you read The meaning of Ichiro or this old one about American minor leagues Ball Four

[Captain Japan]

Have you read The meaning of Ichiro or this old one about American minor leagues Ball Four

Taro posted my story on "The Meaning of Ichiro" here:
Ichiro's boyhood training 'bordered on child abuse'

I ran into Robert Whiting in Roppongi a few weeks ago. He's a really good guy.

"Ball Four" is one of those books I haven't but should have read.

[AssKissinger]

You know I'm a 36 year old geezer right? Well, I read Ball Four in junior high and I still remember it. That's how good it is. I'd like to read it again.

[AssKissinger]

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getsp.pl5?sp20050116a1.htm

Hanshin's Igawa still wants to go to majors

OSAKA (Kyodo) Hanshin Tigers lefty Kei Igawa, who has set his sights on a move to the major leagues through the posting system, hit a snag Friday in the second round of talks with the Central League club

Hanshin has made Igawa an offer of 250 million yen in annual salary for 2005, but Hashioka has avoided comment on the proposed deal.

These guys will do anything to get out of Hanshin. Hell, who can blame them? http://www.fuckedgaijin.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10178&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=yabu

[Captain Japan]

Fighters finalize new contracts
Japan Times

The Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters said Monday they have formally signed former Daiei Hawks pitcher Brandon Knight and infielder Erick Almonte, who once played for the New York Yankees.
Both players will get a signing bonus of 10 million yen and an annual salary of 40 million yen for their one-year contracts.

The 29-year-old Knight joined the Hawks in 2003 and went 6-4 in his two years with the Pacific League club.

Almonte, 26, is the younger brother of former Yomiuri Giants pitcher Hector Almonte. Last season, Almonte batted .318 with 17 homers and 74 RBIs with the Colorado Rockies' Triple-A affiliate.

Almonte filled in reasonably well when Jeter broke himself at the beginning of the 2003 season. Since he's so young, it is a bit surprising that he didn't latch onto someone else and that he'd wind up over here.

[gaijinzilla]

AK: You are right about "You Gotta Have Wa". I tell FGs and potential FGs that if you want to get a picture of what working/living in Japan is like then this book is a good primer.

[Speed]

Gotta agree with you guys about "Gotta Have Wa" and "Meaning of Ichiro". (How's that for some wa?)

If you're into Robert Whiting and his informative and good natured tongue-in-cheek writing, then you might wanna check out "Tokyo Underworld".

GREAT story about an American lifetimer FG - from the time of the Occupation to the early 90's - his rise up and ultimate downfall with the seedier side of Japan in Roppongi. Lots of drinking and eating, smuggling, skeevey characters, women and a look at the Japanese attitude toward FGs through the years.

[Captain Japan]

Oh seeks uniform ball
Gomiuri Shimbun

Fukuoka Softbank Hawks manager Sadaharu Oh plans to propose that all 12 Japanese pro baseball teams use a single manufacturer's baseballs for their games, it was learned Thursday.

Oh, who intends to make the proposal at the Jan. 27 managers' meeting in Tokyo, said that in line with the internationalization of the game, such as the proposed World Cup, it would be best if Japan uses one baseball.

If implemented, Oh would like to see the change take place as soon as 2006. Unlike the major leagues, which has one official ball, Japan has a number of baseball manufacturers for balls used during the season.

[Captain Japan]

Will Yabu be the answer?
Bigleaguers.com

Looking for help with their pitching, Oakland A's turned East. Joining the team next season will be Keiichi Yabu, formerly of the Japanese League.

"The most attractive thing to me is that Oakland's always in the playoffs, always a contender," Yabu told the Contra Costa Times. "I also had to think about my family, and the San Francisco Bay Area always has been an attractive place to live."

Whether the A's will remain a contender after their trades of starting pitchers Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder is debatable, as is the impact Yabu will have on their new pitching staff. Yabu is being compared to Seattle reliever Shigetoshi Hasegawa and is noted for his ability to command four pitches and his consistency against left- and right-handed hitters.

Just where Yabu fits on the A's new staff won't be determined until the spring. It's conceivable he could start, pitch in a setup role, close in case of an emergency or do all three.

In the meantime, he said he will try to familiarize himself with the American brand of baseball as quickly as he can.

"What I've noticed when I watch is that the strike zone in the United States tends to be wider, which, if you pitch the right way, you can use to your advantage," Yabu said. "But at the same time, hitters in the U.S. tend to be more powerful."

Yabu, 36, pitched 11 seasons for the Hanshin Tigers. Last year he was 6-9 with a 3.02 ERA in 19 starts.

[Captain Japan]

Petagine Boston-bound
Japan Times

BOSTON (AP) The Boston Red Sox agreed to a minor-league contract Tuesday with first baseman Roberto Petagine, who played in Japan the last six seasons.
Petagine, 33, won three Gold Gloves, two home run titles and one Central League MVP award while playing for the Yakult Swallows from 1999 to 2002 and the Yomiuri Giants the past two years. The Red Sox invited him to spring training.

In parts of five major league seasons, he hit .225 with 10 homers and 43 RBIs in 193 games for Houston, San Diego, the New York Mets and Cincinnati. He originally signed with Houston as a non-drafted free agent in 1990.

In Japan, he hit .317 with 223 homers and 594 RBIs in 756 games.

[kamome]

Hey Captain, do you think he can crack that elite lineup in Boston? He's 33 and they're putting him in the minor league system.

[Captain Japan]

Hey Captain, do you think he can crack that elite lineup in Boston? He's 33 and they're putting him in the minor league system.

Usually these minor league contracts just mean an invitation to spring training. If he makes the 25-man roster I'd say at best he'll be competing with McCarty for playing time. There's no way he'll be taking at-bats from Ortiz. But he could do something similar to what Mientkiewicz did for the Sox at the end of last year and replace Millar late in games.

[AssKissinger]

Dude, did you forget about the 'Dead Ball' thread

[Captain Japan]

Dude, did you forget about the 'Dead Ball' thread

Sorry, man. I hit the "Post New Topic" button by mistake while in the "Dead Ball" thread. Feel free to move this sucker.

[Captain Japan]

Nakamura, Dodgers agree to terms
MLB.com

LOS ANGELES -- The Dodgers reached an agreement Wednesday with Japanese third baseman Norihiro Nakamura on a one-year minor league contract and will introduce him at a Dodger Stadium press conference Thursday.

Nakamura trained with the Dodgers last spring while healing from a knee injury and will receive an invitation to Major League Spring Training...the rest...

Nakamura is in a similar situation as Petagine. He'll be looking for playing time with the Dodgers. This news is a bit old but I'm posting it now because this happnened during Bandwidth/CPU-gate.

[Mulboyne]

Mlb.com: Takatsu - Fans 'made a difference'

Q: Compared to Japanese fans, what did you think about Chicago fans?

Takatsu: This is not only about Chicago fans, but I found the overall "baseball temperature" -- by that I mean the level of interest for the game -- was much higher for Americans. The whole country was very enthusiastic about the game of baseball. As for Chicago fans, because we have two teams in the same town, and considering its history and rivalry, it gave me unbelievable excitement during the crosstown series. It was a great opportunity and very memorable to be in the middle of it. Chicago fans' "baseball temperature" was just unreal. To see those people taking everything so personally, happy when the team was playing good and sad when it was not, I was very moved to find that they all love baseball so much.

[GuyJean]

Takatsu: Before coming to Chicago, that was one of my biggest worries because I can only eat Japanese foods. But I was glad to find that there were a lot of Japanese restaurants here. Some of them were nice enough to keep the restaurant open after the closing time for me.

Hope he brought his bag of Japanese rice with him.. American food is shit, but in Chicago, there has to be tons of great ethnic restaurants.. It's a shame it's impossible for him to try them.. because he is Japanese..

GJ

[Captain Japan]

Agent after new deal for Yankees' Matsui
Japan Times

NEW YORK (Kyodo) Arn Tellem, the agent of New York Yankees outfielder Hideki Matsui, said Thursday he will begin negotiations for his client on a new contract with the American League club during spring training.

Tellem said he has yet to set a date, but is planning on visiting the team's training site in Tampa to try and strike a new deal for two-time All-Star Matsui, who will be entering the final year of a three-year, $21 million deal signed in December 2002.

Before the 2004 season, Tellem apparently told the 30-year-old Japanese player of his plan to enter contract talks before the current deal expires.

Most Yankees players discuss contract extension after their deals expire, but last March the Yankees signed Mariano Rivera, the club's all-time saves leader, to a two-year contract extension through 2006 after his third year of a four-year contract.

[Captain Japan]

Mlb.com: Takatsu - Fans 'made a difference'

Q: Compared to Japanese fans, what did you think about Chicago fans?

Takatsu: This is not only about Chicago fans, but I found the overall "baseball temperature" -- by that I mean the level of interest for the game -- was much higher for Americans. The whole country was very enthusiastic about the game of baseball. As for Chicago fans, because we have two teams in the same town, and considering its history and rivalry, it gave me unbelievable excitement during the crosstown series. It was a great opportunity and very memorable to be in the middle of it. Chicago fans' "baseball temperature" was just unreal. To see those people taking everything so personally, happy when the team was playing good and sad when it was not, I was very moved to find that they all love baseball so much.

Takatsu was great last year. He was easily the most consistent of all the Japanese pitchers in the bigs.

[Captain Japan]

Tomori puts pen to paper on one-year deal with retooled Red Sox
Japan Times

FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) The Boston Red Sox signed right-handed reliever Denney Tomori, a 14-year veteran of baseball in Japan, and acquired infielder Alejandro Machado from the Washington Nationals on Tuesday.
Tomori, 37, agreed to a one-year minor-league contract with an invitation to the major-league team's spring training camp. In 360 games with three Japanese teams, he is 18-28 with 30 saves and a 3.96 ERA.

Machado, a 22-year-old switch hitter, was acquired for a player to be named or cash considerations. He has a .291 career batting average in six seasons in the organizations of Atlanta, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Montreal, which is now the Washington Nationals.

[Captain Japan]

Uehara stays put Giants ace gives in on demand to go to majors, agrees to sign contract
Archiveless Gomiuri Shimbun

Nearly two weeks into spring training, the Yomiuri Giants finally ensured they will have their ace pitcher on the mound this season.

Koji Uehara, holding out in hopes of being allowed to move to the major leagues, has agreed to sign a contract, team representative Hidetoshi Kiyotake said Wednesday.

Uehara, negotiating through an agent, had balked at signing a contract since talks with the team began in November. The two sides met a total of eight times.

The 29-year-old Uehara had hoped the team would allow him to go to the majors through the "posting system," the route taken across the Pacific by Ichiro Suzuki and Kazuhisa Ishii.

The system allows all major league teams to bid on a player, with the highest bidder winning the rights to negotiated a contract.

In Uehara's case, the problem is that the Giants have no intention of ever utilizing the system.

"We repeatedly told him that a transfer through the posting system was not possible," Kiyotake said at the team's camp in Miyazaki.

"As for other methods, Uehara's side presented several proposals, but in the end, they were refused as impractical."

Uehara led the Central League last season with a 2.60 earned run average while posting a 13-5 record with 153 strikeouts and just 23 walks in 163 innings. He missed several starts while on national team duty at the Athens Olympics.

While specific numbers were not released, it is estimated that Uehara will receive a 50 million yen raise to 360 million yen.

"He agreed to the number that the team submitted," Kiyotake said.

Kiyotake also defended Uehara from reports that his insistance of going to the majors was actually a negotiating ploy to jack up his salary.

"It's extremely regrettable that such distortions were made," Kiyotake said. "The amount of salary and the desire to move are unrelated."

Kiyotake said the team realizes Uehara's desire to go the majors will not end after the season and the matter will have to be dealt with again.

He also said the team regrets the anxiety caused by the drawn-out negotiations.

"As one of the team officials, I apologize to the manager, the coaches and the fans for the inconvenience and worry that the long negotiations caused," Kiyotake said.

Uehara, who had paid his own expenses to spring camp, worked out as usual on Wednesday but did not comment on his contract.

On his Web site http://www.kouji19.net, he said his preparations for the season were going well. He also said that during the negotiations there were "many things that were different from the truth" and he did not like the way they progressed.

Uehara's haste in going to the majors is understandable from the perspective that, under the current system, he still needs four years at the earliest to become a free agent.

That would mean he would be 33 when he would finally get the chance to make the jump, a move that he feels he is ready to make today.

Meanwhile, the expansion Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, leaving behind their new fans in tiny Kumeshima, Okinawa Prefecture, arrived in Hyuga, Miyazaki Prefecture, for the next stage of preparations for their opening season.

The Eagles will train at the former camp of the Kintetsu Buffaloes.

[Mulboyne]

Softbank owner to push for plan to decide world's best team
Softbank Hawks owner Masayoshi Son said Friday he will push ahead with a proposal to hold a competition designed to decide the world's No. 1 club team. Son told reporters at a Tokyo hotel that he plans to present the proposal to a meeting of baseball owners next month with an eye on playing a home-and-away series between the Japanese and major-league champions beginning as early as the fall of 2006.

[Mulboyne]

Boston Herald: One for the ages: Sox' Petagine stars in unique love story
Roberto Petagine made himself the focus on Japanese baseball fields over the past six years because of his impressive production with the Yakult Swallows and Yomiuri Giants. Even though he's soft-spoken and unassuming, Petagine has turned heads off the field, too. The 33-year-old native of Caracas, Venezuela, has been married for the past five years to a woman 24 years his senior but said the strange looks he occasionally gets don't even faze him. "I don't care what people say," Petagine said. "I love my wife and when you love someone, you don't even look at anyone else. What other people do is not my business, (but) I know I love my wife." The stares, Petagine insisted, are other people's problem, not his. "She's 57 but she looks like she's 28," he said. "But that doesn't matter. What matters is what I see (and) how I feel."

[Captain Japan]

White Sox GM, who didn't see Japanese infielder play, trusts his gut
San Jose Mercury News

TUCSON, Ariz. - (KRT) - Someone asked me recently if I thought Tadahito Iguchi was a good player, and my first response was, "How would I know?" My second response was, "How would anyone this side of the Pacific Ocean know?"

The second response is the one that matters here because it gets to the heart of how the White Sox deemed Iguchi worthy of a starting job at second base and a two-year, $4.95 million contract. Last week, for the first time, Sox general manager Ken Williams watched in person as Iguchi hit a baseball.

Whether you trust Williams' judgment is a discussion for another day, but the bigger issue is how an appraiser of talent can watch videotape of a Japanese player performing in a Japanese league and be able to tell whether that player has the goods to succeed here.

Converting yen to dollars is one thing, but how do you figure out the conversion rate of a ballplayer coming to America?

For Williams, the answer is football. He played football as well as baseball at Stanford, and one of the requirements of wearing shoulder pads is that you have to sit in darkened rooms and watch tape of opponents. That's where it started for Williams, and he found the habit fit perfectly with baseball....the rest...

[Captain Japan]

Set to pull a pitcher? Stop yelling at the TV, start voting online.
Christian Science Monitor

TOKYO – In Japan, baseball fans may soon get a way to tell a struggling pitcher to hit the shower that is far more effective than yelling at the TV.
Devotees of the Fukuoka Hawks could soon decide whether to dump a pitcher through an online voting system that would display results on a stadium's center screen.

And the Rakuten Golden Eagles - which debut this year as the first new team to join Japan's pro leagues since 1954 - may allow viewers to watch players off-field in the dugout, the bullpen, or the locker room, simply through a click of the mouse as part of plans to webcast games live.

Such gimmicks may appear to be a minor diversion from the serious business of pro ball. But these attempts to make the game more appealing are bold bids by a new class of team owners to reverse a sharp decline in Japan's national pastime.

The idea of online voting to replace pitchers comes from Masayoshi Son, the president of Softbank, which bought the Hawks in December. He made waves in baseball circles recently by saying that while coaches ought to get the final say in selecting which players to use, they should also con- sider the fans' wishes, which could be conveyed by online polls shown on computers in dugouts.

Whether such a system will be introduced remains uncertain, but the suggestion has created a buzz in the conservative world of Japanese baseball. Shinya Sasaki, a TV baseball commentator and former pro player, scoffs at the plan. "That idea is nonsense," he says....the rest...

[kamome]

Set to pull a pitcher? Stop yelling at the TV, start voting online.

If this were available in the States, Grady Little might have kept his job.

[AssKissinger]

How will they keep opposing fans from sabotaging the votes? I'd vote for throwing a 'dead ball' right at Bond's tiny little nutsac.

Aaron forever!!!

[AssKissinger]

BTW, who wants to start up an FG Fantasy Baseball league? I started to do it but when it came down to it I started to realize that it would probably be better if someone who knows a little more about the game took the role as commissioner. I wasn't really sure how to score all that stuff.