Baseball and Hockey Blogalog

Deanna has another great interview, this time an insightful and long interview with the veteran (of NPB and other leagues) Fernando Seguinol. The Fighters in Sapporo Dome, Shinjo, playing in various countries, his travelling season so far, playing for Katsuya Nomura, different approaches at the plate playing for different organizations in different countries, learning the language, etc. all very interesting stuff.

Update from the Seibu Prince Rabbits equipment manager about their Bavaria training camp. The team lost again, this time to a team in the second tier German league, but apparently the goalie Kikuchi is playing well and even received applause from the local fans. The defence must’ve been really porous giving up lots of shots. Anyways, there’s a funny anecdote (with pictures) about how him and another player went swimming in the cold lake after the team cycled up to the castle at Hussen. Most players are not strong swimmers because most Japanese hockey players are from Hokkaido where they don’t have swimming during phys ed. I’ll do a wrap on their Bavarian trip after their last game on the 31st. Japan NT and Seibu player Ryuichi Kawai has some pictures up from their Ingolstadt game, the atmosphere does look amazing, his brother Takuma is the first Japanese major junior player and is on Gatineau.

One time LA King, and current ECHL Bakersfield Condors goalie, Yutaka Fukufuji visited Oji Eagle Kei Tonosaki in Tomakomai. They both entered Kokudo (which merged with Seibu) at age 18 and are now 26 year olds, how time flies. Fukufuji blanked a visiting Team Canada (Allan Cup winner, best amateur team in the country) in a warm up game in Tokyo before a Nagano Cup some years back, I guess that would be around 2000, when he was still a high schooler.

Kazuma Takahashi explains his current situation, having to train alone because he’s not on any team yet, and how team building works differently between Japan/Europe and North America. In Japan and Europe the team is set during the off season, but in North America only the core of the team is set during the offseason, and the rest are based on tryouts during training camp, that’s how he ended up on the ECHL Utah Grizzlies (which was a step or two up from the previous season he spent in the SPHL.

Good luck on the upcoming season to all the players!

And, back to baseball, former Hanshin Tigers ace Kei Igawa has proven himself a true ace in America as well… in AAA. His numbers so far are 13-5, 3.55ERA, 6.92K/9, 2.64K/BB, 1.19WHIP. But got whipped around in his brief MLB stint again with 13.50ERA in 4IP in 2 appearances. Note to Japanese pitchers trying to break into the majors, you need something more than a decent fastball, mediocre location, and a good changeup.

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Vityaz Chekhov の新チームバス

納期に追われてるので、ちょっと小ネタでも。

NHL のライバルとして立ち上がったロシアのKHL (今、双方の契約問題とかで揉めていますが、RSL の後釜になっているKHL が本当にNHL に脅威になるのには何年もの原油高が必要でしょう)のチームの一つHC Vityaz Chekhov が、新リーグ立ち上げと合わせてチームバスをリニューアル（ロシア語）。ペイントがすげー(半笑

Oh and Nomura on Hoshino Japan

The day after Team Japan failed miserably out of Beijing Olympic baseball competition by losing to the US in the bronze medal game, NPB resumed action after a short 2 day Olympic finals break. But its been rainy lately in Japan, and many games were cancelled, including the first meetup with the Japanesebaseball.com guys we had planned for the Tigers-Swallows game at Jingu Stadium, and the Hawks-Eagles matchup up in Sendai.

Once the game was officially cancelled at Sendai, Sadaharu Oh went to pay a visit to Katsuya Nomura, both legendary players and managers in NPB history. With the press present, naturally, the talk quickly turned to why manager Senichi Hoshino‘s team failed to even medal, let alone gold.

Here’s a snippet of their conversation as reported by Sports Hochi.

Nomura: Olympics was a failure, wasn’t it?

Oh: Yes, it was disappointing. It’s difficult. One loss means it’s all over.

Nomura: It’s difficult to select players. The heart of the order, 3-4-5 hitters need to be solid.

Oh: It’s always difficult for batters when they face new pitchers for the first time. But ours (Tsuyoshi Wada and Toshiya Sugiuchi) got hit pretty hard. (Comment: Wada and Sugiuchi both pitched 2 games each, Wada 4.82 ERA in 9 1/3 IP and Sugiuchi 0.84 ERA in 10 2/3 IP, so it was only Wada who got hit moderately hard. Olympic stats here.)

Earlier before Oh’s visit Nomura had already criticized Hoshino Japan, that the team was “unable to make use of all its data. Totally wasted a good thing there. I thought things got off to a bad start when they chose a group of friends to manage the team (Hoshino is friends with coaches Tabuchi and Yamamoto). Managers who used to be pitchers don’t know what position players go through either.” (Comment: Hoshino pitched for the Dragons, peaking in the 70’s.) Oh also commented on the overall team strengths of Korea, Cuba, and USA.

Oh: They didn’t swing at any balls. Great plate discipline. Once again, we saw how important great batting eyes are. (Comment: says the man who has NPB leading 2390 career walks and an astounding .446 career OBP. At Beijing Japan only walked 24 times, other teams were Canada 15, Cuba 37, Korea 30, Taiwan 30, and USA 34.)

Nomura: The batters swing without taking big steps.

Oh: They wait for the ball, and still get distance on the balls they hit.

Nomura: Different muscles.

Oh: It’s difficult for starters to pitch relief. Though, I understand that it’s also difficult to select middle relievers on Team Japan… and on top of that the roster size is only 24 players. (Comment: MLB is 25, while NPB uses a 28 man roster with lots of leeway.)

Nomura: Kids these days are weak. They have the gall take 10 days off by fouling pitches off themselves. I didn’t want to lose my job, so I even played with broken bones.

Oh: Well, we are 1st and 2nd in all time games played so we were tough, but there are players who give in easily to pain.

Nomura: You are a man of integrity. I lack integrity. That there shows up in our difference of 200 homeruns. (Comment: 868 v 657 career homruns for the two living legends.)

The two talked for 40 minutes, but these were the quotes that made it onto Sports Hochi. World’s homerun king Oh, of course, has also led the champion Team Japan in WBC 2006. And Nomura, the greatest hitting catcher in NPB history, managed Cuban manager at Beijing, Antonio Pacheco, when he played at Shidax in the Japanese industrial leagues. Oh has been to the Japan Series 4 times as manager and won twice, Nomura 5 times and won three times. (Comment: Hoshino has been to the Japan Series 3 times as manager but has never won it.)

Note: This is not a word for word translation, but I’ll reprint the original article here before it disappears from the archives.

SEIBUのドイツ遠征速報

SEIBUプリンスラビッツのバイエルン州のフッセン市をベースにした、ドイツ遠征の速報です。

開催日			開始時間	対戦チーム	開催地	所属リーグ
8	21	木	19:30	EHCミュンヘン	フッセン	2部
	22	金	19:30	フッセン・レパーズ	フッセン	3部
	24	日	14:30	ERCインゴルシュタット	インゴルシュタット	1部
	26	火	20:00	ラペンズブルグ・タワースターズ	ラペンズブルグ	2部
	29	金	19:30	オグズバーグ・パンサーズ	オグズバーグ	1部
	31	日	18:30	ESVコフバーン	コフバーン	3部

前日の２０日にドイツ入りしたからか、最初の２試合は時差ぼけと長旅の影響で散々でした。

8.21 SEIBU 0 – 3 EHCミュンヘン

8.22 SEIBU 4 (0-6, 3-1, 0-3) 9 フッセン・レパーズ

でも休養日を一日置いた後の日曜日に行われたDEL(ドイツ１部)のインゴルシュタットとは、とても良い試合を行った模様です（ドイツ語）。

8.24 SEIBU 2 – 3 (SO) ERCインゴルシュタット

0-1 05:48 鈴木 (田中, 内山)
1-1 06:27 Michael Waginger (Hinterstocker)
1-2 07:33 鈴木 (内山)
2-2 30:11 Eric Nicklaus (Ficenec, Rourke) PP2
3-2 60:00 SO Jakub Ficenec
反則: ERC 6×2, Seibu 10×2, 観客: 1,200

なんと、DEL のチーム相手にシュートアウト負け、なかなか立派な結果です。遠征後半も頑張って欲しいです。鈴木キャプテンのラインが大活躍したみたいですね。日本のチーム相手に1,200人入ったってのは、どうなんだろう？

ちなみに西武の関係者のブログでも、遠征状況が分かります。用具マネージャーのSkate Sharpening Man ブログと、弟がカナダのメジャー・ジュニアで初の日本人選手となった河合選手のブログがあります、なかなか面白いですよ。

2008.8.22 Olympic Baseball Semis (and Bolt, of course)

Japan lost soundly to Korea, again, this time 2-6, thanks to the team’s inept offence combined with completely mismanagement of the bullpen bringing in struggling Hitoki Iwase into the highest leverage situation (2-2 tie in the 8th) in the game, then following it up not with closer Uehara to stop the bleeding, but somehow bringing back Hideaki Wakui who had pitched 7 innings 3 days earlier, he gave up 2 more runs. Kyuji Fujikawa’s forkball didn’t drop as much and was hit into the outfield to tie the game at 2. The struggling Lee Seung-Yeop was heroic in his 2 run homer off Iwase that brought the lead for the Koreans, reminiscent of struggling Kosuke Fukudome’s pinch hit HR against Korea in the WBC semifinals that won the game for Japan (after losing to the Koreans twice in earlier rounds, history didn’t repeat itself in Beijing). But the star of the game was 20 year old Korean pitcher Kim Kwang-hyun who pitched 8 solid innings, completely shutting down the Japanese offence in the second half of the game. For better accounts of the game, here’re the EWC and NPBTracker takes on the game. Oh, and the US was crushed 10-2 by Cuba in the other regional arch rival semifinals.

Well, I’m busy tomorrow evening for the finals tomorrow morning to see what Cuba’s got up its sleeve, but I’ll be able to catch the Darvish-Wada show vs the US as Japan hopes to scrape together a bronze.

But Japan got lucky on the track, to counterbalance the baseball disappointment. With the US and UK relay teams dropping their batons, literally, in the 4x100m relay semifinals, Japan was in line for bronze in the finals. And the relay team brought home the first Japanese track medal in 80 years! Well done, lads. (This was in the shadows of Jamaica’s amazing WR relay and some guy named Bolt’s 3rd WR gold medal.)

Out of the Olympic Limelight (kinda)

From 20 August.

Japan’s Takayuki Matsumiya failed to qualify in his 5000m heat. That in itself is nothing special but take a look at this picture.

Yup, missing left shoe. In the jostling for positions midrace he came in contact with another runner and his left shoe partially came off, so he just took it off entirely and decided to run with one barefoot, that must’ve been odd and probably painful, as he’s no Abebe Bikila, but he completed his heat.

In other Olympic news, Paulie Walnuts of the Sopranos has been located in Beijing, and CCTV only paid about $9m for the broadcast rights for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, they should expect to pay more than 10 times as much for the upcoming Olympics with it going into triple ($100m) figures.

In baseball action, Japan and the US faced eachother to determine who will have to play Cuba in the semifinals (the winner of the game gaining that unnecessary honour). US won 4-2 with the new extra innings rule, taking advantage of Hitoki Iwase’s 2nd inning of work. Darvish started the game and pitched 2 innings, followed by Tanaka for 5 innings. Expect this to be the end of 19 year old Tanka’s 2008 Olympic experience (and he probably gained some valuable experience for WBC 2009), and also expect to see Darvish in the semifinal game against rivals Korea, as he looked good striking out 3 Americans on the way to completing 2 perfect innings (and Hoshino will most likely dare not bring Darvish back out against Cuba if they meet in the medal game). This sets up the semifinals nicely with two regional rivalries in Korea v Japan (10:30) and Cuba v USA (18:00) on the 22nd Friday.

Oh yeah, Usain Bolt became a double world record gold medallist in premier sprinting events of 100m and 200m, the latter with the 19.30 time besting another sprinter with a distinctive, and very different upright, form in Michael Johnson who was a 200m and 400m specialist.

ビールで野球をキャッチ！

6月にシカゴ・カブス福留選手の本拠地リグレー・フィールドでの出来事。アトランタ・ブレーブスの打撃練習中に、外野席（ブリーチャーズ）に投げ込んでもらった球を、なんとファンがプラスチックのビールグラスでキャッチ！あなたは素晴らしい！ｗ

Olympic Reading

Some slightly off the beaten track Olympic reading material.

Salon’s Gary Kamiya, a fellow Japanese half-blood and a writer that I usually enjoy, with Short people got no reason to live after Usain Bolt’s crazy 9.69 100m.

Bolt’s race was one of the freakiest events in the history not just of the Olympics but of track and field. The 6’5″ Jamaican simply redefined speed. Not only did he destroy one of the fastest fields in Olympic history and shatter his own world record, he did it with a gut stuffed full of Chicken McNuggets, with one shoe untied and while signing autographs, blowing kisses and taking a nap during the last 20 meters of the race. As the great retired Trinidadian sprinter Ato Boldon, winner of four Olympic medals, said during NBC’s broadcast, “This has never been seen before in Olympic history.”

The Telegraph takes a look at ex-Olympic sports like cricket (which may start lobbying for its reappearance in the form of the new baseballish Twenty20 form, fittingly enough, for the 2020 Olympics), polo, motorboat racing, rugby, tug o’ war (which lasted several Olympics amazingly enough), and how baseball is gaining membership in this exclusive club of sports.

The tug’o war is a favourite of mine, simply for the stories involved. The USA had to withdraw from the 1900 event because three of its members were involved in the men’s hammer, while Danish journalist Edgar Aaybe went along to watch a combined Sweden and Denmark team against France in the final, was asked to stand in for an athlete who fell ill and duly won gold before filing his undeniably exclusive copy.

There’s more. The 1908 event ended in uproar when the Liverpool Police side, one of Britain’s three representatives, were accused of foul play by the USA for wearing their regulation Police boots, which had cleats and allegedly offered extra grip. The Yanks were not happy and withdrew from the competition and rejected ‘Old Bill’s offer of a rematch in bear feet. Tug o’War was finally put to bed in 1920, when GB won, leaving them as technically the reigning Olympic champions.

Slate’s keeping track of the Olympic Sap-o-Meter of the NBC coverage, and Michael Phelps helped set a new record.

On Sunday, it was back to moms, moms, and additional moms, with 18 mentions of motherhood on the day—more than enough to vault mom ahead of front-runner dream to become the sappiest word of the 2008 Olympics to date. Also of note: a record four mentions of tears, several relating to American gymnast Sacramone’s waterworks. A bunch of heroes, hearts, and challenges pushed Sunday over the edge, setting a record of 64 Sap Points that will be hard to beat.

A Slate ode to weightlifting and Salon’s King Kaufman lament over US men’s basketball team, two of many events not being covered here in Japan in mainstream media because of lack of Japanese entrants.

Beyond the aesthetic and emotional pull of lifting, I suspect what really got me hooked is the strategy, discussed in detail in this recent New York Times piece. The key point is that the weightlifters (in fact, usually their coaches) choose how much they plan to hoist. Their “bids,” so to speak, are all displayed on a giant board, like a bizarre stock market that trades in kilograms instead of dollars.

What I mean is the American men’s basketball failure was a fascinating soap opera. It was a Rorschach test for America. In 2004, we had kind of a hangover from the patriotic orgy that followed 9/11. We were in the middle of a vicious presidential campaign season. It was just dawning on a whole lot of us that the war on terror was a phantom, that Iraq — more than a year after “Mission Accomplished” — was a quagmire.

We Americans told online pollsters that we were rooting in large numbers for our squads to lose. We deserved to be punished, to get ours.

The men’s basketball team, a thrown-together second- or third-team All-Star squad — remember that many top players begged off because of security concerns — struggled in pre-Olympics exhibitions and kept struggling when the tournament started. Because they were the most famous American Olympians, the most famously failing American Olympians and, not incidentally, a bunch of black men, they became the exemplars for the ugly American. Arrogant. Boorish. Bullying.

ESPN Page 2’s Jim Caple completed the golden pass decathlon by attending 10 events on Saturday.

And that is what I hoped to see when I cashed in my golden ticket for its full value Saturday, attending as many events at as many venues in one day as possible. My day began with Michael Phelps tying Mark Spitz and ended with Usain Bolt blowing away the world; in between I saw mystic and marvelous surprises that astonished and perplexed.

Like, who knew Iran had a basketball team?

And finally, a couple of Globe and Mail blog entries about hockey and the medals table, wonder if the American media are going to stick with the total medals method even after their country catches up to China in the second week with all the athletics golds (won’t they?)

Guys, guys: it’s field hockey, not the other kind.

Two Canadians on our field hockey team, Bindi Kullar and Sukhwinder Singh, have just been banned one match for a bit of the old ultra-violence in a game versus Great Britain.

In an explanation that deserves a gold medal for euphemism, an official said “Singh’s stick made contact with Kirkham’s forehead, causing bruising.” As for Kullar, he apparently stickhandled an opponent’s chin.

This method – counting gold medals, not total medals – seems to be the established model across the world, including at this website, the website for the CBC, the BBC, British newspapers and other sundry sites we checked including Die Welt of Germany, The Australian and Le Figaro of France. Even China’s arch-rival Japan seems content with the method that shows China in the lead, at least on the site for Japan Times and the Kyodo news service. The China Daily and Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post also follow this model, though that’s probably because they know what’s good for them.

Now turn your attention to the U.S. media to see who’s on top in the medals standings. Turns out the rest of the world is dead wrong and that what counts is not gold medals, but total medals. NBC, the official Olympics broadcaster, has the U.S. on top. So does the “paper of record” New Tork Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and sports sites ESPN.com, Fox Sports and SI.com. We havent yet found one US-based site that is following the officially-sanctioned model which has China in the lead.

Funnily enough, we did manage to find a very rare supporter of the U.S.-first method from outside the American media. Al-Jazeera’s website, we kid you not, has a medal table with the U.S. sitting proudly on top. Could a detente in the clash of civlizations be far behind?

Street View Black Van

Here’s one of those infamous far right, noise polluting nationalist black vans caught in action on the Japanese Google Street View (which had captured many odd private moments, like couples entering love hotels, middle-aged man pissing on the street, a man exiting a blow job joint, site of recent car accident, all of which have been deleted by request from some people. With Japanese streets often being very narrow, the Street View service in Japan seems more invasive of privacy than in the US.)

Osaka-Toin Wins Summer Koshien!

Congratulations to Osaka-Toin who won this summer’s 90th Summer Koshien tournament in a more than dominating 17-0 crushing of Tokoha-Kikugawa of Shizuoka.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H
大阪桐蔭 Osaka-Toin	4	0	1	0	1	6	2	0	3	17	21
常葉菊川 Tokoha-Kikugawa	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	5

Kikugawa started their injured ace Togari in a show of support even though he was barely throwing 120km/h (75mph) batting practice softies. It was painful to watch, but on this day, it didn’t matter who was pitching for Kikugawa, look at these ugly lines by each pitcher. Oh, and Toin’s Hagiwara hit homeruns in three straight games including this final, that’s a Koshien first or something as well.

	IP	BF	H	SO	BB	ER
	回数	打者数	被安打	奪三振	四死球	自責点
戸狩　聡希	3	18	9	1	1	5	Togari
野島　大介	2(2/3)	18	7	2	2	2	Nojima
萩原　大起	2(1/3)	11	4	0	1	2	Hagiwara
浅川　将輝	0(2/3)	6	1	0	3	1	Asakawa
戸狩　聡希	0(1/3)	1	0	0	0	0	Togari

And Kikugawa’s powerful bats were shutout completely by Toin’s ace Fukushima who had pitched the majority of innings in all 6 games it took to win the championship, capping it off with an unnecessary shutout in the final even though he had pitched a complete game the previous day in the semifinal. Hope his arm doesn’t fall off.

———-

And in Olympic baseball action Japan barely defeated Canada 1-0 on the back of Inaba homerun and more than solid pitching by Naruse (7IP 2H 0BB 10K 0R), as the lefty was pitted against the Canadian lineup featuring 8(!) lefties, and Hoshino’s plan worked perfectly as Fujikawa and Uehara shut the door in the last 2 innings with 1-2-3 innings. This is Canada’s 4th straight 1 run loss, and that’s gotta be heartbreaking, but the team has no plate discipline and seems to have serious problems laying off balls (very low number of walks and lots of strikeouts). While Japan’s problems have been the lack of clutch hitting which may or may not just be bad luck. Japan had runners on 2nd and 3rd with no outs late in the Korea game and came away with 0 runs, and the same lack of clutchness was on display against Canada late in the game again with a runner on 3rd and no outs.

Korea’s had similarly difficult time scoring runs, and Cuba hasn’t been scoring boatloads either (except in the mercy rule win against the Dutch today), so this is a generally low scoring tournament so I guess the Japanese offense is not really an exception, maybe the Olympic baseball stadium is a pitcher’s park? USA and Japan look pretty set to grab the last 2 playoff positions, though Japan can’t cruise through tomorrow’s China game, as the upstarts have taken both the Taiwanese and Koreans to extra innings, beating the former. Taiwan lost a heartbreaker today against Korea as the team came back from an 8 run deficit to tie the game only to have Korea score the winning run in the 7th and shut them out for the rest of the game. Taiwan, and to a lesser degree Canada, being 1-4 at this point in the tournament is probably the biggest shocker, and fittingly these two teams face eachother on the final day of round robin play.

Cuba 5-0

Korea 5-0

USA 3-2

Japan 3-2

Canada 1-4

China 1-4

Netherlands 1-4

Taiwan 1-4

Looking back at how the pitchers have been used, it doesn’t seem like Japan has a rotation set up. Maybe this is intentional, or maybe emergency measures because the team looked close to falling out of contention. Anyways, here were the starting pitchers so far.

8.13 Darvish v Cuba (L)

8.14 Wakui v Taiwan

8.15 Sugiuchi v Netherlands

8.16 Wada v Korea (L)

8.17 off

8.18 Naruse v Canada

8.19 ??? v China

8.20 ??? v USA

8.21 off

8.22 Darvish(?) in Semifinal

8.23 ??? in Medal game

It seems impossible to predict the starting pitchers now, but a TV analyst (hope he had insider info) was saying Darvish in the Semifinal. We’ll see. Maybe we’ll see Darvish on a throw day tomorrow if Japan builds a big enough lead against China (IF that happens, Chinese managed to shut down both Taiwan and Korea, and the Japanese offense is equally anemic), I’m sure Hoshino will want him to face some live batters before the semis.