Free Blades roster set!

The new entry into the Asia League for the upcoming 2009-10 season, the Tohoku Free Blades, have finally signed enough players to form a complete roster. The new players should significantly improve the team and hopefully not make them a yearlong doormat in their expansion season (since the China Sharks don’t have Wade Flaherty anymore, there’s hope).

New players:

F Akiyumi Okuyama 31GP 1G+1A=2P (Oji)

F Masahito Suzuki 34GP 4+11=15 (Oji)

F Bin Ishioka 36GP 8+10=18 (Seibu) – Bin’s move to China turned out to be just an unconfirmed rumour

D Kazumoto Imajo (Chuo University captain – was supposed to join the now defunct Seibu Prince Rabbits)

D Steve Munn (AHL/ECHL)

D Brad Farynuk (AHL/ECHL)

LW Bruce Mulherin (EIHL/ECHL)

LW Jon Smyth (Bundesliga 2nd Division)

All 4 imports are Canadian.

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Fred Brathwaite on Team Canada!

Fred Brathwaite is the 3rd goaltender for Team Canada at the IIHF 2009 World Championships in Zurich, Switzerland. It’s great to see the national program recognize Fred’s success with the Mannheim Eagles this past season, and his success in Europe in general.

WBC uniform watch

I’m sure many people noticed this, but some WBC uniforms are alarmingly similar to MLB uniforms. Guess that’s template at work (and lack of creative colour schemes due to flag colours, though not every nation adheres to their flag stripes). Anyways, without further ado, here they are:

Australia

South Africa

It was difficult to tell them apart on quick glance, especially since they played in the same pool in Mexico City.

Oakland Athletics

Different font, obviously, but pretty similar otherwise.

Canada (home)

LAnaheim Angels

Canada has the faux vest thing going.

Canada (away)

Arizona Diamondbacks

Reverse the font colouring, and you’re basically there.

Dominican Republic

Future Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez pitching for his homeland, earning a job with the Mets in the process.

Texas Rangers

There’s that annoying underarm panel in many WBC jerseys, and the helmet bill’s different colour, but otherwise…

Italy

LA Dodgers

(Immortal Manny at work)

Obviously. Was this done because of the Piazza-Lasorda connection from the first WBC?

Netherlands (the Cinderella!)

Baltimore Orioles

Cap colours need to be reversed, and MLB teams seem to be fond of cursive fonts while WBC unis tend to use block fonts.

Now for the more far fetched connections after this jump

Leon Boyd, the Dutch-Canuck Blue Jay

A couple of interesting posts from the Canadutch blog of Leon Boyd, the Dutch-Canadian pitcher who was the closer for the both Dutch wins over the Dominican Republic in the 2009 WBC. One about the daily routine in the Toronto Blue Jays camp in Dunedin, Florida, and another with a collection of links and photos to interesting articles about his Dutch exploits.

WBC Pitch f/x

Some interesting WBC Pitch f/x articles for Japanese, Korean, and Cuban pitchers for their games pitched in MLB parks, these are normally data that are not seen or available, either in these pitchers home countries or in the US. The websites BeyondTheBoxscore and FanGraphs are doing a great job gathering and breaking down the data, so I’m just gonna link to them here (also for posterity since these articles are already getting buried under the usual barrage of MLB articles). All articles are interesting.

Yu Darvish (Japan) – FanGraphs, BeyondTheBoxscore (satisfying all observers with his stuff)

Hisashi Iwakuma (Japan) – FanGraphs (getting rave reviews for his pitch selection)

Ryu Hyun-Jin (Korea) – FanGraphs

Yoon Suk-Min (Korea) – BeyondTheBoxscore

Felix (Venezuela), LaMura and Cody Cirillo (Italy, the latter with his 67mph “changeup”) – BeyondTheBoxscore 

Cuban pitchers who pitched in their first game against Japan (from wild Chapman to Maya to Vladimir Garcia) – BeyondTheBoxscore

Wily Cuban veterans Vera and Lazo (and his 57mph somthing) in their elimination game against Japan – BeyondTheBoxscore

HardballTimes also has analyzed Pitch f/x data from Round 1 and Round 2 featuring pitchers in the Toronto Round (Yoel Hernandez, DiFelice, Mestri, Cillo), and the 2nd Round in Florida (Leon Boyd, who pitched himself into the Toronto Blue Jays organization, congrats!) and San Diego (Chapman, Vladimir Garcia, Oliver Perez).

Added: Hisashi Iwakuma and Kyuji Fujikawa (Japan), and Bong Jung-Keun and Ryu Hyun-Jin (Korea) – Hardball Times

WBC pitch speeds, they were generally slower than during the regular season showing that pitchers are not ready in March, not a big surprise. The pitcher with the most decline in velocity was Matsuzaka, which is kinda surprising considering he was training from January – BeyondTheBoxscore

The Dutch-Canadian pitcher and recent Toronto Blue Jays signee Leon Boyd – one, two

カナダ人男性像

自我理想図？　:P

WBC2009カナダ代表

第一ラウンドをトロントで主催（アメリカ、ベネズエラ、イタリア、カナダ）するWBC2009 のカナダ代表についてちょっと考えてみる。とりあえずカナダ人メジャーリーガーを並べてみた。穴が多いｗ　ガイエルは手術明けだから無理だろうし…穴は北京五輪代表の選手で埋めてみた。

SP Rich Harden, Ryan Dempster, Jeff Francis, Erik Bedard, Scott Richmond, 
P Jesse Crain, Eric Gagne笑, Steve Green, Brooks McNiven, Robert Swindle 
C Russell Martin 
1B/DH Justin Morneau, Joey Votto 
2B Stubby Clapp 
3B/SS Peter Orr 
SS Emmanuel Garcia 
1B/OF/DH Matt Stairs 
OF Jason Bay, Aaron Guiel, Mike Saunders, Adam Stern, Nick Weglarz 

良い選手はいるんだけど、いかんせん選手層が薄っぺらいｗ

でもハーデン、デンプスター、マーティン、モルノー、ヴォット、ベイが勢ぞろいしてくれればダークホース的存在になれる（希望薄）…可能性もある。

果たして数少ないスター選手のうち何人が参加してくれるのだろうか…それにかかってるな、カナダ代表は。

七面鳥

世間は連休の間に鬼のように忙しくなるのは、やっぱフリーの宿命なのかな。でも８（？）年ぶりのThanksgiving dinner食べました。 
え、感謝祭に七面鳥にはまだ早いって？カナダはアメリカより寒いからか、感謝祭が約1ヶ月早くやってきます。（収穫祭だから当然か…） 

白身も赤身も潤ってて美味しかった。うーん、懐かしい味だ。なんせ、感謝祭、クリスマス、イースターと、ひたすら七面鳥食べまくる文化だもんなぁ。 

ボリュームは日本とカナダの中間くらいの量で丁度よかったし、クランベリーソースとデザートのパンプキンパイは甘さ控えめの日本仕様でカナダのものより美味しかったｗ　サイドのマッシュドポテトとグレービーも、んまーだったぞ

撤退してしまったのかと思ったカナダ料理（？）のお店Good Honest Grub。恵比寿と原宿のお店を統合して、去年移転してたんだね、気づかなかったｗ 

また行く事にしようっと

Sarah Palin’s accent

Sarah Palin’s accent is apparently causing some debate (well, any detail about the candidates in the US election seems to cause debate in the uber-fishbowl media coverage). Anyways, I found this interesting. Geographically, the some Canadian influence seems natural enough. But with Alaska having being settled by people from various parts of the States, it wouldn’t be surprising if it compared similarly to Hokkaido Japanese, a northern island that was settled fairly recently in Japanese history. The hockey mom thing about Palin’s kinda fun too, but with the realistic chance of McCain croaking while in the Oval Office, the creation of ultra-inexperienced President Palin is a very real threat that, I’m sure, no one outside of GOP wants to see. 

Many Alaska residents came from the Pacific Northwest or Western Canada, and features of the dialects of these regions are the most prominent in Alaskan English. Alaskan English even has a certain amount of “Canadian raising,” the sound change that makes a Canadian about sound something like a boot. There are also a significant number of immigrants from the Midwest in Alaska, and they have contributed different elements to Alaskan speech. And in parts of Alaska, there is influence from Eskimo and Indian languages, though this is typically found only in people raised in native villages, and this speech is popularly associated with remote regions.

 

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.