Eri Yoshida’s debut with video

Eri Yoshida made her regular season game debut for her Kansai Indenpendent League team Kobe 9 Cruise in their season opener at the Osaka Kyocera Dome on Thursday 27 March 2009.

She came into the game in the 9th with her team leading the Osaka Villicanes by 5-0. She walked her first batter on 4 straight knuckleballers, then mixed her fastball and knuckleball to strike the next batter out on 5 pitches.

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Submarine knuckleballer… and it’s a she!

This story is full of goodies for the obscure baseball lover.

The newly formed Kansai Independent League, which will begin play in 2009, has just held its draft. This is the 3rd independent league in Japan to start operation this decade, after the pioneering Shikoku-Kyushu Island League and the Baseball Challenge League (Hoku-Shinetsu region).

 

The Kansai league features the first female owner of a pro ball club in Japan as the Kobe 9Cruise (yes, that’s the team name) is owned by Kazuyo Hirota who runs a local mineral water company. The league held an open combined tryout on 4 November, and the draft on 16 November where Kobe selected Eri Yoshida, a 16 year old high school girl who is a submarine knuckleball pitcher (got all that?), with one of its picks after they saw what they liked in the tryout. Yoshida passed the first and second tests of the tryout, then pitched an inning where she struck out the first batter on a knuckler, walked the second batter, then got the next two batters to ground out to second and pop out to short.

She received a compliment from a former Yomiuri player and new Osaka pitching coach that her knuckler and fastball both have the same delivery. Her fastball is in the high 60s, so I assume she relies almost entirely on the knuckler. It’s reported that she’s considering transferring to a Kobe high school, and indie games tend to be played on weekends, so I guess this could somehow all work out, it’ll an interesting story to follow as Yoshida becomes the first professional female baseball player in Japan (in a men’s league, there was a women’s league for 2 brief years following the war).

Cloning Chad Bradford

One season he’s a recently converted submarine reliever for the Oakland A’s writing regular diary entries to the great A’s blog A’s Nation, giving us insight into how minor leaguers live and play, as well as how (great) baseball organizations are run from the inside.

Next season, he’s called up to the big club, and has not allowed a single run in any of his appearances since being called up at the end of May.

The man is unheralded Brad Ziegler. A’s have just successfully cloned Chad Bradford. Amazing. I’ve picked him up in both of the competitive fantasy leagues I’m in  🙂

And then there’s Brad Ziegler. He’s a side-arm reliever for the A’s, and his fastball tops out at about 86 MPH. It’s basically his only real pitch – he throws it 89% of the time, mixing in a below average slider just to keep hitters occasionally off balance. Just based on velocity, his stuff could charitably described as marginal. If he was a lefty, he’d be described as crafty, which is code for can’t-break-glass-with-his-fastball.

But what he lacks in velocity, he makes up for in movement and deception. His fastball has so much sink, in fact, that in his first 11 1/3 innings of major league pitching, he’s posting a 73.5% GB% and an 8.33 GB/FB rate. He’s faced 40 batters since the A’s brought him up from Triple-A, and a whopping three of them have managed to hit the ball in the air.

Apparently, Billy Beane missed having Chad Bradford in the bullpen, so they decided to create another one. Until 2006, Ziegler was a traditional over the top pitcher, but given his limited chances to make the majors as a “normal” pitcher, the A’s convinced him to become a side-arming reliever. It’s worked wonders, as he hasn’t given up a home run since at any level, and he’s run a GB% of 60% or higher at every stop along the way.