WBC Roster Set
Japan manager Tatsunori Hara has settled on a WBC roster. Here it is:
Pitchers
Yu Darvish
Takahiro Mahara
Masahiro Tanaka
Hideaki Wakui
Daisuke Matsuzaka
Minoru Iwata
Hisashi Iwakuma
Kyuji Fujikawa
Tetsuya Utsumi
Satoshi Komatsu
Shunsuke Watanabe
Tetsuya Yamaguchi
Toshiya Sugiuchi
Catchers
Kenji Johjima
Shinnosuke Abe
Yoshiyuki Ishihara
Infielders
Hiroyuki Nakajima
Yasuyuki Kataoka
Akinori Iwamura
Michiro Ogasawara
Shuichi Murata
Munenori Kawasaki
Outfielders
Kosuke Fukudome
Norichika Aoki
Seiichi Uchikawa
Yoshiyuki Kamei
Atsunori Inaba
Ichiro
(SI has the AP article as well)
Notable departures are Nobuhiko Matsunaka (achilles problem), Kenta Kurihara (affected by elbow surgery last year), Toru Hosokawa (right shoulder pain), Tsuyoshi Wada, and Takayuki Kishi. Health reasons were not cited for Wada and Kishi.
Overall, the roster looks pretty good to me, though it’s somewhat short on power.The inclusion of Yoshiyuki Kamei makes no obvious sense to me, but I could see him as a defensive replacement/pinch runner. The only other questionable pick I see is Shunsuke Watanabe. He’s been hit or miss in NPB, and as I recall he wasn’t that great in the 2006 WBC.
22/02/2009 at 4:18 pm Permalink
I didn’t count carefully, but it looks like the reason Kamei made the team is to make sure Yomiuri has the largest number of players.
24/02/2009 at 7:14 am Permalink
It seems like Hara brought together players from every team in Japan, but forgot to include any Dragons. I would have loved to see Ibata, Araki, or even Morino on the WBC team. Hara brought along 4 of his own Giants and really Ogasawara is the only one I’m excited to see…Abe is ok…but I would have liked him cut to make room for a Chunichi member. They beat Australia tonight, which is the same as England beating an American cricket team…so it doesn’t prove much yet…Australia didn’t stand a chance…if it were rugby though….
25/02/2009 at 9:40 am Permalink
Chunichi (Ochiai) refused to release his players for the WBC. Probably due to the sour experience after his players were abused in Beijing and he believed that that was the cause of Chunichi’s decline in the second half of 2008. Of course, the club didn’t come right out and say that they refused the players to participate, they were “players’ decisions”, natch.