WBC Final: Japan vs Korea Live Chat
This is it — the seemingly pre-destined Japan vs Korea WBC championship game. Hisashi Iwakuma takes the mound for Japan, while Jung Bong gets the call for Korea. Yu Darvish will be available for relief work for Japan. This game may be for bragging rights, but I think that both teams can brag that they’ve defeated several strong competitors to make it this far. It should be a great game.
24/03/2009 at 5:46 am Permalink
Man, thank god I wasn’t there for this chat. We (Simon, Pau, me, and another Simon) were at the Hub in Shinjuku this morning/afternoon watching the game, and BOY was that an awesome atmosphere. One girl there was wearing an old Kintetsu jersey… I figured it was Iwakuma but when I actually saw the back it said “Nakamura #5”. Holy cow. My favorite moment, besides Ichiro’s hit in the 10th (when the entire pub went crazy) was after the game when Matsuzaka, holding his MVP trophy, looked like he said to Iwakuma, “Dude… this should be yours.”
BTW, just as an aside… you said there’s no sabermetrics in Japan, but that’s not really true. And infact a new magazine called Baseball Times was putting out sabermetric data every week in Japan for the 2008 season and I expect they’ll do it in 2009 as well. It’s an arm of Data Stadium as far as I know but they also do interviews and other stuff. Their English blurbs are retardedly bad, but the data is sound.
24/03/2009 at 8:46 am Permalink
BTW, just as an aside… you said there’s no sabermetrics in Japan, but that’s not really true. And infact a new magazine called Baseball Times was putting out sabermetric data every week in Japan for the 2008 season and I expect they’ll do it in 2009 as well. It’s an arm of Data Stadium as far as I know but they also do interviews and other stuff. Their English blurbs are retardedly bad, but the data is sound.
Actually I said the sabermetrics community isn’t as well defined as it is here in States, and that there is no sabermetrics publication that I know of. I didn’t want to go down a long tangent about Isao Chiba and stuff. I’ll have to check out that magazine though.
25/03/2009 at 8:18 pm Permalink
I’ve bought few issues of Baseball Times. Unfortunately they don’t seem to understand the basic concept of sample size, which makes a lot of their articles saberish fluff pieces, or even misleading. Really unfortunate.