The New Face of the Marines
19 Year-Old Yuuki Karakawa is inching toward the status of being the face of the Chiba Lotte Marines. His voice will be used as the announcement inside the Keisei Shuttle Busses that run from the train stations to the stadium on game days.
From the spring of 2006, the Keisei Busses used voices of Chiba Lotte Marines, Bobby Valentine, Shunsuke Watanabe, and Toshiaki Imae. The face of the franchise each have their turns and now the baton will be passed to the young pitcher Karakawa.
Front office personnel states: “Not only this year’s record, but looking back from last years stats is a big part. He is a home grown player and we hope he continues to succeed.”
Teams can sometimes be hesitate in giving young players the spotlight too early in their career, but the Chiba Lotte Mariners seem confident that Karakawa will not be pressured, and will continue to make him the center of their marketing strategy.
09/06/2009 at 8:28 pm Permalink
It helps that Karakawa is a local boy too with him being from Chiba (Narita) and all. I officially adpoted him a few weeks back as my new favorite Marines player (along with Iguchi and Komi-chan of course) at Chiba Marine Stadium thanks in large part to a blog entry from Steve’s “We Love Marines” blog. Hopefully, he can continue to shine this year despite all that has been going on with the team.
10/06/2009 at 3:16 pm Permalink
Don’t you mean the new “voice” of the Marines?
Benny Agbayani’s voice is also on the Keisei busses, there are a few other players too, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Tomoya Satozaki and Tsuyoshi Nishioka’s voice as well. My guess is that they’re really just adding Karakawa to the mix, not replacing the others.