NPB Bullet Points: Caraballo Debuts, Kudoh Returns, Chunichi Rolls
A couple of debuts and a new NPB record to share. Today’s articles will require your Japanese language skills, or the Fish.
- Orix continues to work on its roster, bringing in 23 year-old Venezuelan pitcher Freddy Ballestas in for an audition. Ballestas spent 2005-09 with the Phillies organization, never pitching above high-A, and had played Indy league ball earlier this year. If Orix signs him he’ll be their eighth foreign-born player.
- Speaking of Orix, Francisco Caraballo is already with their ichi-gun team, and homered in his debut game on July 19. Here are the highlights on YouTube, skip to 7:11 for the Caraballo bomb.
- 47 year-old Kimiyasu Kudoh was promoted to Seibu’s top team on the 18th, and made his first appearance on the 20th. Kudoh is only slightly too young to have worn Seibu’s retro uniforms when they were new. If they were using an 80’s throwback uniform he could have supplied his own.
- Another notable promotion is the Giants bringing up ikusei alumni Levi Romero. He made his debut on July 19, in a mop-up time appearance against Yakult, keeping his fastball around the magic 150 km/h mark.
- Jason Standridge threw a two-hitter for Hanshin on the 19th.
- One of my players to watch this year, Sho Nakata, finally hit his first career ichi-gun home run on July 20. Nakata has missed time this year with injuries, but maybe he’ll show a little of the form that he used to hit 30 ni-gun home runs last year.
- Chunichi has assembled a streak of five straight shutouts, establishing a new NPB record at the expense of Hiroshima and Yokohama. The Dragons’ collective scoreless inning streak stands at 47, five away from the NPB mark of 52. The MLB mark was set way back in 1903, when the Pirates ran a string of six consecutive.
21/07/2010 at 3:26 am Permalink
Yeah, Caraballo hit the ball hard all night in that game. It was against my hapless Eagles, but impressive all the same.
21/07/2010 at 5:51 am Permalink
The Lions did the 1980 uniforms last year. Kudoh was still with the Baystars, but he did make the card set that BBM put out for the “Lions Classic”.
21/07/2010 at 6:27 am Permalink
You know, I have to note the irony of Kudoh STILL wearing #47 at the age of #47… it was good enough for him when he was 18, guess it’s still good enough now 🙂
21/07/2010 at 10:23 am Permalink
Chunichi’s scoreless streak reached 50 innings: http://baseball.yahoo.co.jp/npb/headlines/20100721-00000176-jij-spo?d=0&team=&date=&pg=1&p=
21/07/2010 at 6:51 pm Permalink
So the new Orix strategy is to stockpile imports and use whoever has the hot hand? That could work, depending on if the players get more or less motivated with this system (seems to make American players who expect regular playing time upset.)
21/07/2010 at 9:22 pm Permalink
I’m a big fan of what Orix is doing, seems low-risk, high-reward to me. In Orix’s situation, I’d take the Caraballos of the world over the Seguignols any day, with all due respect to Fernando. I’m looking forward to seeing if they’ll be able to develop any real star power though, either from the draft or foreign signings.
22/07/2010 at 1:11 pm Permalink
Yeah, it’s all fair game to me unless something is written in their contract. D’Antona was replaced by Whitesell. I encourage HIroshima to replace those useless foreign bats (maybe too late at this point). Brett Harper, who actually didn’t replace anyone, gets only 10 mil. yen at most this year. Why not?