NPB Tracker

Hope springs eternal at the start of every season. Here are some spring training notes, mostly on guys who are trying to make their teams.

(All of the below items point to Japanese-language articles)

• Ken Kadokura is testing a two-seam fastball and a sinker, neither of which he threw in Japan. “The movement on my breaking pitches is bigger than it was in Japan,” said Kadokura, “I think I can use these”.
• Junichi Tazawa threw 51 pitches to Jason Varitek. “I was nervous the whole time,” Tazawa said with a smile. “I was concerned that I was stretching my arm more than usual,”
• Kei Igawa threw 15 pitches to Hideki Matsui. Matsui hit eight, and took seven. “I’m glad I didn’t hit him,” Igawa said with big laughter. Last year, Igawa plunked a minor leaguer in batting practices.
• Ken Takahashi got a decent review from Blue Jays pitching coach Brad Arnsberg: “My first look at him was good. We have two open rotation spots. He has enough of a chance to get one. I hope he makes the team.”
• Marc Kroon threw 70 pitches in a bullpen session on the 19th and will appear in an inner-squad game on the 23rd. He’s working on a two-seamer and a shuuto. “first I’m getting back into game shape. I want to get a feel for all my pitches,” he said.
• On his WBC off day, Ichiro travelled 1200km back to Kobe to take batting practice at Skymark Stadium.
• Rakuten manager Katsuya Nomura has come up with an innovative approach to batting practice: tape a picture of Yu Darvish to the pitching machine. Did it work? Nomura looks happy with the results.

Coming: Micheal Nakamura, Takahito Kudoh, Dicky Gonzales, Edgardo Alfonzo (maybe), Levi Romero (maybe)

Going: Koji Uehara, Makoto Kosaka, Takayuki Shimizu, Tomohiro Nioka, Masanori Hayashi, Ken Kadokura, Shigeki Noguchi

Staying: Marc Kroon, Sung-Yeop Lee, Alex Ramirez, Seth Greisinger

Trending: upward

Synopsis: Uehara is the only guy they will notice is gone, and Nakamura will mostly balance out his loss. Strong group of foreign players will be back in 2009. Of the departures, only Hayashi is under 30.

After a short break from writing, I’m back with a few highlights from my weekend reading. I’ve been enjoying Sanspo’s Baseball Photo Ranking lately.

The next big piece of content I have on tap for NPB Tracker is (surprise) an essay on the Junichi Tazawa situation. Look out for that in the next day or two.

Japanese Articles:

• Construction of the new Hiroshima Citizen’s Stadium is underway, and you can follow its progress on this blog. Thanks to Erik Schullstrom for the link.
• Nippon Ham Fighters starter Ryan Glynn has a 28-inning scoreless streak going.
• Who says Japanese players don’t play hard? Here’s a shot of Yakult’s Masakazu Fukukawa taking out Yomiuri’s Shigeyuki Furuki on a slide into second base.
• Yokohama’s teenage righthander Atori made his first career appearance and hit 94 mph on the gun.
• The Eneos Industrial League team will be travelling to Brazil to play a seven-game exhibition series with Brazil’s national team to commerate 100 years of Japanese immigration to Brazil. I think this is great, I’d love to see baseball expand more deeply into Brazil.
• Obligatory Junichi Tazawa item: here’s a blogger who couldn’t care less if Tazawa skips NPB. “A guy who wants to go to the Majors can go. That’s it.” Well said.
• Hanshin has won a number of games in walk-off fashion recently, here are some YouTube clips of the team’s win on Sept 11: Jeff Williams shuts down Yakult in the top of the ninth, K’ing Norichika Aoki for the final out, Shinjiro Hiyama and Ikuro Katsuragi start the comeback, Akihiro Yano ties the game, and Makoto Imaoka wins it.

English Articles:

• Wayne Graczyk gives us a little insight into what makes fireballing Giants closer Marc Kroon tick.

Following up on last week’s post on blogs by Japanese NPB players, here’s a quick rundown of blogs that are written in English by foreign-born NPB players. The selection is thinner, but there are a few good ones out there.

Of course, the best English content on NPB is maintained by fans — namely Deanna, Simon, the Tsubamegun guys, EWC, and the community at JapaneseBaseball.com. But I think just about 100% of the visitors to this blog are already familiar with those excellent sites, so let’s move on to the player’s blogs.

• By far the most insightful and entertaining of the lot is CJ Nitkowski‘s blog. CJ, if you’re reading this, well done!
• Another left-handed reliever, Hanshin’s Jeff Williams is good for about one post a month in his blog. Jeff is one of the longer-tenured gaijin players in NPB, and that shows through in his writing.
• Giants closer Marc Kroon has a blog as well, but hasn’t updated it in a while.
• Yet another reliever, Nippon Ham closer Michael Nakamura has a blog on ballplayers.jp, where a number of notable players maintain blogs.
• Finally a batter: Alex Ramirez‘s site isn’t so much of a blog as a photo gallery, and as you might expect the photos are very Rami-centric. Note the Engrish in the page title.
• Bobby Valentine has got to be the most fan-friendly manager in Japan right now, and accordingly mantains his blog in English and Japanese. I’m not aware of another NPB manager having a blog, but I could be off on that.
• And least but not quite least, it’s worth mentioning Brad “the Animal” Leslie’s site. Animal pitched for in Japan for a few years after his stint in the big leagues, then retired to a career in the nutty Japanese game shows that eventually made it to American cable.

Anyone know of any others that I’m missing?