We’re a little disappointed that both hanami and baseball season have arrived at the same time this spring, but we’ve been doing our best to take in as much of both as humanly possible. To help you catch up on the latter while you may be busier doing the former, we offer you a quick-and-dirty preview of what might be expected from this year’s NPB season.

Team news for all 12 clubs in the Central and Pacific leagues is presented in the accompanying podcast. Changes, both good and bad, and some expectations for the coming months are discussed in this edition of TPR Spotlight on NPB.

League standings after games played April 4th, 2008: (Read on …)

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Baseball season is coming!

There was one hell of a free agent class this year with 17 players reaching free agency for the first time. A total of 68 players became free agents at the end of the 2007 baseball season, and there are some notable names in that group.

It appears that all 68 free agents have signed contracts as of March, 2008. Several guys will be trying their luck in the majors this year.

It was reported that six guys switched clubs in both 1994 and 2001. I don’t know if that was some kind of record, but far more than six guys moved around during the 2007-2008 off-season. And might I be so bold as to suggest that the trend will continue in the future.

Here are some of the names that have made the news this off-season:

Kazuhiro Wada (Seibu Lions) was looking around a bit before the Japan Series got under way. He became a free agent after 11 seasons with the Saitama-based team. The team had signaled its intent to keep him on and even mentioned a future coaching position as a symbol of its interest in the 35-year-old veteran’s services.

In 2005, Wada was the batting champion of the Pacific League. He had been a solid contributor to the Lion’s many winning campaigns since he arrived.

Unfortunately for the Lions, he eventually worked out a three-year deal with the Chunichi Dragons worth a reported 840 million yen. The veteran has put together a solid career so far, and it should be interesting to see if he is able to keep performing at the .300-plus level for the next few seasons. I don’t see any reason, barring injury, why he shouldn’t be able to do just that.

(Read on …)

Happy New Year!

TPR is excited to get started with it’s second season of Japanese professional baseball (NPB), and we’d like to thank you for your support and listenership in 2007.

今年もよろしくお願いします。

The off-season moves by this year’s crop of free agents have been as dizzying as the players are talented. A more detailed report of those moves, which includes a lot of cross-league and trans-Pacific player movement, is coming in the near future. For right now we’d like to draw your attention to the big names that decided to re-sign with the same teams they played for last year.

Without further ado:

(Read on …)

Welcome back to TPR’s Spotlight on Nippon Pro Baseball. In this edition we take a look at the recently concluded Japan Series that took place in Sapporo and Nagoya, Japan.

This year’s series included the same two teams as last year. From the Pacific league, defending Japan Series Champions, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters! And from the Central, the Chunichi Dragons!

This best-of-seven series was filled with the unexpected, and there were several jaw-dropping moments.

In this brief podcast, we do a game-by-game summary of the series and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of both teams throughout the series.

If you need to catch up on all that has been happening during the 2007 season, click here for some podcasts and additional background.

Otherwise, hit play down below to hear whether Nippon Ham went on to repeat as champions, or Chunichi grabbed their first Japan Series title since 1954!

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The playoffs are here! The playoffs are here!

Well, actually, the playoffs are over…my bad.

Spoiler: we’re going to be treated to a repeat of last year’s Japan Series, but it should be fun to watch just the same.

That’s right, the 2007 Japan Series Championships is another showdown between the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters of the Pacific League and the Chunichi Dragons of the Central League.

You want to know why the Fighters will win? When they do something big, Sapporo Brewing Co. gives the team enough beer to fill the dome that the team plays in. What do Chunichi players get when they win? Actually, I don’t know. Newspapers?

You want to know why the Dragons will win? They’re due. The guys down in Nagoya have been playing top-shelf baseball for years, and after a strong run through the Central League Climax Series they are poised to finally win the whole thing.

Alright, I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. The Japan Series will be covered in a future podcast. This one is all about the Central and Pacific League versions of the Climax Series that were held in October 2007.

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Editor’s Note: Production of this episode started before the end of the regular season. Many of the predictions made in the article below, and the accompanying podcast, have since been shown to be right or wrong (but mostly right). The 2007 final standings below are an example of the information not available to us when we recorded this installment of TPR Spotlight.

OK, here come some of the teams that you may have heard about before.

If you haven’t listened to the podcasts that accompanied the first two NPB installments, you can give them a listen by clicking here and scrolling down.

The Central League is home to the most powerful team in Japanese baseball. Not powerful because they’re the best (at least not since the ’60s and ’70s), but rather because they have the most money and their owner basically controls the league. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

We’ll get to them later. Again, let’s proceed in alphabetical order so as to avoid as much bias as possible.

(Read on …)

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Japan’s forgotten league has made very large strides of late. Pacific League teams have captured the last three Japan Series titles (Japan’s version of the World Series), and they look poised to take it again this year.

The one thing that has held them back over the years has not been a lack of good baseball teams or a dearth of talent. They suffered in the shadows for decades because they were in the other league–the one without the Yomiuri Giants.

That appears not to make much of a difference anymore. Sure Yomiuri is still the only team that you can watch play on non-cable TV, but the perennial strength of the ballclubs fielded in the Pacific League has nearly made up for any discrepancy in exposure. The Pacific League consistently produces good baseball, and this season is a case in point.

The two teams that are currently battling it out in the cellar are actually only 6.5 and 7.5 games behind the third playoff spot with more than a month and a half of baseball left to play. The same cannot be said for the two weakest teams in the Central League. One could possibly argue that the three best teams in the Central are responsible for the large gap between first and last, but I would bet on any of the top three teams in the Pacific over either of the top two teams in the Central every day of the week.

(Read on …)

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“If I ever saw myself saying I was excited about going to Cleveland, I’d punch myself in the face, because I’d be lying.”

20 points if you can recall who is responsible for that quote. That’s right, it was Ichiro (your 20 points are in the mail). Everyone knows who Ichiro is. Why? Because he’s arguably the best position player to have ever played the game of baseball. And that includes all the professional Dominicans, Cubans, Chinese, Australians, Costa Ricans, South Koreans, Americans, Venezuelans, Dutch, Taiwanese, Canadians, Mexicans, and Japanese that have ever endeavored to be the best in the sport.

Maybe the people in Cleveland don’t like Ichiro so much, but the rest of us do. And everyone knows that Ichiro started his professional baseball career in Japan. He played for the Orix Blue Wave in Nippon Professional Baseball’s (NPB) Pacific league. Huh?

Yes, that’s a fair question. Technically, the Orix Blue Wave do not exist anymore. They are now half of the Orix Buffaloes (the other half being the team formerly known as the Kintetsu Buffaloes), and were Ichiro to one day return to Japan to play out the twilight of his career, he probably wouldn’t have any idea as to where his loyalty is anchored.

But I digress: Ichiro is partly the product of the NPB, and even though there has been (and will continue to be) a steady depletion of the brightest talent produced by Japan (think both Matsuis, Matsuzaka, Nomo, Iwamura, Iguchi, Hasegawa, Johjima, and on and on), it is still a league that generates a lot of interest and a wealth of good baseball.

(Read on …)

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