Today’s Japanese word of the day is egui (エグã„), which in a baseball context refers to a particularly “nasty” or “sick” pitch. Hanshin sophomore Shintaro Fujinami’...
In recent weeks, I’ve written about some of the better MLB prospects who are currently active in Japan, and looked back at some of skills that have translated well from NPB to MLB. Now we’...
Within minutes of Masahiro Tanaka signing with the Yankees, I started getting questions on Twitter about the next star out of Japan. The short answer is that there’s no one of Tanaka’s cal...
http://www.npbtracker.com/2014/02/whos-next/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=whos-next
Every time an NPB pitcher transitions to MLB, we see a number of projectsions for he might perform statistically. For me these projections are always a bit of a shot in the dark — there is just...
This post originally ran in 2009, when it appeared that Chang Yong Lim might move to MLB as a free agent. At the time this post was published, Lim was under contract with the Yakult Swallows unti...
All right, here we go. 2013 free agents. This year, 85 players (18 domestic, 67 international) qualify for free agency. In practice, only a small minority will file and change teams. I will highl...
Update:Â Nippon Ham did indeed draft Otani, and Ben Badler has confirmed that that won’t legally stop him from signing with an MLB team. I had implied that it would, at least until the negoti...
Okay, so the cat is out of the bag about high school pitching prospect Shohei Otani. Here’s everything I know about him. I first found out about Otani about a year ago, when Yakyu Kozoh had ...
For the third consecutive year, my friends at Rotowire invited me to contribute to their annual Fantasy Baseball Guide. Given my schedule constraints over the offseason, my Rotowire article wound...
There’s plenty of excellent English-language content being authored on Japanese and Asian baseball. Here are links to a few examples. Wayne Graczyk of the Japan Times discuss’s the Central Le...