What Will Ma-Kun Mean for New York?

New York Yankees pitchers and catchers report to spring training on February 14, and among the new faces will be Masahiro Tanaka, a 25-year-old phenom from Japan who signed a seven-year, $155 million deal in late January. Ma-kun, as Tanaka is affectionately known (“kun” is an informal Japanese suffix generally used to address young boys […]

A Special Insight into the difference between Baseball in Japan & the US

I recently had the honor of interviewing Takahiro Sato, a former college baseball player in Japan and has coached baseball and taught mental skills in U.S. as well as in Japan. He thought that Sport psychology was such an intriguing area where athletes can learn how to prepare for competition and how to handle pressure or stress, so he studied it & received […]

Wayne Graczyk’s Role in Japanese Baseball for the Past 37 Years…

The newspaper article had seventeen errors. Seventeen. Factual errors, not typos. Wayne Graczyk counted them. And he remembers each one because those errors led to the job he has today. In 1975 Graczyk, who hails from New Jersey, was attending Sophia University in Tokyo. While reading The Japan Times, an English-language newspaper, he noticed glaring […]

Why You’re Wrong About Yu Darvish

For many years, American baseball fans with an eye towards the Japanese Major Leagues have been rolling out the red carpet for the Nippon-Ham Fighters‘ 6-foot-5 fireballer Yu Darvish. The NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) has a strange relationship with MLB regarding their players crossing the Pacific to play stateside.   NPB players can sign with […]

Bobby V Lends a Helping Hand to Japan

Bobby Valentine may have left Japan at the end of the 2009 baseball season, but it’s obvious that the former Chiba Lotte Marines manager’s heart is still with the country. The ESPN baseball analyst has been involved in relief and fundraising efforts to aid in the recovery of the decimated Tohoku region. His collaboration with […]

Ryo Shinkawa: Interpreting the MLB

  Sapporo, a city in the Japanese archipelago‘s northernmost island of Hokkaido, is more than five thousand miles from Minneapolis, but to Ryo Shinkawa the two places will be forever entwined. An internship in the former eventually led to his current position in the latter, as the interpreter for Minnesota Twins second baseman and 10-time […]

A Month After the Quake and Tsunami, Baseball Begins in Japan

  In Tokyo and throughout eastern Japan, offices are a little darker, and fewer escalators are running in an attempt to conserve electricity. But cherry blossoms are in full bloom, a sign of spring, rebirth, and renewal. Another sign of spring – and, ultimately, a return to business as usual ­– is the start of […]

What is Baseball’s Place in the Crisis in Japan?

  It’s common knowledge that on March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake rocked Japan, and a subsequent tsunami with waves reaching more than 30 feet devoured the island nation’s northeastern coast. Faced with the daunting tasks of finding the thousands still missing, providing shelter for the hundreds of thousands left homeless, and staving off an […]

MLB and NPB: New Places, Same Faces

Baseball players in Japan began spring training last week, and MLB pitchers and catchers reported this week. Do you know who they are and where they are? In the constant merry-go-round that is professional sports, it’s difficult to keep up with what player is on what team these days. Let’s break down the comings and […]

Marty Kuehnert: A Lifetime in Japanese Baseball

“Everything with Japan started in the toilet.” When Marty Kuehnert speaks of the serendipitous event that led to his first trip to Japan, that’s usually how he begins. “Spend the summer in Japan!” the flyer above the urinal beckoned. Kuehnert, then a freshman at Stanford, noticed the sign while he was, er, in the toilet […]

Japanese Baseball Year in Review: 2010

It’s that time again. It’s the time when everyone looks back on the year that was, and it’s no different here at Baseball Reflections. As my first year of writing essays for this site comes to a close, let’s take a brief look at the Japanese baseball year in review. I started out by describing […]

On the MLB/NPB Posting System and Hisashi Iwakuma

There are plenty of Hot Stove topics occupying the sports pages this offseason, from the Yankees/Derek Jeter saga to what team will land Cliff Lee. There’s another story developing between the West Coast and Japan that is equally as intriguing. The struggle between the Oakland A’s and Rakuten Golden Eagles right-handed ace Hisashi Iwakuma have […]

The Climax of the Japanese Baseball Season

Baseball fans are in the midst of the fervor of the MLB playoffs – with its no-hitters, 5-run comebacks, bullpen implosions, and 14-strikeout performances. Fans of Japanese baseball are also enjoying a little drama, although in a slightly different format. In Japan, the top three teams from the two leagues – Central and Pacific – […]

A Whirlwind Tour of Japanese Baseball

For the third year in a row, I joined JapanBall, run by Bob Bavasi and Mayumi Smith, on a weeklong tour to watch baseball games in Japan. It was a whirlwind event, covering a lot of ground to see five baseball games in six cities over the course of seven days. If the name Bavasi […]

Japanese Baseball Books

It takes dedication to make a career out of writing about a niche topic such as Japanese baseball. One of those writers is Rob Fitts, an award-winning author who wrote Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005) and Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball (University of […]

The Japanese All-Star Series

Image via Wikipedia While watching the recent MLB All-Star game, I started thinking about what the All-Star game is like in Japan. Atlanta Braves catcher Brian McCann and Chicago Cubs outfielder Marlon Byrd performed late-inning heroics, propelling the National League to victory. Now that the MLB’s mid-summer classic “counts,” the win assures a National League […]

The Mascots of Japanese Baseball

The Phillies have their Phanatic, San Diego has a famous chicken, and the Mets have a guy with a giant baseball for a head. But in Japan, each team has a family of mascots. A lot of them are birds; most of them are . . . just . . . strange. The dragons of […]

The Eclectic Flavors of BallPark Food in Japan

Take me out to the ballgame. Take me out to the crowd. Buy me some squid legs and takoyaki. When we see the Carp, we’ll have okonomiyaki. Squid legs? Tako what? What about peanuts and Cracker Jack? We’re talking baseball, but Japanese baseball, and the food at ballparks in Japan is a force to be […]

Inside Information on Japanese Baseball

Image via Wikipedia Baseball fans across America are familiar with the Yomiuri Giants because they are the Yankees of Japan and the Chiba Lotte Marines because Bobby Valentine managed them for seven seasons. But what do we really know about the teams and players of Japanese baseball? Since the scope of my experience spans about […]

The Oendan: The Japanese Baseball Fan Club

“What I was amazed, bewildered, and never, never surprised at was the love that the Japanese people have for the game of baseball. It’s mindboggling. It’s not to be understood . . . in a normal way. It’s abnormal.” When Bobby Valentine made the above remark about Japanese baseball fans at an event at New […]

What is Japanese Baseball?

Ever since 1872, when professor Horace Wilson explained the game of baseball to his students at Kaisei Gakko (now Tokyo University), the Japanese have been obsessed with the American pastime. Americans have been familiar with some aspects of baseball in Japan, but generally that knowledge was limited to home run leader Sadaharu Oh and Japanese […]

Baseball Reflections Now on Japanese Baseball

I’m excited to contribute to Baseball Reflections because it combines two of my loves: Japan and baseball. I grew up with an Okinawan mother and an American father. Even though I thought my mom’s heritage was cool, I barely noticed because I spent all of my time sitting next to my dad watching sports. Growing […]

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