Hopefully Kawabata joins the club next year.
The annual Golden Glove vote have been tabulated, (here are last year’s results) and three-quarters of Tokyo’s infield brought home top prize for their respective positions in the Central League.
Leading the charge with the largest margin of victory was Tokyo third baseman, Shinya Miyamoto. His fourth Golden Glove at third base helped him to break his own NPB record as the oldest player to receive the honor. He is currently 41 years and 11 months old which breaks his old record which was set a little less than a year earlier. All told, he’s won 10 Golden Gloves if you include the six he won back when he still had the range to play shortstop.
Miyamoto received 155 votes while Yomiuri’s Murata finished second with 73, a gap of +82 in Miyamoto’s favor. Third place went to Chunichi’s Morino (five votes), and the only other Central League third baseman to earn votes was Hiroshima’s Dohbayashi with three.
Hold on. Three people voted for Dohbayashi? Really?!
The three jackasses that voted for Dohbayashi are clearly delusional, or lifelong Carp fans. Or both. While Dohbayashi had a tremendous impact in his first top-team season for Hiroshima, and definitely deserves serious consideration for Rookie of the Year honors, he also led the league with a shocking 29 errors.
By comparison, Tokyo’s team leader in that category, Milledge, only had eight.
But whatever. Another wonderful tidbit of information is the fact that Miyamoto has now won honors at third base four years in a row. That ties him with Hokkaido’s Itoi (OF) for longest current winning streak.
Moving on to our next big winner, and the one that we’re the most excited about, Beavis! Winning his first Golden Glove by a landslide of similar proportions to Miyamoto was none other than Tokyo’s beloved second baseman, Hiroyasu Tanaka! His solid play all season long lifted him to an easy win over Chunichi’s Araki. Tanaka gathered 151 votes to Araki’s 75. Hanshin’s Hirano was third with 11 votes.
And just squeaking out his first ever Golden Glove was Kazuhiro Hatakeyama, believe it or not. Tokyo’s first baseman garnered 64 votes while Yokohama’s Nakamura fell just a bit short with 62. Nakamura probably has some Hanshin fans to thank for his loss. Two people voted for Craig Brazell at first while a third gave Arai the nod even though neither of them came close to playing a full season at the position. How can one team have to players in the running for the same infield position?
The only other Tokyo player that made a good showing was Lastings Milledge who finished 6th (20 votes) out of 18 Central League outfielders that received votes.
Congrats to everyone that received votes, and hopefully we see even more Tokyo names in the mix next season.
About Christopher Pellegrini
