An in-depth look at the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, Jingu Stadium, the Central League, and Japanese Pro Baseball
The Swallows drafted 8 players in the draft tonight. Those of you who read my draft preview last night will find none of the names I discussed in our list of picks. The night started off with the Swallows vying for Shuhei Takahashi along with the Dragons (as expected) and the Buffaloes. After each team’s [...]
The 2011 NPB Draft will happen tomorrow evening at the Grand Prince Hotel starting from 17:00. For those of you who are new to the Japanese draft format and are not familiar with how it works, check out the post I wrote last year about the process. I’ll be presenting a few players that may [...]
The 2010 NPB draft took place on October 28th, as planned. Unfortunately not a lot else went as planned for the Swallows. As expected the Swallows threw their hat into the Yuki Saito sweepstakes. They were joined by the Nippon Ham Fighters, the Chiba Lotte Marines, and the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. Our manager Ogawa, armed [...]
Part 2 of our 2010 Draft series will examine some of the prospects that may be of interest to Swallows’ fans. Before I begin describing some of the players of interest in this year’s draft, I should note that I have not seen any of these players myself. I do not follow high school, university, [...]
With the 2010 NPB Draft fast approaching, Tsubamegun will be presenting a number of articles filling you in on how the draft works and which players the Swallows may be eying. Part 1 of this series will explain the mechanics of the NPB draft. The 2010 NPB draft will be held on October 28 at [...]
The birds made a few new acquisitions back on the 29th of October, and at least one of those picks (a left-handed pitcher out of the industrial leagues) looks like he could make an immediate contribution to the team. The Swallows were part of that huge scrum looking to snap up Yusei Kikuchi, but they [...]
The amateur draft took place last night, but the media only picked up the fact that Yomiuri landed a big-hitting kid by the name of Taishi Ota out of Tokaidai Sagami High School as their first pick. Anyway, while it may come as a surprise to the media that 11 other teams were present at [...]
For years now, fans, reporters, and officials of Japanese professional baseball have been fretting over the damage – real and potential – that the globalization of the sport is doing to Japan’s professional clubs. While fans on both sides of the Pacific have been pleased to see the success of Nomo, Ichiro, Matsui, Matsuzaka, Okajima, [...]
