An in-depth look at the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, Jingu Stadium, the Central League, and Japanese Pro Baseball
Fukuoka win the 2011 Japan Series 4-3 over Chunichi.
2011 Central League champs, the Chunichi Dragons, advanced to the Japan Series after defeating the Tokyo Swallows in six games in the final stage of the playoffs. The Fukuoka (Softbank) Hawks won the Pacific League pennant and then swept the Saitama Seibu Lions to face Chunichi in the best-of-seven series.
‘M’ gets back to his traveloguing ways for the final installment of this story. Pre-game. I feel the same as I did on Monday. Nervous and expectant. This walk up Dragons Road isn’t helping. Tonight our season will end or we will set up one of the most exciting games in Swallows living memory tomorrow. [...]
Our good friend, ‘M’, was in Nagoya again last night for game two of the current playoff series against Chunichi. Here’s what he had to say: Pre-game. Pre-game time was ‘killed’ with a visit to Inuyama. Highly recommended. Nice castle, national treasure tea house and great monkey park. Now I’m on my way to a different [...]
A day after being brushed aside so easily by Korea, Japan had to pick themselves up to face the Cubans for the second time in four days. This time however, there were no second chances, the loser would be heading home. Japan rode to victory three days earlier on the back of six innings of five hit [...]
With the pre-season schedule now underway, I thought we’d take a look at the results of this year’s salary negotiations and see who’s getting paid what in Tokyo this year (note: all salary figures are given in multiples of a million yen, eg ?40M = ?40,000,000): The Big Boys Norichika Aoki – The [...]
Trans-Pacific Radio just published a podcast which reviews the 2008 baseball season all the way through the Japan Series which was eventually won by the Saitama Seibu Lions. Click here to listen to the podcast.
A brief article on the Washington University in Saint Louis website discusses how left-handed pitchers and hitters have a distinct advantage in the game of baseball. This is probably not surprising news to most readers of this site, but the math has been done, and despite roughly 90% of the adult population being right-handed, about [...]
