Who do you want to get the bulk of the starts at third this year?

**The poll is now closed. Click here to see the results of the vote.

Here’s a poll to keep your mind off of what you should actually be doing at work.

You will be asked for your opinions on topics such as who should get the most starts at third, and whether or not the front office was right in accepting the posting amount for Norichika Aoki.

This poll will remain open until 5PM (EST) Wednesday February 1st (that’s 7AM on Thursday February 2nd here in Japan). We’ll post the results of the poll shortly thereafter.

Please vote only once.

Poll closed.

Milwaukee's newest prospect and ROY candidate, Norichika Aoki.

let’s first take a moment to check in with the rest of the team.

• At least two Tokyo players have already contracted the flu. Awesome. I’m a bit confused because this is normally what happens to the team in September and October. Are we planning to do this twice in 2012? For the record, however, I have no objection to moving this nonsense to the front-end of the season. Guys, stop sharing cutlery! And wash your hands.
• Ogawa recently told the media friends that 2011 Central League home run champ Wladimir Balentien could start the year on the farm team thanks to how nonexistent he was following the All-Star break last season. We here at Tsubamegun have no problem with that although we’d like to politely remind him that Balentien was far more effective in the playoffs than Hatakeyama and Miyamoto.
• Sorry, can’t resist. While he’s not a Tokyo player anymore, we still love him. Aoki was all over the place with relief upon returning to the motherland. And the Milwaukee folks are well aware of the fact that they’ve landed Aoki’s services at bargain-basement prices.

As you might have guessed, articles covering the postseason were some of the most popular on the site.

Hello 2012, and Happy New Year to everyone out there in Tsubamegun land!

We’d like to welcome you to the new year, and a spring training camp in Okinawa that’s only a month away, by looking back briefly on the most popular posts of last season.

They’re listed here according to page views, and it’s an amusing view into what interested the record number of readers that accessed this site last year.

5. Tokyo vs Yomiuri Game 3 – Climax Series 1st Stage

This was Kozo’s personalized version of the emotional ups and downs of that historic game between the birds and their much better funded crosstown rivals.

4. Tokyo vs Chunichi Game 5 – Climax Series 2nd Stage

Garrett wrote the season-ending game report after the team’s loss to eventual Japan Series Runner-up, Chunichi. The comments at the end of this post were very much appreciated by all of us here at the site.

3. Online Yakyu Writer Insights: 2011 Tokyo Swallows

For this article, I interviewed Yakyu Baka’s Gen Sueyoshi, NPB Tracker’s Patrick Newman, and Jason Coskrey from the Japan Times to see what they thought about Tokyo’s chances in 2011. It’s interesting to re-read this article nearly a year later and see how things actually panned out. I, for one, was completely off on Aoki having a career-best year. Seems the new baseball was the monkey wrench on that one.

2. 2011 Japan Series – Chunichi vs Fukuoka

This is the youngest of the entrants on this short list of popular posts, but it makes sense that it made the cut because it’s essentially seven game reports wrapped into one. Game seven, in which I included play-by-play coverage of how the Hawks finally defeated the Dragons, helped attract a lot of real-time attention to that post.

1. Wishful Thinking (2011 version)

Ah, yes. The annual ritual of putting our foolish hopes and dreams in writing. It’s almost like a belated Christmas Wish List. I swung and missed on most of mine last year. How did you end up doing?

Thanks to everyone who visited Tsubamegun last season! Keep watching this space for an upcoming Wishful Thinking post that we’ll appreciate your feedback on. 

Enjoy the rest of the New Year’s holiday!

Baseball-wise, the quake has affected a number of things. Firstly the need to save energy has lead to the introduction of a few rules to limit game times. Games will still end in a tie if the teams are tied after 12 innings, but now games will not go into further extra innings after three and a half hours. The clock will begin to tick from the first pitch, not the scheduled start time, and will not be stopped for delays such as rain, wind, fog and other troubles. In the event that a game is ended early because of a blackout the game will be called.

The quake has pushed the schedule back a few weeks and the damage has necessitated the following changes to the schedule. For the month of April teams playing in areas of lower power (basically Eastern Honshu) will be playing day games in order to avoid using power-sucking lights. The NPB executive committee has said that the schedule will proceed as normal and allow teams in the affected areas to play night game in May. It is quite possible, however, that the schedule will be changed once the government announces its energy savings plans for the summer months, when peak energy usage increases 50% from current usage. Games that were cancelled due to the quake have been rescheduled to October, therefore the start of the Climax Series will be pushed accordingly to the end of October. The Nippon Series is expected to be played around November 12.

There are still a lot of unknowns surrounding how baseball will proceed this year, but hopefully it will allow people to forget about their troubles, if only for a short while, and that games will be able to be used as a vehicle for further charity and awareness activities for those in need. We here at Tsubamegun intend to keep on plugging along and bring you the best Swallows coverage starting with our season opener against the Giants later on tonight.

What are your “wishful thinking” points for this year?

While that admittedly means we are still minuscule potatoes, it also means traffic is growing at a nice clip.  Thanks to everyone who has stopped by, thanks even more to those of you who have offered us words of encouragement, and thanks most of all to those of you who have commented here and linked to us and helped us get a little community started here.  We hope you’ll continue to find the Tsubamegun an interesting place to hang around.

As always, we’re very interested in hearing any and all readers’ thoughts on the site, especially criticisms and suggestions on what we can do better.  (We don’t mind praise, either, though.)  Feel free to comment here and let us know what you think, even if you don’t have much to say about the Swallows at the moment.  (We know how you feel – sometimes there just are no words.)