From the Daily Sports Online column / デイリースポーツオンラインの連載コラムから Japan is riding a perfect baseball wave right now. If you think about it, this perfect storm has been in the works for 5 years now. Ever since Shohei Ohtani took MLB by storm in 2018, there has been a heightened interest in the country and league…
From the Daily Sports Online column / デイリースポーツオンラインの連載コラムから March 31, 2023. Opening Day for the Central League in NPB. The long wait is over. Six pm couldn’t come sooner. That said, for me, 5:15 pm is when it all begins. Just 45 minutes before the ump yells “Play ball,” we fans get to see the…
From our Daily Sports Online column (Japanese) / デイリースポーツの連載コラムから Fujinami: 思いっきり腕を振って勝負していきたい (Omoikkiri ude wo futte sho-bu shite ikitai) Translator: Swing my arm and do what I can do and… do my best. Huh? That doesn’t sound like good baseball English! Come on, translator! You’d be better off saying something like, umm… omoikkiri… hang on a…
Based on the Daily Sports Online column / デイリースポーツオンラインの連載コラムから “Hats off to you, James, because you’ve been able to do something that I have put off for too long. You wrote a book. You’re a published author. If nothing else, you’ve got something to show your kids and grandkids and say, ‘I wrote this.’” Not…
Based on the Daily Sports column / デイリースポーツオンラインの連載コラムから Hanshin Tigers English News (H-TEN) has put out over 160 podcast episodes in just over seven years. There have been four main co-hosts (WhizOh, Joe, JD, and Sanjay) and a few guests along the way, too. I have had a ton of fun talking Hanshin baseball with…
From our monthly Daily Sports column (Japanese) / デイリースポーツの連載コラムから So the Hanshin Tigers reached the playoffs despite an extremely poor start to the season. Congratulations! Let’s send off incumbent manager Akihiro Yano, who announced his resignation way back on January 31, with a miraculous playoff run! Meanwhile, the team appears to finally be ready to…
From H-TEN’s Daily Sports Online column / デイリースポーツの連載コラムから The Hanshin Tigers are at long last able to play at home again! While I love the national high school tournament held every August, I do not love what it forces my team to do: play 20+ straight games on unfamiliar, unfriendly soil (artificial though it may…
From our Daily Sports Online monthly column / デイリースポーツオンラインの連載コラムから This is the story of a Canadian living in Japan interviewing a Taiwanese baseball star who plays indy-league ball in America. Japanese is not the native tongue of either participant, but was the lingua franca in their conversation and even in the minds of both the…
From Our Daily Sports Online column / デイリースポーツオンラインの連載コラムから Until that embarrassing sweep at the hands of the Yokohama DeNA Baystars, June was a pretty fabulous month for the Hanshin Tigers. Their 14-5-1 record to that point had them pushing for third place, and it seemed like all the talk at season’s start of a lost…
From Daily Sports Column (Japanese) / デイリースポーツオンラインの連載コラムから The Tigers’ woes continue in large part due to their lack of run support for the excellent pitching staff they have fielded this year. After their twenty-one-game streak of allowing 3 runs or fewer came to an end on May 20, they have had two games of giving…