Wishing a happy and prosperous new year to all of our readers.

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This is so terrible I can’t even think of a proper way to introduce it:
TOKYO - An 89-year-old woman died after an ambulance crew spent two hours trying 30 hospitals before finding one that would accept her for treatment, Japanese officials said Friday.

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First, we were giddy after Twins blogger extraordinaire Aaron Gleeman gave us props on his site. Had the good lord of baseball blogs bestowed only that blessing upon us, we would have said “dayenu” and raised our glasses in thanks.
However, yesterday the wheel of baseball blog fortune was kind to EWC again, as we enjoyed […]

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I doubt it behooves me to get too caught up in this, but following up a recent post about Hu Jintao playing some baseball in Japan as part of a diplomatic tour, we had another game of catch breaking out in China over the weekend as Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda visited.

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I was all set to write something nice about Korean baseball. You see, there’s an oil spill west of Korea and one of the teams is helping clean it up. I may still write something. But, you know, I’m a little tired today. Long day down at the ol’ meat processing plant, so I’m a […]

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Good piece in The Hardball Times written by Lisa Gray who writes The Astros Dugout. I disagree with some of the the conclusions I think she’s heading toward at the end, but she nicely dissects the love that fans in Houston, and Texas, had for Clemens when he first signed with the Astros for 2004, […]

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(Image via Zen Kimchi)

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One of my favorite Japanese blogs Pink Tentacle recently put up a Top 10 list (based on # of hits) of it’s biggest stories of the year. The number one post is called Pimp My Rice Paddy and is about a town in Japan that creates crop art visuals in a unique way.

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It was announced yesterday that KT (Korea Telecom) will take over the Korean Baseball Organization’s eighth franchise. Rather than buy the rights to the team’s former name (the Unicorns) KT will hold a ceremony sometime in January to reveal a new name and logo for the franchise.
So let’s help them out. I’ve come up with a list […]

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I like this kind of situation. Everyone’s excited to make money in China, especially with the Olympics coming up and all. So naturally, one of the big issues at this and any Olympics hence is security. Sounds like good news for companies like Honeywell and United Technologies, right? Well, not so fast. The problem with […]

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Yeah, for a guy who said he wasn’t interested in the performance enhancer side of baseball, I sure do a lot of posts on it. I guess I’m a little awestruck by the whole thing. As I’ve said before, I think the only way to really get to the bottom of it is to either legalize […]

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Naver, which is a Korean portal like Yahoo!, has posted video clips of its Top 10 home runs, defensive plays, fantastic finishes, and an MLB Top 10 moments for 2007. It’s well worth a look, especially if you don’t normally follow or see Korean baseball.
My favorite finish involves a May game between the Kia Tigers […]

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This is one of those incomprehensibly hilarious things from Japan. I have no idea what they’re doing or saying, but I laughed out loud several times. I believe this is a TV show or a skit of some kind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU_5khy2fW4

(via Narutard) 

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A Taiwanese national was one of three men recently arrested in North Carolina as part of an elaborate counterfeit golf ring that had been selling fake golf equipment imported from Asia.
The two-month investigation by state and federal officers resulted in allegations that Donald G. Fondrie and Warren E. Fondrie had operated an Internet-based site that sold fake […]

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In what sounds like a good old-fashioned barnstorming sideshow, a contest called “The Million Dollar Arm” recently wrapped up qualifying rounds at various colleges in northern India.
As you may know Cricket, not baseball, is popular in India but sports marketing companies  on both sides of the Pacific have set up the contest in part to spread the love of the grand game, and also to potentially find some rubber […]

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I’m sure everyone is wondering what music the guy who writes for the mostly Asian baseball blog is listening to. Well, without getting too far into some list of hundreds of records that no one will remember a year from now, here’s a song from one album I listened to all the dimdamn year.

Great cover, no? Some […]

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Uh, Aaron, you forgot someone. (NFWS)

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One of the great things about living out here in Taiwan has been the chance to be exposed not only to Mandarin Chinese, the official language, but also ‘Tai-yu’ or Taiwanese, the dialect spoken across the island most prominently in Southern Taiwan.
The language, derived from the Fujianese dialect of Chinese, is somewhat politicized–Mandarin Chinese (or […]

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