SK, keeping with the theme of “simple,” looks set to win its second straight KBO championship after last night’s 4-1 win over Doosan. Again, nothing fancy or overwhelming going on here. Just a very workmanlike performance from a team with arguably one star and bunch of other guys who are pretty good.

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Patrick at NPB Tracker has been doing some fine NPB draft coverage. The biggest news, I suppose, internationally is that Junichi Tazawa wasn’t drafted by a team and will now be free to pursue his own interests. Imagine, a baseball player born of Japanese blood able to pursue his own baseball career wherever he wants. [...]

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Wednesday night I was typing a reply to DJ’s comment on WBC Notes and then zap. East Windup Chronicle was no more.
Apparently there was a corruption in the index.php file having to do with Wordpress. I would have gotten things going earlier but I was busy all day Thursday. Thanks to Clayton at JaguarPC for [...]

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After a couple of fairly bad  ones SK and Doosan finally delivered on the kind of game this rivalry is capable of. In the end SK took both the game (3-2) and a 2-1 edge in the series.
Despite out hitting the Wyvrens 11-5, Doosan couldn’t take advantage of a number of opportunities, even loading the [...]

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EWC wishes Chen Feng-Ming, gold glove winning catcher and the official CPBL player of EWC, a happy 31st birthday.
For those of you keeping score at home, my wife officially won our bet on Chen’s season batting average.  I bet he would hit .240 or below on the year, while my wife bet .240 - [...]

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Currently sitting in Newark airport during a 6 hour delay awaiting return to Taiwan from the Perfect Game USA tournament in Jupiter, Florida, a 5-day overwhelming extravaganza featuring top high school prospects from the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Strictly for the hard core, the tournament featured games from 8:00 AM until 10:30 PM on [...]

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Ending a prolonged courtship involving several teams, 22 year-old right-handed reliever Lo-Chia Jen has finally fit an MLB glass slipper, signing a deal reportedly worth $250,000 with the Houston Astros. The hard-to-get Lo rebuffed earlier offers from the Red Sox, Twins, and Angels. Lo is the first Taiwanese sign for the Houston Astros.
The [...]

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SK won a fairly ugly Monday night game by the score of 5-2. I’d like to say the Wyvrens got back on track, but that wasn’t really the case. Actually, SK played pretty badly, but Doosan was worse.
Kim Dong-joo got the party rocking with a nice enough pickup on a grounder by Park Jae-hong, but [...]

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I won’t pretend to be a figure skating expert, but judging by the number of times this little ditty I wrote about Kim Yu-na came up on searches, I’d say she had something of a coming out partyinternationally over the weekend. Not sure how often I’ll follow her story, since I might be tired of [...]

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Interesting ballot initiative going in York County, North Carolina, where the sale of alcohol is is prohibited on Sundays. But come November 4 citizens will have a chance to vote on an initiative that would lift the ban. Voters in both nearby Rock Hill and  Tega Cay  already  serve alcohol on Sundays. If approved York [...]

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I spent the better part of the morning fighting through a hangover so I could laud SK, label them the best team in Asia, claim Kim Kwang-hyun could win 15 games in MLB, predict they’d win in five games and then…
SK went out and lost Game 1 by a 5-2 score. Sure am glad that [...]

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Senichi Hoshino said he won’t manage the Japanese team, and Japanese baseball fans breathed a sigh of relief.
Will Ichiro manage Team Japan? He’s already said he’ll play, and also urged Japan to get serious about the WBC.
This Japan Times reporter thinks  Shigetoshi Hasegawa should be the choice.
SK manager Kim Sung-keun, who is basically the spokesperson [...]

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As I periodically do, I combed through google a bit to track down some Ulsan For You-related news. Unfortunately, outside of Korean petrochemical companies cutting production due to shrinking demand, all I could find was this painting (above) of a whale the city spent money to put on a liquid storage tankowned by Taeyoung [...]

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Well, it’s been a very exciting year in Korean baseball, hasn’t it? After all, I ranked the team at #1  everytime I compiled KBO rankings this season. I said that if Kim Kwang-hyun pitched at a level anywhere close to his potential that the Wyvrens would repeat. That the team had no stars, and [...]

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Great, even must-read, article/diary here  in The Economist, by a correspondent working in the paper’s Tokyo bureau. Essentially he’s taking us through his week, starting with the premise that news in the country doesn’t “break,” but “creeps, slinks and whispers,” and then taking the reader to informal meals, cafes and even a language lesson, where [...]

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Last night was bowling night at my wife’s company. Afterwards, which is mostly why I went, we all ate Jjim, which is a process of steaming or boiling meat, chicken, fish, or shellfish which have been marinated in a sauce or soup. Anyway, the restaurant had the Chunichi/Yomiuri game on a big screen TV, and [...]

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You might have to read this one twice.
A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband’s digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday.

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The Doosan Bears did the expected and finished off a gutsy Samsung Lions team setting up a Korean Series rematch with the mighty SK Wyvrens. The game was delayed for over an hour by a rain storm that, once it cleared, gave way to an apparently chilling cold (well, if you’re on the Bears [...]

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EWC:The other day my wife was talking about Kim Yu-na and how she’s worried the Korean media is overexposing her in advance of much success. She compared the situation it to another female Korean athlete named Kang Cho-hyun. Can you give a little background on both athletes and then explain why you think my wife [...]

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From a Pink Tentacle (who got them from this  Flickr set) posting of vintage illustrations detailing the innards of famous Japanese kaiju (strange beast).
The above illustration is a Flaming Monster Gamera, which can see in the dark, has arms strong enough to lift and throw a 50-ton boat, and possesses “fire sacks” that let it [...]

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