The four remaining CPBL teams–The Brother Elephants, Uni-President Lions, La New Bears, and Sinon Bulls–conducted a draft absorbing the players left unemployed by the dissolve of the D Media T Rex and Chinatrust Whales. Left-handed hitting outfielder Hsien Chia-shen, who hit .352 last season, was the first pick overall. Ni Fu Te was [...]

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According to an Apple Daily news story (Chinese, use your google translator for some amusing results), a team located on the east coast of the U.S. [sic] has made an offer with a 150,000 bonus and AAA start to Ni Fu-Te. With the CPBL ’special draft’–absorbing the players left unemployed by the latest annual [...]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQjy4SMbEYg

Found this Tazawa footage and thought I’d share it.  You can see both his potential and his kinks in the video as he flashes some nasty pitches, but also gets into trouble and struggles with command.  Not the smoothest delivery and a work in progress at the point the video was taken, but he shows [...]

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On that note, According to the highly interesting World Baseball Today, Cuban Pitcher Aroldis Chapman hit 102 MPH during a recent game.  The pitch is the fastest ever clocked in Cuban league play, and Chapman is currently 4-0 with a 1.65 ERA for his team, Holguin.

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ESPN’s Enrique Rojas has an informative report on recent Cuban defectors Yadel Marti and Yasser Gomez. According to Rojas, the two
“left the island and are in an unknown location before attempting to reach the Dominican Republic to seek an MLB career”….Players’ relatives and friends in Cuba confirmed their departure, without disclosing details of the [...]

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The Korea Herald English newspaper asked a few bloggers to come up with lists of their top stories in the expat community for 2008. If you’re a regular reader of EWC you’ll recognize three of the four: The Marmot’s Hole, Korea Beat, and Brian in Jeollanam-do.
All three lists are interesting in their own way. Korea Beat included the story [...]

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Pink Tentacle put up its Top 10 posts for 2008. Not surprisingly I’ve linked to a few of these. I couple others I meant to link to but didn’t. In the top spot is the recent Scientists extract images directly from brain, and just a little further down is Old School Horror: Edo-period monster paintings [...]

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What a bummer. It’s not that Kang Ho-dong gets me seething at the TV like some Korean personalities do, but it sometimes does bother me how ubiquitous certain entertainers are once they’ve become popular. You can find Kang pretty much doing exactly what he’s doing in the photo above on three or four Korean TV [...]

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Don’t be thrown off by the dumb title Search party — Red Sox scouts are always on the lookout for talent, it’s a good piece. You know, the writers rarely write those things. The article gives a little background on scouting in general, starting with a scene at an unnamed Northern California junior college, and [...]

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According to a Yomiuri Press article, 2009 will be Bobby Valentine’s last season as manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines. The move apparently comes after team owner Setoyama Ryuzo expressed his desire for a changing of the guard with the organization. Valentine helped increase his team’s win percentage, attendance, and revenue during his [...]

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Several players worth discusssing either vastly exceeded expectations or seemingly came out of nowhere to become valuable roto contributors in 2008. Owners with enough cajones to draft Dustin Pedroia early on were rewarded with an MVP season from the middle infield. Anyone who says they saw Cliff Lee’s cy young season coming last [...]

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Sorry I’ve been a little M.I.A. recently and I don’t mean that in the Sri Lankan rappin’, Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack writtin’ kind of way. Between the holidays and “other projects” I haven’t had much time to post. However, today I got an email from Gary Burnham with some news I wanted to be sure to [...]

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It’s never really too early to start talking about roto baseball, and this year our good commissioner Aaron and I have vowed to keep readers up to date on the progress of our first ever keeper league, which features the top 12 members of our twenty team league from last year, plus a couple of [...]

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Manuel Benitez, a former child actor whose credits include Galactica, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and Stand and Deliver, was shot to death by police in the back of a Chinese Restaurant in El Monte, California, ending a four-year manhunt for the 38-year-old.
Benitez’s 7-year-old son was injured as police used a flash grenade to get into the [...]

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People always ask me “how do they celebrate Christmas in Korea?” You’ll hear a lot of different figures as to how many Christians live in South Korea — I’ve heard 80% of the population and I’ve heard 40%. The truth is — well, it lies nowhere, because a lot of that number depends on who [...]

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When the Corleone family wants to send a message, they put a horse head in your bed.  And when the Chinese government wants to send one, they send, well, two cute and cuddly panda bears.
Taiwan’s two new pandas–named ‘Tuan Tuan’ and ‘Yuan Yuan’ (or, not-so-suprisingly ‘reunion’) in Chinese-were sent as a gift by the Chinese [...]

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Meanwhile, in the world of the mundane, Japanese teams added a bunch of gaijin to their rosters over the past week in preparation for the upcoming season.  The Yokohama Bay stars added lefty Les Walrond and first baseman Dan Johnson, the pride of Coon Rapids, Minnesota.
The Hanshin Tigers added Kevin Mensch, The Rakuten Eagles added [...]

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Last night I sat down to write someting vaguely indignant to the effect of how ridiculous it is that the Yankees were able to go on an unfettered $423 Million spending orgy and purchase 35 Wins, 480 strikeouts, and a top 3 first baseman in the course of two weeks.   But then I stopped [...]

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

I can’t believe it took me 33 years to catch on to this, but this weekend I was in a hotel with the fam and we stumbled across Japanese Women’s Extreme Pro wrestling on TV. This is more or less a must see if you haven’t seen it before.
Another facet of Japanese TV [...]

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We wrapped up our little off-season conditioning trip over the weekend in fine fashion with a meal at Outback. I had the Toowoomba Pasta for those keeping score at home.
Jee-ho did another article on the Korean Cubs, this one about Coach Sung Min-kyu, and his interesting road to the big leagues. Sung is only 26 [...]

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