The following is an interview with Robert Fitts, author of Wally Yonamine: The Man who Changed Japanese Baseball. The book is published by University of Nebraska Press and is now available at Amazon.com or at WallyYonamine.com.
EWC:What attracted you to the story of Wally Yonamine to the degree that you wanted to write a book on […]

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I read an amazing story this morning, about a woman from the former East Germany, Renate Hong, separated from her North Korean husband Hong Ok-geun some 40 years ago, was granted permission by North Korea to travel to the country with their two sons and visit their husband/father. The children had never met the man, […]

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I’ve heard of Wally Yonamine and seen him mentioned in books, but never thought too much about the man some call “The Jackie Robinson” of Japanese baseball. Yonamine was the first ethnic Japanese to play professional football in America, and then following a career ending injury became the first American to play professional baseball in […]

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Danwei has a post about Ye Shumeng, a Chinese born graphic designer now living in Helsinki, who has produced a book of photography about Warrior Sneakers — an iconic Chinese-designed sneaker from the 1970s.
From Book of Warriors:
Three decades later, these sneakers are still well known among the Chinese people but they are no longer objects of […]

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Here’s a book idea I think some people have been waiting for. Bridging the Statistical Gap by Eric J. Seidman (Statistically Speaking, Fangraphs, and Baseball Prospectus) aims to serve as a fan’s first foray into sabermetrics. I did a quick interview with Eric, asking him to explain said gap, talk about his own path in baseball statistical analysis, and […]

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I haven’t read it, but there’s a new book out called The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom that I’d like to get my hands on at some point. It chronicles the life of Sinologist Joseph Needham (1900-1995), who wrote Science and […]

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I’ve been reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle for the first time in about a decade. I’ve mentioned before the title was in part the inspiration for EWC. Actually, we’d toyed with the idea of simply calling it East, and at one point there was the idea of calling it Pacific Rim Sports. My […]

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