Not exactly a new subject, but I think it’s becoming more topical because for the first time during my life in Korea I can see unification of some kind on the horizon. Like within 2 or 3 years. I named a section on my side blog Post-DPRK Collapse Theories, which was meant to be a layman’s [...]

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Fantastic article in the Japan Times about Trey Hillman’s early days as manager of the Nippon Ham Fighters. The article is an excerpt from an updated version of You Gotta Have Wa, the seminal Japanese baseball book by Robert Whiting. 
The piece (which is part 1 of 2) more-or-less documents the adaptation of Hillman to Japan, [...]

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Great article in Slate about a new book that concerns the surprisingly high number of fatalies that have happened to people while either watching or playing baseball. The book is called Death at the Ballpark: A Comprehensive Study of Game-Related Fatalities, 1862-2007.
 
It’s weirdly moving, if not exactly consoling, to learn just how many of baseball’s [...]

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Last week a man named Leonard Mlodinow was interviewed on Baseball Prospectus radio. He’s an interesting cat — his book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, has just been released in paperback, and is about how mathematical laws of randomness affect our daily lives. Fortunately he’s a big baseball fan, and even more fortunately, [...]

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Novelist Haruki Murakami, who we pay attention to around here since we took our name from one of his books, was recently given the 2009 Jerusalem Prize, Israel’s highest literary honour for foreign writers. There was apparently some controversy as to whether or not he would accept the award due to the fighting in Gaza.
I’m [...]

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I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers — The Story of Success, after having it recommended to me by a couple of people. I liked The Tipping Point a great deal, but am finding the main premise of Outliers — the idea that both great skill and random events are what create success [...]

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I recently finished reading, and when I say reading I mean listening, to a fascinating book called The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do.
The author is a marketing consultant and psychoanalyst named Clotaire Rapaille. He’s French, but he’s lived in the U.S. for [...]

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You may or may not have noticed the links in the left hand column to a site called Far Outliers, which was kind enough to post two excerpts from Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball by Robert K. Fitts, who I interviewed here.
One of the excerpts, titled American Influence on Japanese Baseball, 1953 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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