This might seem like a stretch to some, but I think playing extra-circular baseball-related games, both fantasy baseball and strategy-based board and computer games like ABPA and now Out of the Park Baseball, has helped me immensely with what I’m doing now in international scouting.
These games don’t relate directly to, say, spotting a batter’s [...]

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If you watched Daisuke Matsuzaka start for the Red Sox you saw a guy throwing dying quails, holding his hand on his hip. Obviously not fit to pitch. 
He’s since been placed on the DL with arm fatigue, and even though most sports writers have the attention spans of gnats, they haven’t forgotten Dice K featured prominently [...]

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Wha?
Let’s go ahead and say it: The Asian style of baseball is the boring way to win — but win nonetheless. Watching Japan vs. Team USA, it felt like USA was the A.L. team and Japan was the N.L. team. I swear Davey Johnson looked like Earl Weaver for a minute, waiting for a three-run [...]

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I had a funny conversation with a friend tonight during which I told him who Ichiro was. He’s not Korean or Japanese, but Canadian, and even though he tangentially follows baseball through EWC, he’s not a baseball fan and had no idea who Ichiro was. 
As we ate daegi-guk-bab (pork stew) the news played on a big [...]

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Sure, once it’s over it’s easy to look back at key points in a game and critisize managerial decisions — but since when does it make sense to throw strikes with two outs, runners on second and third with first base open?
Oh yeah, and with one of the greatest hitters in baseball history up at [...]

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What can you say? The one-and-only Ichiro went 4-for-6 with 2 RBI–including the game-winner with a two-run single in the top of the tenth–as Japan beat Korea in an extra-inning nail-biter to repeat as World Baseball Classic champions.
An erratic Yu Darvish blew a 3-2 lead in the bottom of the ninth in relief of [...]

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Apparently unmoved by some of the most electric baseball in the world, sportswriter Chris Ruddick is the proud recipient of today’s “EWC Provincial Jackass of the Day Award” for his astoundingly stupid column entitled “Is the WBC over yet?“.
While the rest of the world was glued to quite possibly one of the greatest baseball games [...]

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For what seems like the thirteenth time in the last two weeks, Japan and Korea will duke it out in the WBC. This time it’s for all the marbles, as Japan’s Iwakuma Hisashi takes the hill against Korea’s Bong Jung-keun in the title match. Bong is shooting for his third straight victory against [...]

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I decided sometime after Korea won the Olympic gold meal in baseball that I was going to make the 2009 World Baseball Classic part of EWC going forward. Afterall, with Korean baseball becoming a focal point of world baseball, it seemed to make sense to add my two cents, and so I started writing the [...]

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Mercenaries…carpetbaggers…no heart, no soul…only care about their pro clubs…heart’s not in it….oh, but wait a minute, the U.S. flashed it today with a big time come back.  We all saw it, but in case you live in a cave and missed it, here’s the recap.  Maybe Aaron lit a fire under their arse with his [...]

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How psyched are the Koreans? For the second time during this WBC, the Koreans outplayed Japan, this time bringing it to poster boy Yu Darvish in the first inning. And as seen above, for the second time in two WBCs Korea (literally) planted the flag on the mound. Starter Bong Jeung-kung was [...]

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Nice looking photo stream from yesterday’s Cuba/Mexico game. One of the advantages of having so much Korean (and I assume Japanese) media down in San Diego. I don’t find these things so commonly in the American media. They must exist — maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.
I hate to say it, but things could [...]

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A couple of gems dug up by Matt, from 화이팅!:True Stories of Korean Baseball. For the record, I’d planned on posting these and linking to 화TSOKB before I ripped Matt’s writing style to shreds in my last post. Who says bloggers help each other out?
Anyway, I’m not a big fan of Engrish jokes, and I’m [...]

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I’m not a big fan of game breakdowns with a lot of bold type. I think it’s a lazy way to make articles feel longer than they are. That said, if I was one of those types of writers, I would include something like this:
It was over when:
Korea, with runners on first and second and [...]

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Nice day for Asian baseball, eh? Unfortunately, the Cuba/Japan game started in the middle of the night for me, so I only caught the last few innings. But I went back later to try and see what went wrong with Aroldis Chapman, whose line of 2 1/3 IP, 3 H, 3 ER, 3 BB and [...]

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I know it’s baseball. It’s not life or death. But if you are American, and you would just as soon see the American team put a product on the field that’s worth your time, I have to ask you…
Are you satisfied?
If you don’t like Team USA you are most definitely satisfied. The team is now [...]

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I haven’t been paying much attention to the “the WBC is fun/not fun” articles, outside of the occasional Twitter. If you don’t like the WBC you probably don’t really like baseball are probably interested in the sport for reasons you aren’t completely aware of. It could be something that happened in your childhood or maybe [...]

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“But in all that what truth will there be… he’ll know nothing…the air is full of cries”
-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
While the WBC moves forward, in Taiwan the aftermath of the national team’s dismal WBC showing has given rise to an unintentionally hilarious media war of finger-pointing, accusations, and tragically off-base quotes from various baseball [...]

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Most dominating performance by a starting pitcher in the WBC? Aroldis Chapman? Possibly. Yu Darvish vs. China? Not really given the competition. It’s got to be Ubaldo Jimenez, who set a WBC record for 10 strikeouts (out of 12 batters) over just four innings. He set the first seven consecutive batters down on strikes.
But as [...]

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Here’s an overzealous and masked Japanese fan, breaking out a mirror during the first at-bat of yesterday’s Korea/Japan game in an attempt to distract Korean pitcher Bong Jung-keun. Hey now. (See Simon’s comment below. It’s actually an ID and a woman wearing a cotton mask). 

If you were watching at the start of the game, you might [...]

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