The runner up in the first season of the League of the Rising Sun, the Out of the Park Baseball league I play in, needs an owner. Anyone game? The team is the Niihama-shi Ghosts, who are based in Gifu and have a rabid fan base. It’s a good franchise that’s poised to compete every year. And, as [...]

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Over the weekend my wife and I took the ferry from Busan to Fukuoka, Japan. It’s about a 3 hour trip across the Sea of Japan and the waters this time of year can be pretty rough. That combined with the fact that the boats were at about 10% occupancy due to swine flu fears [...]

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Seems like you can find this kind of article pretty easily these days — here’s Tom Seaver blowing his top in regards to the way the Yankees are protecting Joba Chamberlain’s arm. Seaver thinks the Yankees are doing Joba a diservice by keeping him on such strict pitch and innings counts. I guess time will [...]

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Another interesting Asian baseball quandary has been posed in the online Out of the Park Baseball Japanese league I play in. It concerns naturalizing the citizenship of foreign players so that they don’t count against the league’s foreign player limit. In the League of the Rising Sun teams are currently allowed six foreign “mercenaries” (as [...]

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Last night I had an interesting talk with an professor of economics from UC Santa Cruz. He’s here teaching a summer class at a university in Seoul and was in Busan with a mutual friend. Economics and baseball cross paths often, something I realized a few years ago when economists like Andrew Zimbalist kept popping [...]

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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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Well, in a highly debatable move I’m going to link to a story I wrote for my new Out of the Park Baseball online league. This is essentially fan fiction, something I’ve always found to be a little curious and, um, lame.
I won’t normally do this, but this particular story is kind of an interesting [...]

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