Marinerds, etc.

I've been a giant fan of Japanese college baseball since 2007, and when I was living in Japan I pretty much spent every weekend at the Tokyo Big 6 games, sitting in the front row taking photos with some friends, going outside and chatting up players after the games, getting photos with them and getting the photos I took of them autographed, and also bringing snacks for the players and jokingly offering to be everyone's English teacher.  This resulted in things like several years in a row, I had actually been out drinking with guys who got drafted, and other shenanigans.

Somewhere along the line I became somewhat obsessed with actually being there in person for a Tokyo University win again.  (I was there when they won a game in 2008, and I was there for a few ties.)  So I started prioritizing those games, and somehow my allegiance shifted from being well-known as a Hosei/Keio fangirl to a Todai fangirl.  It means I am not buddy-buddy with guys in the pros so much anymore, but the Todai guys are always the nicest, smartest, and most interesting ones anyway. Plus, since I've been working for Google for over seven years now, and we have a LOT of Todai grads, it has also been a running joke with a lot of my coworkers in the Tokyo office.

So a decade ago I wrote a post on here called The I-Lost-To-Todai Club pointing out that, since Todai basically can go whole years without winning a game, when they DO actually win, it's a big deal (the slogan on the Fall 2016 posters literally said "We make the news just by winning one game") -- but the pitchers who lose to them aren't generally crappy pitchers -- they're the ones who often end up going into the pros.

Traditionally, the Tokyo Big 6 University League has had a Rookie Tournament at the end of each semester.  For the three days following the Waseda-Keio final weekend, there would be three days of this tournament, with each day having two games.  The first day would eliminate two teams.  The second day would result in two winners and two losers; the two winners would play each other for the championship on the third day, and the two losers would play each other for 3rd place.

The rules on who could participate in the tournament was "1st and 2nd years" with no restrictions as far as I know, although in general, the purpose of the tournament was for players who wouldn't normally get playing time in league games to get a chance to play in some real games at Jingu and all, so if a team had a bunch of star freshmen, you wouldn't likely see them in the Rookie games.

On the other hand, the Rookie Tournament also gave managers the option to try interesting things -- Megumi Takemoto made her pitching debut at Jingu in the Fall 1999 Rookie Tournament as the first Japanese woman to ever take the mound in a Big 6 game.  (The first woman was American Jodi Haller who pitched an inning for Meiji in 1995.)  Two years after Takemoto's rookie debut, she would face off against Meiji's "female Matsuzaka", Chihiro Kobayashi, in a real league match.

Anyway, this year they're going to try something different and do an entire round-robin Rookie League, with 15 games total, each team playing every other team once.  These games will be played mostly on weekends before normal Big 6 games, by the same pair of teams that play the first game that day (so you can see two games of Hosei-Waseda on April 9th, for example).  The reason for this is mainly that underclassmen wouldn't really get much playing time even in the Rookie tournament, especially if they were on a team that got eliminated on the first day, so this is a way for younger players to get more playing time without sacrificing any playing time for the upperclassmen who are trying to show off in front of scouts and prospective corporate team employers.  It's almost like a farm system!

http://www.big6.gr.jp/game/rookie/2017s/2017s_rookie_schedule.html

It sounds like for Todai, upperclassmen will be allowed to fill out the team.  This is because Todai doesn't have suisen, or "athletic recommendations", as a route to attending the university and participating in sports, unlike the other 5 schools.  The other 5 schools will have plenty of freshmen on their roster -- some of whom have been training with the university team since early in February.  In a lot of these cases, they are players who played at Koshien or otherwise had bright baseball careers in high school, and were allowed into the university with either a reduced entrance exam or in some cases, no entrance exam at all, especially if they came in through a feeder high school.

Keio is the weird case in that everyone who graduates from Keio HS can automatically attend Keio University, although graduating from Keio HS is no small feat.  I've also gotten the impression that it's rare for someone to not get into Hosei or Rikkio after graduating from their feeder schools (they just don't have that many).  Whereas Waseda has many feeder schools all over the country, and so there's no guarantee that attending one will get you into Waseda.

So if you saw a star player at Koshien who didn't go into the draft, and wondered what happened to them, chances are they already got themselves accepted to a top sports college before the normal applications for admission were even open.

Todai will get freshmen on their team, once people show up at the university and decide to join the baseball team and all, but it won't be in time for the rookie league.

Here's the schedule, translated:

Date	Start Time	Matches		Regular Games After?
4/9 (Sun)	8:00am	Hosei-Waseda		H-W, M-T
4/15 (Sat)	8:00am	Todai-Keio		T-K, R-H
4/16 (Sun)	8:00am	Rikkio-Hosei		R-H, T-K
5/6 (Sat)	8:00am	Hosei-Keio		H-K, T-R
5/7 (Sun)	8:00am	Todai-Rikkio		T-R H-K
5/13 (Sat)	8:00am	Keio-Meiji		K-M, R-W
5/14 (Sun)	8:00am	Rikkio-Waseda		R-W, K-M
5/27 (Sat)	9:00am	Todai-Meiji		Soukeisen
5/28 (Sun)	9:00am	Keio-Waseda		Soukeisen
5/29 (Mon)	11:00am	Waseda-Meiji	Keio-Rikkio	No, not even Swallows
5/30 (Tue)	11:00am	Todai-Waseda	Hosei-Meiji
5/31 (Wed)	11:00am	Meiji-Rikkio	Hosei-Todai

Hi everyone. It's about 16 hours to the draft as I write this, having spent last night searching through photos for it. Yeah, I went dark all summer, but for those who know me on other outlets like Twitter and Facebook and Google+, you know that I was doing plenty of Japanese-baseball-related things all year, including some crazy trips like going to the east coast to see Darvish against Kuroda at Yankee Stadium (which, btw, I am completely never ever ever again allowed to diss the Yankees since they let me sit in Legends seats for that game and see the new stadium from an amazing perspective), seeing Uehara close a game at Fenway in my first game there, and trips to Sacramento to try to find Hiroyuki Nakajima (sitting in the dugout and not playing) and Fresno to find Kensuke Tanaka (who I got to meet, which was awesome!)

I then spent all of August and September in Japan, and while I had a vague focus on train-related things (I went all the way from Wakkanai to Makurazaki, if you know what that means) I also went to around 60 games, including a day at Koshien where I saw the Best 8 play (and sadly got myself out of the sun right before Kona Takahashi came into the game) and some awesome rural baseball adventures, a Big6 All-Star game at Kusanagi Stadium putting me up to 5 stadiums I've seen games at that Babe Ruth played at, a few WOMEN'S baseball games (including getting to meet Shingo Kawabata's sister Yuki AND also meeting the entire Kawabata family randomly), and of course re-connecting with some of my old college ballplayer buddies who are now in the pros or industrial league, and making some new college ballplayer buddies as well.

As usual, I'd love to sanitize and put some of the stories up here, but who knows if I'll have time -- I also started a new job right when I came back, at a very large search company that is taking up a LOT of my brain right now. I already warned them that I'll be staying up all night for the Japanese baseball draft tonight and will be in late tomorrow.

So, now that you've gotten a 2-paragraph summary of my year, why don't I go on to do a BIG WHOPPING PRE-DRAFT PHOTO POST! I didn't do one last year and I am a little bit sad about that. I also may not actually finish writing in descriptions for everyone before the draft starts (I'm going to just fill it in between stuff at work today). Apologies in advance.

---

Tokyo Big 6

Hosei University, Takuya Kinoshita, C

Kinoshita's a really great catcher (a lot of the pitchers at Hosei have said that) but he's not a really great batter.  I don't expect him to get drafted, but you never know.


He's built like a catcher, though, which is why the scouts have liked him for a while.


Throw to 2B


I don't know what was up with this exactly but I took a photo anyway :)

Hosei University, Naomichi Nishiura, SS

My only regret about Nishiura is that I didn't get to know him at all during his college career and is making me realize I need to be better about that.  He's a pretty solid shortstop and came from Tenri HS, where he played at Koshien in his 3rd year. I think he's been scouted since HS and even if he may not be a top-level prospect or super hotshot type, he's a fairly solid ballplayer, and I think he partially decided to file because he had a pretty great spring semester and hoped to repeat it in the fall. (Hosei's really had bad luck with hitters the last few years, it's really been all about the pitchers, and Funamoto decided to go to ENEOS next year instead of entering the draft.)





Meiji University, Hiromi Oka, RHP/1B/OF

Oh man, where to start with Oka. I remember him showing up as this big freshman kid at the Rookie Tournament who could throw like 150 km/h, and he went on to pitch for a few semesters before it became pretty clear he was a guy who was all speed and no control. However, he could HIT. I mean, really hit. He's had a .330 BA in his college career with power and has been a regular batter for most of that (I joked for a while that Meiji was lucky to not only have two of the best pitchers in the league in Oka and Yamasaki but to also have two of the best HITTERS in the league in Oka and Yamasaki). I would really expect some team to take him just because he's a big guy with a hell of an arm and he's got a lot of raw power that could be turned into something, if nothing else, sort of like Takumi Kohbe was a project for the Marines.


I swear I have better photos of him pitching but this was the best I could find.



Waseda University, Takaaki Yokoyama, RHP

I actually have no idea where Yokoyama-kun fits into the grand scheme of things. I really liked him when he was in high school (he was actually considered a decent prospect for the 2009 draft out of Seiko Gakuin up in Fukushima and I remember seeing him interviewed on TV during some Koshien) and then he went to Waseda, so I stopped liking him as much.  He's been injured a bunch, but when he's been healthy he's been a pretty good pitcher. I've heard rumors that Rakuten plans to take him for the local boy factor, but who knows.



Keio University, Akihiro Hakumura, RHP
Hakumura was kind of a big deal coming out of high school because he could throw 148 km/h even back then.  He went on to Keio University where he started out fairly strong, but then kind of ran into a roadblock halfway and went on to be somewhat mediocre (IMO, at least compared to what people were expecting of him).  His control actually seemed to get worse through his college career.  I think some teams see him as a tall dude who can throw really fast and may draft him anyway, hoping a good pitching coach can work out his problems.

I have a few friends who were classmates of his at Keio in both HS and university and they uniformly have said he's a jerk, but I've never met him so I don't really know.  (The fact that I never met him despite knowing a lot of his teammates may say something in itself.)

---

Tohto League

Asia University, Allen Kuri, RHP

Probably one of the more interesting people in this draft as far as I'm concerned. He's half-Japanese, his father was a minor-league shortstop in the US, and he actually started playing baseball with a Tampa Bay Rays little league when he was in 3rd grade. It sounds like he came back to Japan in 6th grade and was in Tottori, so some places report his hometown as Tottori and some report it as Florida. He is extremely lucky to look mostly Japanese -- I've seen him pitch for several years and never actually realized he was half until I saw his first name (亜蓮, which is "aren", but it's weird enough that I investigated to see for sure if it was kanji for the English name) It honestly shouldn't surprise me given how many other talented half-Japanese guys have come out of Asia University in recent years -- Robert Boothe, Krissada Shirakura, Bruno Hirata, etc.

Anyway, Asia University has won the Tohto League for 5 consecutive semesters, and Kuri has been in the rotation and has a W-L record of 18-4 in those semesters. It's possible he's getting helped by being surrounded by a decent team and all, but he's also got an ERA of like 1.60 in that time, so... yeah. I wonder if he'll be courted by an MLB team (like Boothe was by the Dodgers) if he doesn't get drafted? He's a pretty big kid at 6'3" 200ish and can throw 90mph.





Asia University, Hiroki Minei, C

I would be really surprised if Minei doesn't get drafted. Not only was he a regular catcher at Asia pretty much from his freshman year, but he's also from Okinawa Shogaku (Koshien stronghouse and highschool of current pro players Ishimine, Hiyane, and Higashihama). He caught Higashihama when they went to Koshien and then again in college, and then Minei became team captain this year, and just like some other guys who suddenly get it into their head that being captain means being a superstar, he exploded into batting .361/.439/.528 this spring and is currently at a .357/.437/.571 clip for the fall.




Toyo University, Takaaki Nohma, LHP

I dunno what to say about Nohma. He's kinda like Fujioka or Inui but not as good. On the other hand he came from a legendary Toin Gakuen high school team -- legendary in that almost everyone on their team went on to have fantastic college careers and SEVERAL became team captains at their respective schools, including Nohma. He's kind of Toyo's post-Fujioka lefty ace -- when he isn't being injured, anyway.




Rissho University, Yuta Yoshida, C

I've been a Yoshida fan for a really really long time even if I haven't been all that vocal about it. He was Nichidai Sanko captain back in 2009 when I first saw them at Koshien, and then he went to Rissho, where he pretty much became the team's regular catcher from his freshman year on. He came to the US as a sophomore for the US-Japan tourney, which is where I met him as the bullpen catcher and fangirled on him about Sanko. I caught up with him a semester or two later and gave him some photos from the US tourney and had him sign one, and he already looked kind of different -- like I asked a teammate where he was, and the guy basically said "oh, Yoshida's over there", I went to talk to him, and momentarily honestly wasn't sure it was the right guy because he was... bigger. He was listed as 182/84 in the summer of 2011 and as 182/94 by the fall of 2012. 10kg or 22 pounds really does make a big difference in a guy's physique.


In July 2011.

In September 2013.

Other College (US-Japan)

I'm trying to mostly put up photos that I didn't put up in 2011 when I photoposted the US-Japan games.

Kyushu Kyoritsu University, Daichi Ohsera, RHP

It was incredibly embarrassing remembering seeing Ohsera at the US-Japan game and realizing I'd not posted any photos of him -- because he didn't appear in any of the games I saw! But I did have a few of him, since he's a really tall guy and I did watch him throw in the bullpen a little so I did notice him. Alas, I've not seen him pitch for real pretty much since Koshien 2009, but he's a top top top top top pick in this year's draft, so it's only a matter of who wins the lottery, not whether he gets drafted.





Fukuoka Universty, Ryutaro Umeno, C

I really liked Umeno and even as a sophomore he was the starting catcher for the national team in 2011. Seems he has also only gotten better since then.



With Takahiro Fujioka. I'd love to see this battery together again someday :)

Fuji University, Hodaka Yamakawa, 3B

One of my friends who is a scout was at the 2011 US-Japan games and we saw Yamakawa hit a grand slam home run straight out of Durham Park. That was impressive. Yamakawa also turned out to be a really goofy kid when I talked to him. I'd really hoped to see him again sometime in Japan, but it just was never convenient since he doesn't play in Tokyo and I'm not around for the summer tourneys. He has been SOLID in college though, with a .304/.431/.460 line, 9 homers, in 9 semesters as he's been a regular pretty much since his first semester. My friend every now and then has asked me where Yamakawa is in the pros now -- not sure he realized that he was only a sophomore that year! I guess we'll see what happens today.




Yokohama Shokadai, Yuta Iwasada, LHP

Industrial League

JR Higashinihon, Kazumasa Yoshida, RHP

Yoshida is expected to be a super-high pick in this year's draft too. I only saw him play a little bit at the Industrial-Big6 tourney in April and not very much at that, unfortunately.




JX-ENEOS, Motoshi Ohshiro, LHP

I'd seen Ohshiro pitch a whole bunch of times for ENEOS over the last few years, and he's been on the cover of a whole bunch of Grand Slam magazines and whatnot. My best guess on why he hasn't been drafted is because he's seriously barely taller than I am, because he's GOOD. I don't think I've ever seen him have a bad outing. Anyway, this fall at Kamagaya I went to see the ENEOS team play the Fighters ni-gun, and of course I went to say hi to all the old Big 6 guys like Mikami, Yamasaki, etc, and then I also approached Ohshima to see if he'd sign one of the photos I'd printed out, and not only did he compliment my photography but he even perfectly remembered the game I'd taken it from and was super-sweet and funny! We got a photo together and sure enough, we're about the same height. I don't really expect him to get drafted this time around either, but I'd be overjoyed if he did.





JX-ENEOS, Tomoya Mikami, RHP

I've known Mikami far too long to be objective about him, I think I first met him in the fall of 2009 when he was a sophomore at Hosei and had been converted from an infielder into a pitcher, to take advantage of his arm and his huge height (190cm, he even towers over me). He didn't enter the draft when he graduated in 2011 because he wanted to "explore his options" a bit more, but when I saw him at the same Kamagaya game I asked him what he was up to now and whether he wanted to be drafted and his reply was something to the effect of "Yeah, I wouldn't mind getting drafted this year." So I hope he does :)

Kinda surprised I haven't seen ANY coverage of this in English, so as usual I guess it's my job to write about the Tokyo Big 6 happenings :)  Of course this had to happen right AFTER I came back to the US!

This past Sunday, in front of a relatively small crowd (reported as 2000), left-handed pitcher Yuhei Takanashi of Waseda University pitched the 3rd perfect game in Tokyo Big 6 history, against Tokyo University (not too surprising).  The game took slightly less than 2 hours and Waseda won 3-0.

What I find hilarious is that Waseda Sports has an article about the game with interviews with the players and all, but the only boxscore they attach is the WASEDA box, which is of course NOT the interesting one.  How annoying. I basically went and found someone's written box score on Twitter and transcribed it (the interesting half):

Waseda 3 - 0 Tokyo
Sunday, April 21, 2013

                      1  2  3   4  5  6   7  8  9   R  H  E
Tokyo                 0  0  0   0  0  0   0  0  0   0  0  0
Waseda                0  0  2   0  0  1   0  0  x   3  5  0

Tokyo               AB  R  H RB  K BB SH SB  E     1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9
Shimojima, 3b        3  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0    G3 .. .. G3 .. .. G3 .. ..
Iida, 2b             3  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0    f3 .. .. G3 .. .. G1 .. ..
Kurozawa, 1b         3  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0    G3 .. .. F8 .. .. F9 .. ..
Arii, rf             3  0  0  0  1  0  0  0  0    .. KS .. .. F8 .. .. f5 ..
Kasahara, c          3  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0    .. f5 .. .. L5 .. .. G4 ..
Agata, lf            3  0  0  0  1  0  0  0  0    .. F9 .. .. F7 .. .. KC ..
Sawada, cf           3  0  0  0  2  0  0  0  0    .. .. KS .. .. KC .. .. G6
Nakasugi, ss         2  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0    .. .. G5 .. .. G5 .. .. ..
  Iijima, ph         1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0    .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. F2
Tatsui, p            1  0  0  0  1  0  0  0  0    .. .. KS .. .. .. .. .. ..
  Nagafuji, ph       1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0    .. .. .. .. .. F4 .. .. ..
  Shirasago, p       0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0    .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
  Nishiki, ph        1  0  0  0  1  0  0  0  0    .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. KS

Waseda              IP   NP  BF   H  HR   K  BBH  RA  ER
Takanashi (win)      9  109  27   0   0   6   0   0   0

There are various articles around with photos and whatnot: sponichi nikkan sports

The last guy to throw a perfect game in Tokyo Big 6 was Satoshi Kamishige, who threw one for Rikkio on October 22, 2000. He's now an announcer for NTV.

I've had this post sitting in the "draft" state for almost a year. How silly.

Anyway, I was a huge fan of the Nichidai San HS team that managed to win the Jingu Taikai in fall 2010 and the entirety of Koshien in the summer of 2011, as can be seen in back posts under the Sanko 畔上組 label on here. I first saw them play at said Jingu Taikai and fell in love, then went to Senbatsu in Spring 2011 and sat behind their dugout, and then cheered for them all the way through Koshien, from afar, while working in San Francisco.

So when I went back to Japan in the spring of 2012, of course I had to go hunt down as many of the Sanko boys as possible in their new college digs. Fortunately, most of them were at easily accessible colleges, so here's some photos/details about the Sanko Nine.  (Technically, this post should be called Two Years Later in terms of details, but the photos are all One Year Later, so...)

#1: Pitcher Kentaro Yoshinaga.  College: Waseda.



I was totally in love with Yoshinaga when he was pitching for Sanko, and it was pretty painful for me to watch him go to my least favorite college team, almost like watching a player I love get drafted by the Giants.  Even worse, they gave him Saitoh's old #16 and basically started calling him "the new Golden Boy".  And EVEN worse, he's living up to it -- his freshman year line is a gorgeous 7-2, 1.79 with 71 strikeouts in 70.1 innings.　(And batting .385 while doing so -- you'd think he was trying to outdo Sachiya Yamasaki at being the next Sanko Double Threat.)　He was the front cover of Shube's 大学野球 magazine for the Fall 2012 semester, and there was a 15-page article on "Sanko Boys: The Amazing Freshmen", with 8 pages on Yoshinaga alone, comparing him to Saitoh, among other things.

Anyway, his fans are nowhere near as annoying as Saitoh's fans were, and I think I'm finally feeling slightly less heartbroken about him being at Waseda.  Except when he pitches against Hosei, of course.

#2: Catcher Takahiro Suzuki.  College: Rikkio.



Suzuki's crowning moment in the Senbatsu 2011 was when he actually split his lip while making an amazing play at the plate, had a towel to his mouth to catch the blood... and was back in the game catching and kicking ass again a few minutes later.

Unfortunately, he hasn't had much of an impact at college yet, only appearing in 3 official games, and not even getting an at-bat in any of them.  I was even at one of the games, on October 7... of course, I was sitting in the Hosei cheering section.  Rikkio hasn't had a lot of luck with catchers in recent years since Yuki Maeda left, so hopefully Suzuki-kun will catch on soon enough.

#3 First Baseman Ryoya Kaneko.  College: Hosei.

Actually, so Kaneko was a year behind the rest of the Sanko Nine, and so he spent 2012 still in high school, as captain of this year's Sanko team, which didn't go to Senbatsu, did go to summer Koshien, and lost their first game to Seiko Gakuin (though Kaneko himself hit a solo homer in the 9th to bring a 2-0 game to a 2-1 game).  It will be super-interesting to have two consecutive Sanko captains at Hosei this year (with Azegami there as well), along with the fact that Hosei's captain this year is Kanji Kawai, who was on the 2009 champion Chukyodai Chukyo team.

#4: Second Baseman Kenichi Suganuma.  College: Asia... except he dropped out and is actually entering Nittaidai (Japan Sport Science) college in the fall.




I still have absolutely no idea what the hell happened here.  He made it onto the bench for Asia's team as a freshman, probly on his Sanko credentials, I saw him at a game and took this photo (he didn't play but was on the sidelines) and then never heard of him entering any of their games at all throughout the year, and in the fall he wasn't even listed as being in Asia's baseball club roster at all.  I asked Azegami about it when I had a chance to talk to him in the fall and he was like "I'm not sure, but I think he might have dropped out?"

Anyway, rumor is he's joining the Nittaidai team which has several of his former Sanko teammates, including Taniguchi, so maybe that will be good for him.

#5 Third Baseman Toshitake Yokoo.  College: Keio.



Yokoo was the cleanup batter for that Sanko team, and he did hit a pretty scary number of home runs in high school, and he idolized Seibu's Okawari-kun.

He hasn't been smashing the snot out of the ball quite as much in college -- to the tune of a .196/.316/.393 line for the year with only 2 homers -- but Keio's manager Etoh has been basically letting Yokoo go out there and bat 5th in the lineup for every game.  I guess we'll see how he fills out in college.  I didn't really see him play much, but his swing looked just like it did in high school, so I'm not sure what's up.

#6 Shortstop Koki Shimizu.  College: Nichidai.



Bizarrely the only one of the main 9 Nichidai Sanko boys to actually go to Nichidai (Nihon University).  Unfortunately for Shimizu, first Nichidai fell from the top Tohto League to 2nd League in the fall, and he didn't get enough playing time to end up on the league's stats site, so I'm not entirely sure how he did (though I should probably do more webstalking to figure it out sometime).

#7 Left Fielder Yuta Taniguchi.  College: Nittaidai.

Unfortunately, Nittai is in a league I just don't go to see, so I didn't stalk Taniguchi.  Maybe some other time.

#8 Center Fielder and Captain, Sho Azegami.  College: Hosei.



The great thing for Azegami going to Hosei is that he got to experience them winning the Big 6 League in the fall.  The bad thing is that he was going to a team that was fairly strong and so he barely got any playing time in the spring at all, though a decent amount in the fall.  Still, his attitude seemed to be pretty much "I'm a freshman, I know that if I work hard I'll get playing time and to contribute to the team later."

Fun fact: Azegami was 6-for-16 (.375) with 1 strikeout while I was in Japan for the first 3 series of the fall.  Then he was 0-for-8 with 4 strikeouts for the remainder of the semester after I went home.  Conclusion: for Azegami's sake, I should consider moving back to Tokyo.

#9 Right Fielder Shun Takayama.  College: Meiji.



I'm going to say something that might sound ridiculous, but I feel like Takayama could easily be the next version of Hayata Itoh (wrong HS/college, but whatever).  He's tall and built extremely well, can hit for power AND speed from the left side, is a decent outfielder, etc.  His first semester in Big 6 he hit .417 and the only reason he didn't get the batting title is because Keio's Agata went on a tear and hit .447.  His batting average went down a little bit in the fall but he hit his first college homer and also walked a bit more.

Seriously, I think Takayama might be the second-most likely to go pro after college out of these nine as of right now (Yoshinaga seems to be the most likely).  Though, Sanko doesn't usually produce that many pro players, oddly enough, so who knows.

Bonus pictures: I actually met some of these guys!



This was after an exhibition game of Keio vs. Sega Sammy.  Yokoo seemed sort of very WTF when I was like "can I get a photo with you please please please I'm a huge fan" but Daisuke Takeuchi (who, BTW, had been kinda picking on Yokoo in the dugout during the game -- bet it's some form of freshman hazing) was like "Sure, no problem, we can take a photo". And being a freshman, Yokoo had to listen to his senior. Ha! I am figuring that later on Daisuke explained to him "don't worry, the gaijin is harmless, she goes to a ton of our games". I gotta say, he won a bazillion "good guy" points with me that day.



Shun Takayama. This was after Opening Day vs. Todai.  I'd actually briefly met Takayama when he was still in high school, actually, when I recognized him outside Jingu and talked to him a little.  I asked for a photo then but he said "sorry, I'm not really supposed to".  This time he really had no excuse, especially after one of my Meiji superfan friends said "You have no idea how much this girl loved your Koshien team, she's going back to the US tomorrow" and so he was like "ok, fine, I guess". Hence the kind of grumpy look, but I was really happy to meet him.



So yeah, being as Hosei is my favorite college team and I have the most context and fan cred there, it was only a matter of time before I'd meet Sho Azegami.  While I was introduced to him briefly in the spring with several other Hosei freshmen, this picture was actually taken during the fall semester.  I told him what a huge fan I was and how happy I was he came to Hosei.  The other guy with his eyes closed is Akihiro Wakabayashi from Toin Gakuen.

Actually, this is just me being too tired to write ANYTHING about the four games I attended this weekend, where Waseda won both of the Soukeisen games (6-2 and 4-2) and Yakult won on Saturday night 3-2 but the Giants won on Sunday night 6-2.

This is my favorite photo I took all weekend:



Waseda's Shota Sugiyama slides headfirst into 3rd base for a triple. It's really rare to see a headslide from the "oh my god he's flying towards us!" perspective!

Well, even though I wasn't in Japan for most of this year, myself and my camera have gone to an awful lot of amateur baseball games over the years anyway, especially local college games, so here's a few of the guys who submitted letters for this year's draft. (I'll be updating this as the afternoon goes on to take my mind off being nervous. And then I'll move the liveblogging post to the top.)

Tokyo Big 6

Hayata Itoh, Keio University, OF

I used to write a ton about Itoh and nicknamed him "Clutchy McClutchitude" because he always came through for the team in big situations. He's often compared to Atsunori Inaba because he's an outfielder from Chukyodai Chukyo who bats lefty for power and average, has a good arm and speed and so on.

He's a pretty smart guy overall, and he knows Pi to 115 places. And in the spring he missed the batting Triple Crown by ONE HIT. But this semester he's been kind of erratic, and I'm really not sure what's up with that. A few weeks ago there was a game where a whole bunch of close umpiring calls went against Keio, culminating in a guy getting tagged out by being punched in the head basically, and Itoh and Etoh-kantoku both were really angry about it, to the point that Itoh wasn't even bowing to the umpires before each at-bat like he used to, and didn't have the team line up and bow to the stands, and that one day, snuck out of Jingu so he wouldn't have to face fans or press! (Seriously.)

Anyway, he's a veritable superstar and should do pretty well in the pros. He hits for power and average and has a really sweet swing. Over his college career he's also really filled out a lot more and really looks like, well, a baseball player. I don't think he'll be a cleanup batter in the pros, and I'm not even sure he'll have as good a rookie year as, say, Shota Ishimine, but he'll do fine. (I'd love to eat those words, but the fact is, if he DOES get drafted by a team like Hanshin, he's unlikely to get a lot of playing time his first year, you know?)




The swing.


At the USA-Japan tournament.


This is one of my favorite photos I ever took of him -- he's standing at 3rd base during Soukeisen talking trash with Waseda's Ayuki Matsumoto (the Baystars' Keijiro's little brother)

Yusuke Nomura, Meiji Univ, RHP

I've also talked about Nomura a lot, being as the first time I ever saw him pitch was in Koshien 2007. He was the Koryo HS ace and was considered fairly unstoppable, until he ran up against the Miracle Saga Kita team and ran out of steam in the 8th inning and Hiroshi Soejima hit that grand slam and well, that's history.

Nomura has had a fairly awesome college career in Big 6 though; he pitched 34 scoreless innings as a freshman to get the ERA title then and also got the ERA title last spring. He just got his 30th win last weekend and he passed 300 strikeouts during the 2011 spring semester. Almost all of the pitchers who accomplished that in Big 6 have gone pro and most have had successful careers. I suspect Nomura will too -- he's been very solid his entire time, never misses a game, never gets injured, always strikes out a ton of guys and never walks anyone. He's not huge and he's not going to ever throw 150+, but his control is great and he's got a very stoic manner on the mound.




As you can see, he's VERY consistent in his form. I have so many photos of him that look exactly the same that it's hard to choose one. The top is from the fall 2011 semester and the bottom is from the Japan-US tournament.


Here's how I'll always remember him, actually -- he has this habit while standing on the sidelines of tossing a ball up and down in the air, almost like juggling, so here he is on the mound doing the same thing.

Just for fun:



Nomura during his sophomore year. Clearly younger, but not much else has changed about him. He's simply consistent.

Shogo Shibata, Meiji University, LHP

Shogo has an amazing story -- he suffers from Behçet's disease, an incurable immunodeficiency, which he was diagnosed with when he was in junior high school. But he entered Aikodai Meiden HS anyway (you may recognize that as Ichiro's alma mater) and worked as hard as he could given the disease he was facing, and his 3rd year he pitched at Koshien. Then he entered Meiji University, and has been trying his best, but of course has also been in the shadow of many other pitchers there, what with being the same year as Nomura.

(There was a TV special about him when he was in high school. You can watch it on Youtube starting here).

I don't think Shogo will get drafted unless some team does it for the story, like Chunichi, but he IS a decent lefty pitcher and a really nice guy too. There was an article about him in Shube this past week how he basically is entering the draft because he wants to follow his dream and refuses to ever run away from things no matter how unlikely or difficult they are.





Hiroaki Shimauchi, Meiji University, OF

I haven't talked about Shimauchi much. This has been a gross mistake on my part. He has very quietly managed to have 3 amazing semesters playing for Meiji as a lefty-batting lefty-throwing outfielder from Seiryo HS, who sometimes even gets compared to being a "smaller Matsui". He put up a 1.064 OPS in the fall 2010 semester but didn't play during opening weekend and so didn't qualify for the batting leaders. He put up a .954 OPS in the spring 2011 semester, good enough for 4th, and his .385 BA was good enough for 3rd. He put up a .959 OPS this semester, with a league-leading 16 walks (the only way anyone's catching that during Soukeisen is if they walk EVERY TIME THEY COME TO THE PLATE pretty much) and a home run. (Oh, and 2 strikeouts against those 16 walks.)

It kinda sucks that I never actually got to know Shimauchi, since I did get to know a bunch of the other 4th-year Meiji players, and he seems like a nice guy. I gave him a bunch of photos last week and got him to sign one and told him good luck in the draft and all, and he seemed surprised but happy. We'll see what happens.







Keisuke Okazaki, Rikkio University, IF

I honestly don't know what's going to happen to Okazaki in this draft. I could see reasons for him getting drafted: he's been a consistently good batter in his last 2 years of Big 6, including leading the league in OPS by far this semester with an 1.184 as well as being the batting champion at .424. He was Rikkio's captain this year and they've actually done better this year than they had in a while. He played 2nd base for a long time, though has been mostly at 1st this year. He's from PL Gakuen HS and was on that same team as Kenta Maeda, they were both regulars from their freshman year. He has some power and he has a decent glove.

On the other hand, I've met Okazaki several times, and we even got a photo together in the US, and he is barely bigger than me, and I mean both heightwise and weightwise. (I'm 5'7".) In Japan that doesn't actually matter as much as it would in the US, but I don't think Okazaki runs enough to make up for his small frame. And of course, there have been lots of Big 6 batting champs who haven't made it to the pros, or did make it and haven't been all that great there.

On the other other hand, I never expected Fumiya Araki to get drafted last year, and look how that worked out! So who knows.


(I am mostly showing off my mad photo-taking luck here.)





Shohei Habu, Waseda University, OF

A teammate of Nomura's during that Koshien 2007, Habu has been a consistently decent player over his years at Waseda, though he hasn't been stellar this year per se. Still, he's a Waseda outfielder who bats lefty and can run, so there may be teams interested in him. Or not.

Tohto League

Daichi Suzuki, Toyo University, SS

Toyo captain, national team captain as well. Decent shortstop, decent lefty batter. My impression of him personality-wise is that he's kind of a jackass, but that's not really fair. He comes from Toin Gakuen HS, which is a nice academic and baseball pedigree to have.





Takahiro Fujioka, Toyo University, LHP

My favorite player going into the draft. He's tall, left-handed, throws 150 km/h (for reals, not this Jingu gun stuff), strikes out a ton of batters, throws a ton of complete games, goes to the mound with a smile on his face no matter what the situation, and has a great personality in general. In short, he's like a left-handed Kagami, but actually probably better in that his mechanics are less likely to get him injured and his manager isn't an idiot in overusing him.

(I have a few more photos of him in a preseason game post from the Hosei grounds, where I met him for the first time, and the US-Japan tourney. I also have a whole ton of photos of him from earlier, back to April 2009, that I never posted. Whoops.)





Takuya Uchiyama, Toyo University, RHP





Kyosuke Takagi, Kokugakuin University, LHP

Other Leagues

Tomoyuki Sugano, Tokai University, RHP

Widely regarded as the best pitcher in this draft, Sugano is the nephew of Giants manager Tatsunori Hara, and there's a good chance that ONLY the Giants will take him, like with Sawamura last year. Lame, but at least it means Fujioka won't go to the Giants.


Pre-season game at Meiji university's grounds (this is when I met him and got a photo together)


2010 All-Japan national collegiate tournament.


2011 US-Japan tournament in North Carolina.

Shotaro Tashiro, Hachinohe University, OF

Kinda another Shogo Akiyama type, though probably a little more on the speed and less on the boom. These are from the same 2010 All-Japan tournament. I have a lot of photos of him, though I'm not sure why. Something must have struck me as intriguing about him at the time, maybe it's the way he puts his arms together when he bats? I just don't remember at this point.