NPB Tracker

This is part five in a multi-part series. Previous entries:

• English-language news sources and blogs on Japanese baseball
• English-language online Pro Yakyu communities
• Watching Pro Yakyu games online
• English-language Twitter accounts to follow

This is most likely the last one of these I will do, unless I can come up with a great idea that isn’t covered yet.

Okay, so you’ve read the first four entries in this series and you’re studying up on your Nihongo. Now it’s time to test yourself with some Japanese-language sources. Here’s what I use.

Mainstream Media

The site I rely most heavily on, by a wide margin, is Yahoo Japan’s NPB site. Yahoo has pretty much everything needed to follow NPB: box scores, stats, game casts, and news articles (amazingly, they even linked to me once — I wish I taken a screen shot of that).

For day to day news, I’m in the habit of making Sanspo my next stop. I can’t necessarily say it’s superior to the main alternatives, Nikkan Sports and Sponichi, I just tend to prefer it’s more photo-centric user interface.

My favorite print publication is the bible of Japanese baseball, Shukan Baseball (En: Weekly Baseball), which I’ve been reading since I found a copy at a kiosk on a train platform in Osaka, 14 years ago. Shu-be has gotten it together with a bit of a web presence in the last year or so, centered around it’s iPhone application (search the App Store for 週刊ベースボール). The app content is also viewable through a browser, though in practice I don’t do this much.

When it comes to player movement news and rumors, Nikkan Sports is by far the most accurate when it comes to scoops. I’ve come to take whatever I read on Sponichi with a large quantity of salt. Sanspo falls somewhere in the middle. Other regional sites will occasionally pop on to my radar, but I pretty much ignore them unless they have a quote given on the record by one of the principles in the story.

Blogs

Once upon a time, I could have given you a great list of Japanese-language baseball blogs. Then Google killed Google Reader, and though I exported my data, I haven’t replicated it anywhere else yet. But that won’t stop me from sharing these four excellent site:

• Draft Report is basically my one-stop shop for information on Japanese draft prospects. This is a fantastic site.
• DeltaGraphs is one of the few attempts I’ve seen an Fangraphs-style Sabermetrics site focused on NPB.
• NPB Prospect Watch seems to be on hiatus, but is the only site I know of that focuses mainly on professional prospects.
• Bays-tan is perhaps the most uniquely Japanese of the blogs here. It’s a serial manga based on scarcely identifiable characters that support the Yokohama DeNA Baystars. I don’t spend a lot of time reading this, but I admire the creativity that’s been put into it.

These sites are all high quality, and great when I want some in-depth insight on a particular topic. For day to day stuff I find myself increasingly drawn to..

2ch

2channel, mostly known as 2ch, is Japan’s largest bulletin board/link sharing site, and from what I understand, the direct inspiration for 4chan.

2ch is a bit of a cesspool and has a horrid user interface, but I overlook these shortcomings, because it’s a great way to find out what average fans think, and there are many more usable sites (matome sites) that exist simply to archive the better content from 2ch.

Before I share any links to anything 2ch-related, let me offer a bit of a warning… you’ll tend to find adult content and other possibly objectionable stuff on 2ch sites, so exercise caution, particularly in work environments.

With that out of the way, 非常識 is always my starting point for 2ch content, along with this link site. Just looking at a random sampling of today’s links, we find…

• Rakuten Card Man throwing out the first pitch at an Eagles game.
• Stills from a TV program about Yu Darvish’s fitness-nut lifestyle.
• This year’s attendance numbers so far.

There are always other oddities, like users creating batting lineups consisting only of Masahiro Kawai, but time constraints prevent me from digging too much for stuff like that.

So, that’s what I do. If you’re a veteran Japanese speaking baseball fan, probably none of this is new to you. If you’re learning Japanese, or want to start, try not to be daunted by the scale of stuff to learn. I was at first, but once I learned to stop being discouraged by what I didn’t know, and started being encouraging by each new thing I learned, it started to go pretty well.

This is part four in a multi-part series. Part one on English-language news sources and blogs on Japanese baseball can be found here; part two on online communities is here; part three on watching games online is here.

After having this is draft mode for over a month it’s time to finally kick this one over the finish line.

Despite, or maybe because of, it’s limitations, Twitter has become a ubiquitous part of the media. To cite an off-topic example, I was watching a boxing match last week, and the broadcast included the ring announcer’s Twitter handle, right beneath where his name was shown on the screen.

Japanese baseball is no exception to Twitter’s ubiquity. NPB Tracker (@npbtracker) has had a Twitter presence for almost five years, but there are many, many accounts that update more frequently and are more adept at cramming witticisms into 140 characters. I’ve compiled this admittedly brief list as a starting point for newcomers to the scene.

The Writers:

@JCoskrey
@JballAllen
@JNYakyu
@kaznagatsuka

Fans & Bloggers:

@Kazuto_Yamazaki
@osaki_makkura
@janblurr
@NPB_Reddit
@yakyunightowl
@RealKenDick
@MyKBO
@lovelovemarines
@marinerds

Players:

@CJNitkowski
@brandonmmann
@HeyBarn

I gathered this list by signing into Twitter and looking at who had been active on my timeline, so this might be a bit random and there’s a chance I may have missed a few good accounts. As always, feel free to point out any omissions.

Now I guess I need one of those buttons that says “Tweet this article.”

This weekend I had the pleasure of filling in for Jim Allen as a host of the Japan Baseball Weekly Podcast. You can download here, from the top of the list.

John Gibson and I had to contend with the head cold I’ve been suffering, time zone differences and flakey Skype performance, but we battled through and had a great discussion about Lastings Milledge and the Yakult Swallows, the juiced ball controversy du jour, and the state of the Pacific League. I hope you’ll enjoy listening to it.

Thanks John for having me on! I’m looking forward to taking part again!