Category: Articles
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2020 MLB season postponed – Yukan Fuji
By Robert Whiting (2020) PART I The MLB season has been postponed, thanks to the coronavirus, and may not start until midsummer, if at all. With New Yorkers, among other big city residents, ordered to stay home for 90 days beginning March 21, an order which includes the New York Yankees players and those of…
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Baseball cheaters – Yukan Fuji
By Robert Whiting (2020) Cheating has a long and dishonorable history in baseball, both in the US MLB and Japan. The title of greatest team cheater in MLB may possibly belong to the New York Giants. It happened on October 3, 1951, when New York Giants hitter Bobby Thomson hit the famous home run against…
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Oh in Athletic top 100 – Yukan Fuji
By Robert Whiting (2020) As discussed in a previous column, the popular digital sports magazine The Athletic has been running a series of essays by veteran writer Joe Posnanski, on the top 100 MLB players of all time. #100 was Ichiro Suzuki which occupied a previous column. +++ Llisted at #85, in the series so far, is Sadaharu Oh,…
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The 100 pitch limit mistake – Yukan Fuji
By Robert Whiting (2019) It’s been 44 years since the first so-called Tommy John surgical procedure, which occurred September 25, 1974, and, according to the popular website 538, half of the recorded surgeries have occurred in the nearly six and a half years since April 1, 2012. Why is that? Some American commentators say that the…
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Valentine’s Way: book review – Yukan Fuji
By Robert Whiting (2021) Bobby Valentine, the former manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines, has published a memoir, with some interesting observations about Japan in it, among other things. The memoir covers Valentine’s covers his entire career as player, manager and media personality that started in 1969 when Valentine was a star high school athlete…
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Spaceman Shinju Kantoku – Yukan Fuji
By Robert Whiting (2021) I have seen a lot of strange appointments to the post of manager of an MLB club in my long career as a journalist, but perhaps none so strange as the Nippon Ham Fighters front office decision to hire Tsuyoshi Shinjo as their field manager for the 2022 season. Shinjo, a…
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Shohei Ohtani, MVP 2021 – Yukan Fuji
By Robert Whiting (2021) 2021 was quite a season for Shohei Ohtani. He nearly won the home run crown and might have won the Cy Young award with a little more run support from his teammates. He led all MLB in WAR. He won a slew of trophies, capped by the BBWAA A.L. MVP, which…
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150th Anniversary of Baseball in Japan – Yukan Fuji
by Robert Whiting (2022) The coming year will mark the 150th Anniversary of Baseball in Japan. The game was introduced to the Japanese in 1872 by an American professor named Horace Wilson, who had been invited to come to Tokyo and teach at Kaisei Gakko. He was one of many foreign teachers and technical advisors recruited by the…
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Shohei, Boog and Big Mac
By Robert Whiting YUKAN FUJI (2018) ESPN analytics whiz Sam Miller did an extensive evaluation of Shohei Ohtani, 2018 Rookie of the Year, as a batter and came to the conclusion that the MLB player most like is former Baltimore Orioles slugger Boog Powell, Powell, 6’3” 235 pounds in the prime of his playing days, was a line drive hitting first baseman who averaged 30…
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Wall-to-wall coverage of Shohei Ohtani is more than justified
By Robert Whiting – October 28, 2024 It’s impossible to live in Japan and not know who Shohei Ohtani is. The baseball star of the Los Angeles Dodgers dominates the media. His in-game exploits usually occupy the front page of Japan’s ubiquitous sports dailies, whose combined circulation runs in the millions. Most of the time…
Tokyo Junkie 