Thursday, July 29, 2010

World University Baseball Championship

As I type this, the World University Baseball Championship (English website!) is starting, although I'm on the other side of the planet now so I'm not going to it. I have to admit that looking at the teams it seems a bit odd that all the USA players are sophomores, whereas the other teams have a mix of all 4 years, including that Cuba has a few graduated players as well -- not sure what the eligibility rules are exactly.

I have to wonder about the usage of KAIT and Utsumi-Shimaoka (Meiji University) for the event, because they're both pretty much in the middle of nowhere and have no seating, but I guess that's what was available. One of the Hosei boys wrote that the Canada and Cuba teams came to practice with the Japan team at the Hosei baseball field too.

Anyway, the big news to me was that two Big 6 kids were added to the roster for the event -- before it was just Yuki Saitoh, Tatsuya Ohishi, Yusuke Nomura, Fumiya Araki, Hiroshi Taki, Keisuke Okazaki, and Hayata Itoh. They are all awesome, to be sure. But then due to injury, Toyodai's Ryo Hayashizaki had to duck out of the tournament and was replaced by Rikkio's Koichiro Matsumoto... and Chuo's Hirokazu Sawamura had to duck out of the tournament and was replaced by none other than my favorite college pitcher Kisho Kagami!

My guess is that with Saitoh and Nomura in the mix as well as the fantastic Tomoyuki Sugano from Tokai and the solid lefty Takahiro Fujioka from Toyodai, there is very little chance of Kagami getting in as a starter, but I could see him getting a few innings of relief pitching before bridging to Ohishi as closer. I hope Kagami does well and doesn't get injured. The draft is only 3 months away...

So far, the USA one-hit Sri Lanka and won 15-0 in a 5-inning called game, with 14 strikeouts. Ouch. Canada beat Chinese Taipei 3-2 in a much closer contest. 50 people came to the USA game, and 300 to the Canada game. Go figure, they're during the day and the USA game was in the middle of nowhere.

5000 people showed up to see Japan beat Korea 4-0 at Jingu. As expected, Yuki Saitoh started, struck out 9 in 6 innings, Masahiro Inui followed him and struck out 5 in 2 innings, and Tatsuya Ohishi pitched a perfect 9th, striking out the side, also as expected. As I've been saying for ages, Ohishi is an awesome strikeout machine. The 4 Japan runs came in on two 2-run homers, one by captain Shota Ishimine and one by Hayata Itoh. Itoh is the best pure hitter in the Tokyo Big 6 league (my nickname for him, especially this spring, has been "Mr. Clutch") and Ishimine is a solid ballplayer, I saw him launch a good home run off Daisuke Takeuchi during the Keio-Tokai game in the All-Japan semifinals.

It'll be interesting to see where the series goes next. I predict Japan will annihilate China, but what happens in the Cuba game could be interesting.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Assuming college years are taken from the Spring 2010 semester, there shouldn't be any seniors. Many good junior players were either drafted in June or are fatigued from NCAA games in spring (assuming juniors got more playing time than sophomores).

Anonymous said...

Deanna,
Thank you so much for this blog!! There coverage of Team USA baseball in the WUBC has been sorely lacking...especially on the USA baseball website!

If you do happen to make it to one of the Team USA's games, could you please take pictures and post them on your blog?

There are a TON of Team USA player's parents and family/friends who would greatly appreciate it!
Thank you so much!!

-Albert

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much! Was looking through your blog, very informative and entertaining!
I am a University of Florida Gators fan myself. Go Gators! Two of our best and brightest start, Nolan Fontana and Brian Johnson are currently playing for Team USA.
Have a great day!!

-Albert

Deanna said...

I'm in Seattle for 3 weeks, so I'm not going to this. The joke was that I wasn't going because Kagami didn't make the team originally, but actually I had a summer trip to the US planned for quite some time. Sorry... at least they're bothering to have a site in English for the event, so it's possible to at least look up scores and results there. Canada plays USA on Monday night at Yokohama Stadium, which is near a bunch of army bases, so maybe they'll have some supporters come out then...