Hey everyone, welcome to my 20th year of translating the NPB draft.
As always this is also my "hi, what's up" post. Hi, what's up? Last year at this time I had just come back to Tokyo with my shiny new HSP engineering visa, and now I've been working at a robotics startup for the last year. I only made it to 50 baseball games this year, although I watched a TON more on TV at home - it's crazy how when I was an English teacher and could leave work at 4:50pm every day I went to 100+ games per year, but now leaving work at 5pm means I have to stay another time to make it up. Most of my games were on weekends, but also Japan is way more brutally hot now than it was back in the day, and I have to admit I probably skipped going to some games just because I didn't want to deal with the weather and I'm definitely more tired now than I was in my 20's. I finally went to my first Kamagaya game in September and several staff (and players!) saw me like "Hey! Long time no see! Where have you been?" and I sheepishly admitted "It's my first time here this year..." and they're like "It's been really hot, huh?"
But I did go to Okinawa for Fighters spring training back in February for a change, and that was pretty cool; I hope I can do that again next year. Another highlight of the year was finding a price loophole and staying for a weekend at the Tower 11 hotel in Es Con Field and getting to watch some minor-league ball from my room. I made it to the new Giants and Tigers ni-gun stadiums, and also was at the Toshitaiko finals for a change and even sitting over the underdog championship team's ouendan.
As in recent years, I expect to mostly just translate as it comes in over the usual news sources. I bought a draft magazine but mostly for the lulz. Nikkan Sports is my usual go-to, and I use draft-repo for high-school kids and the individual websites for colleges/companies for the others, when more obscure people get drafted and the major news outlets don't have their stats ready.
Name Pos HS/Univ/Company T/B DOB Ht/Wt -------------------- --- --------------- --- ---------- -------
