Wow, it's that time of year again, where I dust off the blog, translate the NPB draft (for the 21st year running), and say hi. Hi! It's been a crazy year. I'm still working at a robotics startup in the southeast corner of Tokyo for the time being. I made it to 65 baseball games this year (and like 25 basketball games last season, including a trip up to Hokkaido over Golden Week to see the Fighters AND to see Keisei Tominaga sink a bazillion 3-pointers for Levanga Hokkaido, and it was easier to get good Levanga tickets in my first year of fanclub membership than to get any Fighters tickets in my 20th). Probably the most fun was sitting in the outfield ouendan for a minor-league Fighters-Swallows game at Es Con in the middle of August, the most emotional was having the Swallows season bookended by Shingo Kawabata's retirement game in March and Masanori Ishikawa's retirement game in October. I also chased the Pokemon 30th Anniversary NPB event, going to 9 out of 12 stadiums across the country for it. (Anyone in Pokemon Go want to trade me a baseball Pikachu with the background from Fukuoka or Hiroshima or Toyama? I have all of the rest of them to exchange...) Honestly I thought I should probably write up my overall review of the Pokemon event since it spanned across several months and prefectures for me, and each stadium did it differently, but I've been too lazy. Some of my reviews are on Twitter.
Anyway, one irony is that this year I have basketball tickets tonight at 7pm, which we bought a few months ago before we knew the draft date, so I'll follow the draft for the first hour from 5-6pm, then go over to Toyota Arena, watch the Tokyo Alvark take on the Ibaraki Robots, and then by the time I get home from that the draft will be over and I can just translate stuff instead of freaking out about who went where.
Preparing the table though! Teams that have had consistent URLs for draft results, I'm also filling those in.
As always I'm following Nikkan Sports, also Yahoo Sports, also draft-repo for info on players.
Name Pos HS/Univ/Company T/B DOB Ht/Wt
-------------------- --- --------------- --- ---------- -------
Eagles
Dragons
Marines
Swallows
Buffaloes
Carp
Fighters
Baystars
Lions
Giants
Hawks
Tigers
