Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Powell Outage, aka NPB Roundup, Dondake Edition

On January 11, articles happily reported that Jeremy Powell was going back to Orix. It was even on the Buffaloes' site. They said he would wear #50 and made him a player page accordingly.

However, uh, today, supposedly the Softbank Hawks signed Powell? Huh? They seem to be claiming either that the Powell signing by Orix was announced but not finalized, or finalized but not announced properly, or something like that.

I see nothing of it mentioned on the Hawks' site yet, though there's a bunch of articles categorized as "パウエル獲得" on Yahoo and other sports article sites. And sadly, this is all the variety of stuff that I have trouble reading, but I'm sure that whenever people figure out what the hell is going on, it'll get posted to the thread on japanesebaseball.com accordingly.

(There is another article in the Daily Yomiuri which has some more details, but is almost as "WTF?" as everything else, I think.)

Spring training starts in only a few days, so I hope they get this mess straightened out soon. (And in all honesty, I hope he ends up with Orix, because Softbank already has a pretty loaded rotation.)

Anyway, on another note, the Fighters apparently invited Jermaine Van Buren to spring training to try out for the team. Yes, this guy. They're very kind to him, saying that he's 1-2 in 16 games in the majors, rather than mentioning his career 9.00 ERA and that he's walked 24 guys and struck out 11. But to be fair, his AAA numbers are actually really good and the kind of stuff that can sometimes transition really nicely to Japan. So, who knows.

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