The Nippon Ham Fighters met with representatives of the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association over the team’s disposal of three key players, outfielders Haruki Nishikawa and Taishi Ota, and reliever Ryo Akiyoshi, whom the Pacific League club released on the Dec. 1 deadline to tender contracts to reserved players.
Teams do this every year. It’s absolutely, 100 percent no big deal. The problem was not releasing them, but the words the Fighters chose to use.
On Saturday, John E. Gibson (@JBWPodcast), Claudio Rodriguez (@beisboljapones), Christian Gin (@Christian_Gin) got together on Zoom to discuss our Pacific League picks for the upcoming season for the upcoming Japan Baseball Weekly Podcast.
I don’t want to give away any spoilers before the show drops on Monday, but we were unanimous in our pick for the 2022 PL champion.
The big controversy, it turned out was how to treat a SoftBank Hawks team that “struggled” so abysmally, that they led the league in the fewest runs allowed but missed leading the PL in runs scored by 20 and finished fourth.