New Marines commandant Masato Yoshii and new Lions trainer Kazuo Matsui answered questions for the media Tuesday, while new old Hanshin manager Akinobu Okada spoke on Sunday, and I’ll give you some of those riveting exchanges.
We also had our final monthly award winners, two going to one league’s pennant winner, while the other league’s both went to its last-place team. Seven teams announced their first-round picks in Thursday’s draft, and we had the first trade of the offseason.
Some people asked where they could get the Bill James Win Shares calculations for NPB that I use to inform my award voting and which are rather different from WAR. So I’ll post the last three season’s files for you.
We had a pair of new manager hirings announced Friday. The Hiroshima Carp, who had been sort of silent as they stood in the wake of Shinji Sasaoka’s outgoing second-hand smoke trail, reached, as Jason Coskrey of the Japan Times put it, into the OB bag, and pulled out Takahiro Arai to be their next skipper, while the Lotte Marines went for continuity and chose their thoughtful and funny pitching coordinator, former Mets, Rockies, and Expos pitcher Masato Yoshii.
But while Yoshii’s hiring makes perfect sense for a team keen to have a plan, it makes one wonder what in the heck the team’s owner was saying about a careful and thorough search.
