We’re a day away from the first of Samurai Japan’s two international friendlies against Australia, and though is not close to the team Hideki Kuriyama will eventually compete with in March, it does have Munetaka Murakami and Roki Sasaki, who is going to start Thursday’s game at Sapporo Dome.
NPB has also announced the details of the active player draft, while the Nippon Ham Fighters’ new park has an issue, and the award for the person making the greatest contribution to pro baseball was awarded to a Japan Series-winning manager for the 20th time in 22 years, although the player that people spent the whole season talking about and lifted the game to new heights, did get an honorable mention.
There was an interesting post on Twitter Saturday, which just begged for verification. It questioned whether Munetaka Murakami should be considered Japan’s best young home run hitter ever, since the conditions in which the Swallows star has hit his home runs are quite different from those faced by Sadaharu Oh and Hideki Matsui.
It just frustrates me because people are going "Murakami better" because he's hit 150 HRs faster than anyone in NPB history
Oh and Matsui started their careers in eras that were basically mini dead-ball eras with historically low HR rates
Conditions are always in flux, offhand I would agree with this post about Oh, the early part of Matsui’s career was a fairly normal era for home run production. The perception that Matsui hit in a “mini dead-ball era” is created by the switch to Mizuno’s rabbit ball by the Giants, Dragons and BayStars toward the end of his time in Japan.
The same thing probably led Robert Whiting to recently declare Wladimir Balentien’s 60 home runs to have taken place with a lively ball in place. The ball wasn’t particularly lively that year, but it was normal compared to the soft ball used the previous two seasons.
