Baseball

Shohei Ohtani looked up at the stands from the hero interview podium at Kyocera Dome Osaka and smiled. Ohtani had just hit two home runs, including one, incredibly, from one knee to straightaway center, in Samurai Japan’s win over the Hanshin Tigers in a warmup for the World Baseball Classic. […]

Osaka – Munetaka Murakami blasted a three-run first-inning homer and Masataka Yoshida drove in four runs as Samurai Japan cruised into the World Baseball Classic on a 9-1 win over the defending Japan Series champion Orix Buffaloes in its final warmup game Tuesday. The 23-year-old Murakami, who last year became […]

Tim Atherton has been pitching for Australia for over a decade and is among the most respected figures in the nation’s tight-knit baseball community. In 2017 he pitched in the World Baseball Classic. Two years later, Atherton threw 5⅓ scoreless innings to help the Aussies topple the United States during […]

Osaka – Former pitching star Park Chan-ho, one of Japanese Baseball Hall of Famer Hideo Nomo’s first MLB teammates, wants youngsters, especially in his native South Korea, to learn from Los Angeles Angels superstar Shohei Ohtani and Japan’s approach to the sport. Park, in Osaka as an analyst for World […]

Osaka – Shohei Ohtani hit a pair of three-run home runs and Lars Nootbaar had two hits in their first Samurai Japan game before the World Baseball Classic, an 8-1 win over the Hanshin Tigers on Monday. With MLB players unable to participate in earlier games due to tournament rules, […]

There will be plenty of attention on the superstar players of the Samurai Japan roster during the World Baseball Classic. Everyone knows what players like Shohei Ohtani and Yu Darvish can do. There are also a lot of fans eager to see pitchers Roki Sasaki and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and slugger […]

There will be plenty of attention on the superstar players of the Samurai Japan roster during the World Baseball Classic. Everyone knows what players like Shohei Ohtani and Yu Darvish can do. There are also a lot of fans eager to see pitchers Roki Sasaki and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and slugger […]

Osaka – Masataka Yoshida, the last missing piece in manager Hideki Kuriyama’s World Baseball Classic puzzle, took part in his first practice with Samurai Japan on Sunday, just four days before the team plays its first Pool B game. The new Boston Red Sox outfielder, who made the unprecedented step […]

Roki Sasaki pitched three scoreless innings, and Kazuma Okamoto hit a tiebreaking solo home run as Japan’s World Baseball Classic team beat the Chunichi Dragons 4-1 in Saturday’s warm-up game. Sasaki struck out three, walked two and allowed just one hit — an infield single, reaching as fast as 165 […]

There have not been many signs of spring at Fuchu City Stadium recently. Even with the sun shining and blue skies overhead, the mornings are cool. The tallest trees that line the stadium beyond the outfield wall are still mostly barren, with their leaves and blossoms weeks away. The lone […]