pawatan comments

Patrick

Matsuzaka's Red Sox contract could come out to an average of $10 million per if he meets ALL incentives by the end of next year.

Matsuzaka is getting paid $10M next year regardless of incentives. As I showed you in my link, that's 2x the highest amount paid to any player in Japan. Likewise with Gojira - maybe Yomiuri "could" pay $10M (still less than $13M/per he made with the Yankees) but they wouldn't, and won't. Nobody gets paid that much in NPB, and nobody will ever get paid that much in NPB. There's just no incentive, NPB is poorly marketed and just doesn't generate that sort of revenue.

He was such a draw at the Seibu Dome over the years, myself included on numerous occasions, that they could have continued paying him in the equivalent range of $5-6 million annually, regardless of the financial and legal troubles of ownership at the time.

Still half of what he's making in the US, and he doesn't have to work in Saitama and play at the crappy Seibu Dome to do it.

So players will always talk about 'proving themselves against the best', but it's mostly just a great way to get paid, and very well. After you play in MLB, you can always come back and get paid well again as an "ex-MLB player" even if you are currently crap. Witness Iwamura and Kaz Matsui for that...

As far as players left off previous WBC rosters, I'm talking about those of Korean heritage. If you don't know those who were because of their questionable status as Japanese, then you don't pay much attention to NPB.

Nice job insulting me there, Patrick. I go to minimum 50 games every year in person and watch many more on TV, as well as participate in the blogosphere and on NPB fan sites. I'd say I'm more familiar with NPB than 99% of Japanese people.

The Hawks are a better team overall than the Lions. This win by the Lions proves once again that if teams do not play at least a 5-game series, it does not show which team is the best, which is my main complaint against competitions like this and the WBC.

It doesn't matter who is BEST. It matters who WINS. Chiba Lotte was most definitely not the best team in Japan last year but they WON. That's all that counts! The Hawks have frequently been among the best in recent years but haven't gotten it done until this year. Best has little to do with it.

Fanboy fanboy fanboy fanboy fanboy, that's all I am hearing here. Why are you making a pointless Mac vs Windows argument? Windows is crap. MacOS is also crap (maybe less so since it's Unix based, though it's like *nix for Dummies). iOS is truly crap. Android is nicely open source, can be adapted by anyone for any device, and is already far outstripping iOS development due to it's adoption on a wide variety of platforms. Heck, you can get apps from more than one source - how AMAZING! I don't have to shop at the same crappy, restrictive store all the time!

The iPod WAS just an MP3 player. It had a nifty little click wheel for sure. iTunes was, and still is, crap. Apple had to be shamed into releasing higher bitrates than 128, shamed into selling DRM-free music, way behind when other stores (ahem, Amazon) did.

It was horrible, really difficult to read the tiny eight bit words on the screen and hugely unpopular.

I think you never used one. They worked just fine, but were large and quite expensive.

Macs used FIREWIRE; everybody else uses USB. Macs throw out floppies - oh yeah, everybody was already using ZIP, CD burners or similar.

Macs use color. All computers use color.

Geez, Macs had many innovations but color was most definitely not one. The first Macs were B&W! My Commodore 64 in 1982 had a color output, thank you very much, and it was hardly the first (nor did it cost the thousands that a Mac did).

Look at the Android icons and UI and compare them with the iOS. Coincidence? I think not.

Look at the iOS icons and compare them with any icon on any other device. Coincidence? I think not.

Macs install software from the Internet, Windows copies it.

I installed software from the internet in 1994 on a Unix box.

Track pad.

Licensed by Apple from another company.

Ultra thin laptops.

That cost 2x as much as my nice, thin, cheap Acer.

There are NO viruses for the MacOS, not fewer. NONE.

Nor are there for *nix. NONE. And it's FREE (well, as Linux, it's free)

EVERYONE copies Apple... that is indisputable.

First to make an MP3 player? Nope, that was Rio. First to make a tablet PC? Nah, several were released 10 years ago. First GUI operating system? Er, that was Xerox.

But I guess Apple is the world's leading innovator for preventing you from using the device you bought the way you want unless you hack the crap out of it, so there is that.

don't they know that Japanese would never buy what Koreans like/love/produce/market

Except music, food, TV, movies... But other than most things, you are very correct, kibousha!

Dice-K is only going to receive about half of the $103 million deal he signed since his posting fee was just over $50 million. There are many other examples.

Well, of course the posting fee takes a chunk out of the overall compensation. But you think Matsuzaka would get US$10M/yr from Seibu? Or Gojira would get US$13M/yr from Yomiuri? Or Ichiro would get US$18M/yr from Orix (his current salary)? That's more than 50% of an entire NPB roster (not named Yomiuri or Hanshin).

If Ichiro could get $18M/yr here, he'd be here. He'd be very, very lucky to get 40% of that. Darvish is the highest paid player in Japan - approx. US$6M.yr at current exchange rates.

http://baseball-data.com/ranking-salary/all/

I have a simple question for you. Would you support the Hawks playing a series against the Cardinals this year? If so, would the Hawks use Cabrera, Ortiz, and standout foreign pitchers like Falkenborg and Houlton?

Absolutely. And absolutely. Why wouldn't they use their entire roster? It's a club championship, not a national competition.

If you think this is what most Japanese baseball fans would want, then you should go back and look at certain "Japanese" NPB players who were kept off previous Japan rosters for the WBC because they weren't Japanese enough, for example they are ethnic Koreans.

Yes, like half-Iranian Darvish Yu. It was a shame they left him off the 2009 roster. Wait, he pitched in more games than anyone? He started game 1, and got the win in the final? I forgot how much Japanese fans HATED that!

which is another reason why most of the world's best want to try to ply their trade, if given the chance, in the majors.

The main reason is $$$$$$. MLB pays a heck of a lot more than NPB. I'm sure most Japanese players would rather be superstars in their own country than semi-anonymous cogs in an MLB team, but the MLB team will pay them 2x, 3x, 5x more...

I don't see how the limits on foreign players hurts NPB. There aren't that many superstar foreign players despite the much higher average salaries than the Japanese players. There's no indication at all that if more foreign players were allowed the quality of baseball would be much improved.

Smith, even a cursory Google search shows how incorrect that is.

http://www.asianplasticsurgeryguide.com/news10-2/081003_south-korea-highest.html#data

SK has almost the same number of surgeries as Japan with less than 40% of the population!

Anyway the girls from Kara are great looking and good dancers - I couldn't care less if they've had surgery or not.

Hawks are chokers, that's all. Chunichi was just a bigger bunch of chokers this Nippon Series. I can guarantee 2010 Chiba Lotte would never have lost to Samsung Lions had they held the series last year.

See how they get around unions?

You have hit the nail EXACTLY on the head as to why this is happening. Fuel charges are a smokescreen; they already charge us extra for fuel, and that amount goes up and down as fuel prices rise and fall.

Just another power play by management to crush the unions, that's all. Watch them turn around and ask for "loans" from the US government to "help them through these difficult times".

They will vote the Muslim Brotherhood into power. The burkha is going down over Egypt.

You always say this or something like it. It's always irrational paranoia.

I guess people are getting poorer and poorer; only reason they would settle for second, or maybe third, best.

Geez, smith! Do you have to be a raging Apple fanboy in every tech post?

I greatly prefer reading on my eInk Kindle to any tablet (and yeah, I own one). It's just so much easier on the eyes than a backlit screen. It's so cheap that I don't worry about damaging it. Dunno about the Fire, but the eInk Kindles are fantastic.

If there's something a bit off the learning curve, which is rare, you just Google the question.

Like anything else these days - hardly something unique. I never needed a manual for either my iPhone or my (current, happy to have upgraded to) Samsung smartphone.

I'm not sure where people live that they get better reception with Softbank than Docomo. In my own apartment Softbank was horrible,especially for data. I was in Shibuya a few weekends ago and couldn't connect a call. The iPhone NEVER worked in inaka, only if I were actually at a train station. No such problems with Docomo, get coverage pretty much anywhere. Very happy to have switched.

Why is the Indonesian culprit played up while the three Japanese culprits given such scant mention?

Because they haven't been convicted yet, and this Indonesian chap has.

Aren't the Seychelles uner water yet?

Don't be silly and make strawman arguments. Nobody said the Seychelles would be under water by 2010. You are probably thinking of one of the lower Pacific island groups, which it's sometimes said they will be largely under water by 2050, not 2010.

No Prince? Seriously? Hit after hit after hit after hit. Pink Floyd is quite far from a "Rock Band" as well.

One Seg - another nice feature to have that the iPhone simply can't provide. You'll want that next emergency.

They have cole slaw.

They have potatoes and gravy, too - at least the one by me.

apply conflicting ethics depending on your customers nationality

Did they kick you out because of your tattoo or your nationality? Sounds like your tattoo, but you're trying to make into some racist thing. If their rule is no tattoos and they won't let you in because you have a tattoo, why not just take your business elsewhere? And what doe it have to do with the pole dancing, anyway?

Hmm, I think I need more videos to properly evaluate this phenomenon.

There we go in Morocco! Another domino in the Arab Shariah spring.

Oh, secret police and authoritarianism is SO much better! Or do you think people shouldn't have the right to determine what sort of government they want for themselves, even if you or I disagree with policies of that government?

WilliB

Not if another round of "democratic elections" sweeps another crop of 12er Shiite mullahs into power, as it inevitably will.

Turkey is a secular country first and a democratic country second. The military has repeatedly 'intervened in the democratic process' to keep the country secular.

As is referred to in the article itself, this falls just on the heels of the scandal at Olympus (and since it's in the article, how can it be unrelated?), where yet again a person was sacked for questioning those in power.

That's not at all why he was sacked. He was sacked because he held a press conference and laid the dirty laundry of his employer on the table for all the world to see. That will get you sacked most anywhere around the world.

Both parties involved are asses, apparently.

This is an interesting article, but shouldn't a travel article have some directions for those who want to visit? There's not really any indications at all on how to get here.

This insular environment, so very typical of many Japanese entities, only allows for positive feedback and a perception that everything is great, and why much needed changes are never made. And, as always, the public suffers because they are served up a mediocre product at a ridiculously high price.

This comment has absolutely nothing to do with baseball or the Giants. Did you even read the article? High price? What?

Watanabe is an old man who likes things done that benefit him and his team, period. If it doesn't benefit him, he doesn't like it. The Giants are his little fiefdom and he tries to intimidate all the other owners into following his will, and unfortunately they mostly do because he is loud and old.

But really, this is not some massive scandal like Olympus! I think something is very much lost in translation if the English-speaking public sees it that way. This sort of infighting happens all the time in NPB, it only seems to make the international press if it involves a foreigner (Valentine vs the Setoyama clique at Lotte) or the Giants. It's mostly an amusing bit if schadenfreude for all us Yomiuri haters.

The only certainty in Climate Science seems to be that the climatologists are always wrong and their predictions are useless.

I see you do not know the basic difference between "climate" and "weather".

That one was pretty long this morning - my building was shaking for more than a minute, I think. At least it was relatively weak - shindo 4 at the max.

smith

Maybe Iwakumi learned his lesson and won't demand such a ridiculous contract

Man, do you believe everything you are told? The source from that is a leak from the A's to a "trusted reporter". They polluted the negotiations to try to get a lower price - negotiated in bad faith, in other words. The IwaKUMA camp denies they asked for such a contract.

I agree with Dotobock, though - Iwakuma is most definitely on the decline. He's already had one career renaissance, doubt he has another in him.

Dotobock

The 4 big teams play in nearly full capacity almost daily and the rest play in emtpy stadiums.

What is an "empty stadium"? The worst average attendance this year was Yokohama, and they still averaged ~16,000 or so.

how do you explain the continuing plummet in TV ratings (even the "climax series" was not televised on regular channels

Completely incorrect, unless NHK is no longer a "regular channel".