My copy of the 2009 Japan Pro Baseball Fan Handbook and Media Guide arrived this past week. I’m pleasantly surprised by the contents. I was expecting a cheaply produced collection of facts that may help make my visits to games in Japan later this year a bit more enjoyable. However, this is really high quality and much more useful than I bargained for. The paper quality is top notch. Every page is in full color. And the items covered are more comprehensive and interesting than I hoped. Let’s take a look at some of the sections:

Each Japanese baseball team has a two page spread as shown above with overview material. This is pretty much all I was expecting, but there is much more.

Detailed stats, and even salaries, are shown for every player, including names in both Japanese kanji and English. If nothing else it’s a good source for practicing kanji name readings. 😉

All foreign born players have additional career details provided. How many Americans, other than Tuffy Rhodes, are there with over 400 home runs who are virtually unknown to U.S. baseball fans?

Not shown here are a bunch of other sections in the book. One I particularly like is the schedules by date. So let’s say you are in Tokyo on September 26th and want to catch a game. Instead of having to flip to each team’s page to see where they are playing, you can turn to the schedules-by-date page and quickly see that you have four options: Rakuten at Seibu in Tokorozawa, Orix at Lotte in Chiba, Hiroshima at Tokyo in the dome, or Yokohama at Yakult in Jingu. Times are also listed and since two of these games start at 2 and the other two start at 6 you could actually make it a doubleheader with four different teams in one day if you want. Try doing that in a major city in the U.S.A.

Published by Wayne Graczyk and JapanBall.com, ordering information can be found here.

Posted on April 19th, 2009 under Japan • Tags: baseball, book review, reviews, seibu lions. • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed