Well, it's official the Chiba Lotte Marines are the Champs of the Nihon Series. They won 4 games straight...the Tigers didn't have much of a chance.
It didn't help that there was a 3 week lag after the Tigers became their league champs and had to "wait" around for the Pacific League to have their play-offs. Why they even need to have play-offs is beyond me, each league only has 6 teams!! It's not like MLB, where there are 4 divisions and a total of 30-something teams....
Anyway, Congratulations Marines!! 31 years is a LONG time to wait. A promotion manager wrote a little column (in English) on the Marines website...oh and if you look real closely at the photo, you can see Benny Agbayani(formerly of the METS (Kat's a Mets fan) and Hawaii local boy (Kat's from Hawaii too)--yeah Benny!!. (^o^)v
Boy that Marines PR dude went OFF on the company line.
ReplyDeleteWell... I don't follow NPB but I DO know some things about baseball in general.
Bobby Valentine is an egomaniac and an overrated manager. I'll bet the press in Japan is giving him WAY too much credit for the Marines' championship and that he's eating up the attention like so much cake. These statements about "a real world series" shouldn't be taken seriously by anyone except those who have ingested too much champagne.
I think there were forces in MLB that wanted him as far away as possible and that they hope he'll stay in Chiba-ken as long as possible. He made a decent analyst on ESPN but I wouldn't hire him as a manager if I were a GM.
I AM glad to see that Agbayani is a success in Japan -- not all gaijin players make it there.
Hey Saburo,
ReplyDeleteActually, Valentine is getting a lot of press (I think they even made a "manga" (comic) of his story, although he's trying to be "humble" and say that it really was the players...I'm just glad that Benny is doing well. Hopefully he can play a couple of seasons here. Well, the 2 Leagues are probably going to do more off the wall things next year (to be more like the Big Leagues), so we'll just have to wait and see what "brilliant" things they come up with. :)
Peace!
Kat & Satoshi