Writing

Plugh-san,

You're welcome to write about Akita baseball (mostly Industrial League with a few NPB games each year) here any time you like. However, it sound more like you're looking for a job with the mainstream press.

I know of several people who have used their hobby of reporting on Japanese baseball to get jobs with the mainstream press here in the Tokyo area. Jim Allen used to put out some great guides to Japanese baseball each year before joining the Daily Yomiuri, and Dan Latham set up a great Pro Yakyu news site with the sole purpose of getting a better job, finally landing one with Asahi's Tribune-Herrald.

I'm not convinced that the losses of these two to the Free Press (i.e. not under corporate control) has been the best thing to happen to the English speaking Pro Yakyu community, but they've each attained the goals they'd set for themselves and reach a great many more people than they could on their own (larger readership doesn't necessarily mean high quality readership). Nonetheless, writing on the Internet is a proven way to get your ideas out there, tune your writing style and skills, and act as a great resume for when you're ready to hook up with a media outlet. So when you get here, start up your own page or write to JapaneseBaseball.com.

Gambatte.

I'm not sure what kind of articles you want to write. At baseballguru.com, I write about the history of Japanese baseball, generally with a statistical bent. Gary Garland contributes a blog of current events in Japan, plus some other ideas which he deems appropriate. If you want to duplicate those areas, it might be hard to fit you in on the site. However, if you want to go in some different direction which explores information about Japanese baseball which is likely to be new to an English-speaking audience, I suspect the baseballguru webmaster, Craig Tomarkin, would be interested, though of course I cannot speak for him.

If you want to know more about what kinds of things Craig accepts for the site, you can see the Baseball Analysis, Articles page.

Hope this helps.

Jim Albright

Thank you gentlemen for your input. I am new to both this site and baseballguru.com, but in the last several weeks I have familiarized myself with both the work of Gary Garland and the esteemed Jim Albright.

I plan to write extensively on my experience in Japan from all angles. I have a background in producing and shooting human interest pieces and documentary work, and I am keen to put the skills I honed in that arena toward my writing efforts as well.

I think my aim is to ultimately find work in the mainstream press and to be published in book form, but I feel strongly that the best way to reach people is diversification. I can reach a broader audience with my writing in the mainstream press, but I can engage in far more rewarding dialogue in this forum with like-minded people who challenge assumptions and generally experience a far more thoughtful and informed debate.

There's room for both, but I am glad to be making the acquaintance of fellow yakyu fans. I'm sure there's a lot to learn from all of you, and it's my privilege to begin this journey with people holding as much passion as can be found here.

Looking forward to participating here.

Mike.

I would suggest that if he wants to write about Japanese baseball that he do it with more of a feature story kind of bent. I've taken the niche of the everyday game action and incorporate some other stuff that catches my attention from time to time. Consequently, I don't have the time to do feature stories. Writing daily is a big job and I go through periods of burnout. Somebody else, who I like a lot and respect immensely, tried taking on what I do and ultimately had to drop it since it's pretty time consuming.

What we really need in the short term is someone who reads Japanese who can post complete current stats in English at least every couple of days. NPB has shut down their English portion of their site and it has left the non-Japanese speakers high and dry. Like Jim said, for those interested, contact Craig and see what you can workout.

- What we really need in the short term is someone who reads Japanese who can post complete current stats in English at least every couple of days.

Garland-san,

I assumed that you were aware that I had responded to that complaint with stats updated daily for each team (click on "Stats" for a given team) and a standings and leaders page (takes a while to load) where I may fall a couple of days behind on the standings at times. I've notified TBS that I'm pulling the data from their site, appealing that there is no other resource for the English-only community. While I never got a response asking me to stop, I have had indirect confirmation that they've recieved my messages as they've corrected some errors on their site after I notified them of them.

While I may run this site, I like to think of my main contribution to the community is stats. That's why I'm working with the SABR Baseball DataBank project, to normalize my data and reach a greater distribution for the work I've done with my database since 1995.

Nonetheless, that niche is currently taken care of (other than box scores, which I'm working on various ideas).

My apologies Michael. I didn't see the stats on your front page anymore, so I assumed that you had to give that up for time or other reasons. I'm not a particularly bright guy, unfortunately. If you don't hit me in the nose with it, I probably won't notice it. I'll run a link to that page in my reports so that people can go right to it.

Cheers.

I guess the link to the leaders' page wasn't clear enough. I've updated the page in hope that it stands out better, now.

The reason I moved it from the top page was so that people didn't have a slow loading page for the top level entry page. I put a link at the top, but if you didn't see it, I'm sure that that explains why I've been getting other questions on where to find such information lately. Poor placement of the notification on my part. Sorry.