Besuboru Guy—Playing With the Pros

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One year ago on Round and Square (7 June 2012)—The Accidental Ethnographer: Melbourne Revival (a)
Two years ago on Round and Square (7 June 2011)—Living and Learning: Stumps (Yes, "Stumps")

[a] Individual and Society RF

可飛ばせ, 内田!

Let 'er rip, Uchida!  OR
Fly to base, Uchida!

—Common Japanese baseball chant
(Tanaka is a common surname, like "Olson")

Japanese baseball is called 野球 (yakuu), a combination of "field" and "ball" in Japanese (in Chinese it sounds a little like "wild ball," which has a particularly interesting set of connotations).

And what is the highest level of all? Well, that would be プロ野球 (pu-ro field-ball). Pro baseball.

[b] プロ RF

Nippon Professional Baseball has two leagues with six teams each. Unlike the American major leagues, the teams are owned by corporations, and more loosely associated with various cities. The Central League and the Pacific League (and the latter has the designated hitter, too). They play a 144-game schedule over eight months, with playoffs in October. 

Sound familiar (with eighteen fewer games)?

Yup. 

There are many similarities (as we have seen). Then we began pulling back the layers and seeing the complexity of it all. 

See you tomorrow for that. 

[If you don't read Japanese, but want to have some sense of the Japanese kana and kanji in these posts, just copy the phrases and paste them into translation software such as Babylon or Google Translate].

[c] Layers RF

[Originally posted on August 7, 2014]