Hangzhou Asian Games baseball held in October this year. The biggest rival of the Korean national team, which is aiming for a fourth consecutive championship, is Japan, the runner-up in the last tournament. In Japan, since the 2014 Incheon Games, it has been decided that a representative player of business baseball will participate. One of Japan’s two major business baseball tournaments, the Intercity Baseball Tournament, is underway at the Tokyo Dome until July 25th.
Japan has not yet announced the 24 members of the national team, although it has revealed 39 candidates for the Asian Games. Of the 39 candidates for the national team, 32 participated in the city competition. 32 teams participated in the city competition. Some teams have 7 substitutes and some have none.
It is not easy to see candidate players because it is a tournament system where you lose once. Nonetheless, coach Joong-il Ryu, coaches Il-eon Choi and Ji-hyeon Ryu, who lead the Korean national team, and power analysts have been inspecting 2-3 games a day at the Tokyo Dome from the stands since the 19th to identify the Japanese national team players.
In Japanese business baseball, the pitcher is stronger than the batter. Among the 14 candidates for pitching, there are 3 left-handed pitchers, and one of them, Morita Shunya, showed pitching that left a lasting impression on the Korean coaching staff. Morita is a member of the business team Honda Suzuka, but participates in the city competition as a Toyota Motors player. Teams advancing to the city competition can recruit 3 players from among the teams that failed in the regional preliminaries as ‘reinforcement players’. Morita means a pitcher whose skills are acknowledged by other teams.
Morita started against ENEOS on the 20th and became the winning pitcher with 3 hits and 1 run in 6 innings. He displayed a fastball of 140km per hour and stable control, and the Korean national team’s pitching coach Choi Il-eon warned, “Our batters may not be able to hit it easily.”
Toyota, which advanced to the quarterfinals thanks to Morita’s strong pitching, started another representative candidate, right-handed pitcher Shuichiro Kayo, in Nihon Tong Driving on the 22nd. Gayo showed a perfect performance with no runners until the 6th inning, and the entire stadium watched Gayo’s pitching. The moment Gayo got his first hit in the top of the 7th inning, manager Ryu Joong-il and coaches inadvertently shouted “Ah!” I had no choice but to focus on the pitching of the song to the point of making a loud voice.
Gayo won 2 consecutive games with 3 hits and 1 run in 9 innings. Based on his height of 1m87, Gayo overwhelmed opponent batters with a fastball with a maximum speed of 151km with a large angle and high rotation rate. Director Ryu said of Gayo, “I like the ball on the body.”
An unemployed player may be mistaken for a player who ‘plays baseball as a hobby’, but this is not the case in Japan, and a young player can be said to be a ‘professional reserve’. Pitcher Morita is 26 years old, and Kayo will be 28 this year. They are older than the Korean national team, which mainly consists of players under the age of 25.
Coach Il-Eon Choi said of Gayo, “If you go pro right away, you can put it into the starting rotation.” He said, “I want to become a central player in unemployment baseball for a long time.”바카라사이트
If you judge the level of the entire Japanese business team with the word ‘amateur’, you can taste it. It is important to understand each player’s ability level, and for such work, Korean coaching staff are directing their eyes at the Tokyo Dome.