Ballpark de Tsukamaete! - Vol. 3 Ch. 28 - SHOW YOUR SUN

[MangaDex]

 

[NotKiwiBird]

Heyyyy silly billys

It's 1:30 am on Christmas Eve which means I'm feeling a little sillier than usual. I'm also too lazy to get the discord link, so just this once, don't join and enjoy the holidays in peace.

Also this chapter is like... really precious I'm sorry I was so pleased with myself as I was translating the last few pages because I figured out what was going on. So happy

Sorry this chapter was REALLY late. I haven't been able to scrape together the motivation to do just about anything, but I'm looking to finish up one of our series early next year, and once that's done I want to focus on Ballpark again.

 

[Yuyuin]

Peak has returned. Wishing you well on the pursuit of staff and your focus on this series.

 

[outinthegardener]

What a sweet chapter to come back to.

 

[eelzbean]

congrats to Kojiro

 

[pandatime]

yo...
Congratulations kojiro my man

 

[LeBronBron]

Kojiro with big news on Christmas Eve

 

[AnotherDuck]

Phone calls being scarier than messages. Can relate.

I'm not sure it's good to have a phone in your uniform pants when you're about to play...

It's 1:30 am on Christmas Eve which means I'm feeling a little sillier than usual.

Is that even possible?

Sorry this chapter was REALLY late. I haven't been able to scrape together the motivation to do just about anything, but I'm looking to finish up one of our series early next year, and once that's done I want to focus on Ballpark again.

No worries. Just do what you feel like.

 

[havelmom]

not only the series is hard
there's like 100+ raws left

 

[Pagemistress]

She's totally gonna make that baby a onesie Motorsuns jersey to support Kojiro.

I cannot wait for the best mascot to make Kojiro's baby giggle. Do you guys think they make plushies of him?

 

[THUND3RSTICKZ]

Didn’t say anything about the defensive stats but most of the team’s batting over 300. That’s very good already.

 

[ACEG]

Didn’t say anything about the defensive stats but most of the team’s batting over 300. That’s very good already.

It's either their defense and baserunning sucks, or they have problems with their pitching (a weak bullpen or their starting rotation must be mediocre beyond the ace). To your point, a starting lineup where nearly everyone is batting .300+ would be low and away the best team in the league (not even the Dodgers had that level of firepower).

 

[Kushikime]

Thanks for the chapter. That was extremely cute.

 

[Darkshade13]

Didn’t say anything about the defensive stats but most of the team’s batting over 300. That’s very good already.

Though it's not as pronounced in recent seasons, the Japanese pro leagues have historically tended toward higher averages and less power, favoring a somewhat less extreme (and less good) version of Ichiro's batting approach. A team full of .300 hitters is still really good but if some of the writing is based off the author's nostalgia for baseball over the last 20+ years it's probably not meant to be as shockingly good as it seems through the lens of a 2024 MLB fan.

It might also be a function of the different approach to pitching, where it feels like lots of Japanese pitchers favor broad arsenals of a ton of different pitches but where none of them are a crazy, dominating, super-weapon of a pitch. You see Japanese pitchers out there and they throw a 4-seam FB, 2-seam FB, cutter, slider, curve, splitter, and some kind of changeup vs your average MLB starter that probably has 1 amazing pitch, 1 pretty good pitch, and 1 average to slightly below average pitch and that's all they use. It works for a pitch-to-contact approach where the goal is to just ensure the batter can't square it up, but it doesn't generate a lot of strikeouts. So the result is a lot of balls in play, a lot of slap or squib singles, and higher batting averages only for runs to be somewhat suppressed because the lack of power means the defense can stop those runners from scoring.

I dunno. I used to follow Japanese baseball a bit but have sort of fallen off of that in recent years as the posting of Japanese players has slowed and only the real unicorn/elite guys even contemplate coming to MLB. It's not like it was 10-15 years ago when you had this big wave of Japanese players trying their hand at MLB and ending up leaving because they just weren't good enough to adjust to a different league with a radically different style of play.

 

[Silfir]

Are the two American players both hitting 4th? Is one of those supposed to be 5th, or are they just both described as "No. 4s", i.e. cleanup hitters, the same way soccer pundits occasionally talk about teams playing with two "Sixes" rather than two defensive midfielders?

I also noticed the second baseman was hitting over .300 as the 8th hitter, but sure enough, an OBP just barely higher than that. The slap hitter theory likely has some merit.

If I remember right, the Motorsuns have been catching up, so it's also possible some of the bad hitting earlier in the season has been done by players who aren't in the lineup anymore. There's a bunch of them who look like they might be recent call-ups from the Ni-Gun squad.

 

[NotKiwiBird]

Are the two American players both hitting 4th? Is one of those supposed to be 5th, or are they just both described as "No. 4s", i.e. cleanup hitters, the same way soccer pundits occasionally talk about teams playing with two "Sixes" rather than two defensive midfielders?

I also noticed the second baseman was hitting over .300 as the 8th hitter, but sure enough, an OBP just barely higher than that. The slap hitter theory likely has some merit.

If I remember right, the Motorsuns have been catching up, so it's also possible some of the bad hitting earlier in the season has been done by players who aren't in the lineup anymore. There's a bunch of them who look like they might be recent call-ups from the Ni-Gun squad.

Anthony is no. 5, that’s a typesetting error, whoops

 

[jubuttib]

Thanks for the TL kiwi, love to have this back!