Instead of nature's cruel wrath and the horrors of a grave nuclear crisis, let's think about the Nippon-Ham Fighters instead

Yu Darvish: Fighter -- NIPPON-HAM Fighter.

Yakyu Baka, your home for all things Japanese baseball, is reporting that the Central League is apparently still planning to start its season on March 25th, which is pretty nuts, while the Pacific League is a little more understandably going to put things off until mid-April.  It would be understandable if both leagues had decided to put things off until you could think about something other than people dying for like even a minute, but they have elected to go another route.

So why not talk about Japanese baseball a little?  I am a Nippon-Ham man, myself.  The Fighters used to play in Tokyo, where nobody liked them at all and nobody came, so they said fuck it and bailed.  They ended up in Hokkaido, where they play most of their games at the Sapporo Dome, but they also play some home games in Hakodate, which is sister-city to Halifax, as both are small, have citadels, and are kind of out of the way but nevertheless really, really awesome.  (I have never been to Hakodate but I went to a Serious Cultural Event at the university a few years ago where some kids from Hakodate did a pretty ballin' squid dance and chanted "IKA IKA IKA" and so my assumption from this is that these are people who know what is important in life.)

The Fighters were awful pretty much every year from 1961 until they won in 2006, which is just after Yu Darvish showed up. You've heard of him: he was the big deal pitcher of the 2009 World Baseball Classic (a tournament I totally love, even though it is obviously a mess), a 23-year-old right hander with a 2.12 ERA in over 1000 innings pitched.  He apparently wants to pitch in MLB starting in 2012, and everybody with any money at all will be after him.  Keith Law tweeted a month ago that he thinks the Blue Jays will be "serious bidders" and maaaaaaaan I hope so: he's a workhorse and he throws smoke and he's got a crazy name so what's not to like?     

Back to real-world horrors for a second, The Independent has a few words from Darvish about starting the season any time soon:

Players also face a moral dilemma, with the baseball season supposed to start on March 25.

"I am asking myself can I just go on playing when a majority of people in Japan are in trouble," Nippon Ham Fighters ace pitcher Yu Darvish told Japanese media.

"I am a baseball player and a human being as well. I cannot think about baseball alone as I normally do," said the 24-year-old Iranian-Japanese who spent three years as a high school student in disaster-stricken Sendai.

Well, sure.  I mean, god damn.  When baseball came back after September 11, 2001, things were still awfully awful, and who knew what was going to happen, but we could at least be pretty sure that we weren't all being slowly poisoned by the air. Fuck.

KS