Ask Away 2011
About a year ago, shortly after joining Fangraphs, I did a post inviting questions on my area of expertise, Japanese baseball. It’s been a year, so I’d like to do the same again today. This time I’ll add a single rule: please adhere to a limit of one question per comment. I’ll make my best effort to respond to every (serious) question that is posted.
Fire away!
Patrick Newman is a veteran enthusiast of Japanese baseball who happens to write about it at npbtracker.com, and on Twitter @npbtracker.
What are the best books on Japanese baseball?
I’ll go with the books authored by Robert Whiting, notably You Gotta Have Wa.
I love his books. I enjoyed his book on the Yakuza, Tokyo Underworld.
His baseball books do tend to repeat themselves, and the most recent (“The Meaning of Ichiro,” also known as “The Samurai Way of Baseball”) isn’t nearly as good as the first two, “The Chrysanthemum and the Bat” and “You Gotta Have Wa.”
But you gotta read “You Gotta Have Wa.”