Mid-week Notes

Every time I think I'm out of the water, something drags me back in. I've been working on my final packet for my Chinese class, putting the final touches on a history paper, trying to speed through an Independent Study German class and so on. Sometimes it feels like it never ends.

Presentation on Japanese Baseball

This week in my Japanese history class each student has done a short presentation on his or her research paper. I did my presentation on my wonderfully dry paper about Taiwanese nationalism. I probably should have done something about baseball instead, but I thought that doing something actually related to my major would have been more worthwhile.

Nevertheless, there was a presentation on the history of Japanese baseball. A girl in my class did a pretty interesting research paper, based primarily on a paper by Daniel Rhoden (sp?) on pre-WWII baseball in Japan. She mentioned a high school team, Ichiko, which challenged and beat the all-western Yokohama Club in a four game series in 1896. I wouldn't mind learning more about this -- anybody know of any books or research papers (other than You Gotta Have Wa)?

Had I known earlier that she was researching this topic, I would have loaned her my copy of the modern classic Sayonara Home Run! for illustrations. Oh, and 2DBB would have loved every minute of it.

More Season Preview

I (hopefully) will write up the next Team Preview tomorrow afternoon. It all depends on how quickly I finish my homework. That, and I'll probably have to find some time beforehand to make a few changes. Diamond Mind's automatic draft system is simply awful, leading to teams with way too few pitchers, or absolutely no reserves on certain positions. But you probably already knew that.

This should be a fun project, since I'll be playing from China starting around the second half of August. I'll post updates on both the Diamond Mind Yuku and Delphi forums, too, especially if I'm unable to access this blog in China.

APBA Journals

I don't think I've mentioned this yet. I've been scanning old copies of the APBA Journal for Francis Rose over at the APBA Journal official website. Most of these are old Journals my dad saved from when he played APBA more frequently. There is one from 1976, a few from 1983-1985, some from 1991-1992, and a few I picked up in 1998-1999. I've currently scanned through September 1991. It's a pretty time-consuming project, but it's really a lot of fun. There's nothing better than taking an hour off in the afternoon, listening to a live game and scanning a few of those journals at the school library.

I've always wished there was something similar for the Diamond Mind community, but I'm afraid that the internet has made such ultra-specialty journals obsolete. And, to tell the truth, it's more fun to follow replays game-by-game on blogs and forums than waiting for a short APBAlone update after the season is complete. Still, the Diamond Mind community could use a centralized report of league winners, and it would be nice to have a place to store DMB-based baseball analysis as well.

Of course, the first step ought to be connecting the Diamond Mind Online and Diamond Mind websites.