Saturday, March 28, 2009

Big in Japan

Eri Yoshida, age 17 and Japan's first female professional baseball player, made her debut on Friday in the newly-formed Kansai Independent League (which is basically a minor league). A knuckleball pitcher who grew up wanting to emulate Tim Wakefield, she picked up a strikeout. As Rob Neyer points out, her small size is probably going to be her largest hurdle, but this is still awesome and I hope she gets very far.

3 comments:

Zifnab said...

While the story is interesting, I found Neyer's approach phrased in very sexist terms and lost what respect I had for him.

Mason said...

I agree that he could have made his point using phrasing that didn't go in such a direction at all.

Mason said...

To add to a bit to my above comment, I definitely felt some discomfort with Neyer's phrasing when I read his post (though I choose to include the link because of the small-size point, even with the poor way of expressing it). He was out of line, and I'm somewhat surprised that that got past his editors.