Japan’s first baseball winter league will be held in Okinawa from this year. Its name is “Japan Winter League”.
This is the first time in Japan that a full-scale event will be held after December, which is off-season, including professionals and amateurs. It is positioned as a unified place for tryouts.
Participating players in the first year are only amateurs, and it is expected that major and NPB scouts will also agree, and remote scouting by quantifying the evaluation of players for 21 games (stats, numerical data in tracking system, video analysis) We will form a new era of tryout, such as introducing a system that can do this.
Mr. Rin Ohno who became the GM of the Japan Winter League
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Japan’s first winter league
Generally speaking, the winter league refers to overseas leagues held in warm regions such as Latin America such as Puerto Luco and Dominican Republic, Australia and Taiwan during the off-season from November, and past NPB teams have also dispatched mainly young players. There is a history.
Apart from that, there is also a tryout league held in the United States that anyone can participate in. That is why Goro Shigeno, the main character of the baseball manga monument “Major” (Shogakukan) since Heisei, went to America alone. This time, it is the latter that will put into practice Japan’s first attempt.
Kazumasa Washizaki, the representative of Japan League Co., Ltd., said, “By creating a third community that is neither professional nor amateur, a place where players who are not in the sun can shine and their active baseball life is completely burned. We will hold a winter league in Okinawa so that we can do it, “he said strongly.
Okinawa legend Rin Ohno, who was the driving force behind Okinawa Fisheries, who won second place in Koshien for the second consecutive year in 1990 and 1991, and who entered the giant from Kyushu Kyoritsu University, was appointed as GM.
“There are a lot of players all over Japan who have abandoned crying baseball due to various reasons. At that time, it may have been solved by quitting baseball due to an unexpected event, but later,” If you continue .. In Japan, you will be asked for choices at the ages of 15, 18 and 22, and your life may be decided there. If I got out of the game, that was the end of the game, which was called an independent league.
However, even in the independent league, which is in the last minute of operation, more than half of the players are hired by connection. Then, the player who has no connection loses his place while holding a sickness in his heart. I think it is a big role of the Winter League to provide such players with a proper place for actual battles. “
