Newsletter

Baseball: Cardinals’ Nootbaar heading for some sort of reunion in Japan

St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Lars Nootbaar barely speaks Japanese, but he might feel a wave of childhood nostalgia when he joins his Samurai Japan teammates before the World Baseball Classic in March.

Nootbaar, 25, grew up in California, the youngest son of a Dutch father and a Japanese mother. He will be the first Japanese player to qualify for the WBC team through his ancestry.

Lars Nootbaar (C) is pictured with Yu Funabashi (L) and Yuta Shiozawa during a Japan National Junior Team stay at Nootbaar’s family in California in 2006. (Photo courtesy of Yuta Shiozawa)(Essonne Info)

Manager Hideki Kuriyama expects Nootbaar to enrich the team as he grew up playing a different style of baseball. Still, Nootbaar already has a connection to Japanese baseball since growing up in California.

Seventeen years ago, players from a Japanese youth national team, including former New York Yankee Masahiro Tanaka and high school rival Yuki Saito, stayed with Nootbaar’s family.

One player who remembers Nootbaar well is Yu Funabashi.

St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Lars Nootbaar. (Getty/Essonne Info)

“He was a tough guy who was good at connecting with people,” Funabashi said.

The visitors remembered the nine-year-old Nootbaar, who served as a batsman, helped the players stretch and played ball with them. Mr Funabashi posted the news of Nootbaar’s arrival to the WBC squad on the social media group he is a part of along with his former Japan Youth teammates.

” This child ? Saito, who retired from professional football last year, posted. “I remember him. »

Another former teammate, Yuta Shiozawa, remembers telling Nootbaar over and over, “Eat your rice if you want to be a professional baseball player,” and receiving a Christmas card from the boy saying how much he liked to eat lots of White rice.

“When I see how big and strong he is, I’m touched,” Shiozawa said with a laugh, recalling that skinny boy is now an MLB 190-inch outfielder.

At a recent Cardinals team event, Nootbaar was asked if he could speak Japanese.

“I’ll give it a try,” he replied, reports The Associated Press.

“Obviously it will be difficult to learn a language in a month. I will do my best. My mother sings the Japanese national anthem at home. I repeat. We just do little things like that. »

Shiozawa said, “It’s a spark plug that will overcome the language barrier. »

Kuriyama said Nootbaar will be a hit with his Japanese teammates.

“Everyone is going to like it, 100%,” Kuriyama said recently.


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Trending