It seems that a second professional baseball league has opened in Japan. I am not clear on the business reasons for the new league (which seems to be more of a minor-league operation than new competition for the Japanese majors) but one of the teams appears to have identified a major-league-quality knuckleballer. The knuckleball, for those of you who don't know, is one of the trickiest pitches in baseball. Essentially, the pitcher throws a knuckleball with no spin. Since a baseball isn't a smooth sphere, in theory the lack of spin makes the ball's trajectory unpredictable and almost impossible to hit. In practice, the pitcher needs to be very very good to avoid (1) handing the batter an easy hit; (2) throwing a lot of balls; or (3) making life impossible for the catcher and thereby allowing any runners an opportunity to advance.
The curve? The knuckleballer so-identifed appears to be a five-foot-tall 16-year-old girl.
I hope this story pans out. Truly good knuckleballers are rare. So the odds are that Eri Yoshida won't make it to the incumbent major leagues in Japan, let alone the United States. But I hope she does.
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