MLB: Japanese baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani has addressed the LA Dodgers fans in English in a rare public speech.
Shohei Ohtani addresses Dodgers faithful | 00:54The team captain, Tim Kennelly, is a firefighter. Pitcher Mitch Neunborn worked both as a plumber and disability support worker in 2022 before impressing enough in the ABL and World Baseball Classic to earn a full-time gig playing Double-A.
But thousands of kilometres away in Fuchu, a Tokyo suburb which is their “second home”, it is very different. “We come over here,” Kent added, “and we’re baseball players”. Bazzana, who made history in July when he became the first Australian to be selected first overall in the MLB Draft, described the support in Japan as “incredible”.“It’s almost like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Similar numbers are expected for the opening game against Japan in Nagoya, which will be played at Tokyo Dome in front of nearly 50,000 fans on Wednesday at 9pm AEDT. Todd Van Steensel of Team Australia celebrates. It wasn’t always that way though. Kent, who first made the senior national team when he was 17, has been able to see that shift first-hand — from a team that “turned up to tournaments hoping to win some games” to one that “would arrive at tournaments thinking they could win some games”.
Vision shared of Kent playing with a few of the local kids on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Friday night has over 25,000 likes and 3.1 million impressions. Sherriff, meanwhile, described it as more of a “blackout moment” — one he was completely prepared for at last year’s World Baseball Classic given so many of his teammates had told him of also having that exact same feeling in their trip to the plate or mound.“... When I got on the mound, everything just kind of blacked out around me. It was the catcher and myself. Obviously after I came off the pitch, then you start to realise, ‘Holy f***. That’s a lot of people around’.
“I think that’s when it really kind of set in that Japanese baseball is really taking interest in Australian baseball,” he said. Especially when you consider what the 37-year-old has achieved throughout his career as the Australian Baseball League’s modern day all-time leader in games played, home runs, hits and runs batted in.
Hard workers like Spence, a fifth-round draft pick who reached as high as Triple-A and knows all too well that chasing your dream as an Australian baseball player comes at a cost.“You might have the game at seven o’clock at night, but you’re at the field at 12 o’clock because you’ve got to work out, you’ve got to do all that other stuff… and then the games don’t finish till you know 10 or 11 o’clock.
“To get that feeling… that’s why you play this game. That’s why we do all the early workouts, the long days on the field, just so that when the time comes, you can achieve something great like that.” Travis Bazzana dreamed of representing his country at the senior level. Picture: Andrew Green/baseball.com.auMeanwhile, it will be another chance for Sherriff to don the green and gold after pitching for Australia at the World Baseball Classic and the Asia Professional Baseball Championships last year.
“I couldn’t really hold my own over there,” added Sherriff, who was just 18 years old when he went over to the States.Which is why tournaments like these can be about more than just winning or losing a game. “We’ll do the little things, we’ll do whatever it takes to win as a team and it’s a really special feeling… there’s no egos, it is just 28 guys plus the coaching staff all fighting for one shared common goal.”It may seem unrealistic to some, but in reality, it is anything but because this is a team and this is a coaching thatBut the Premier12 isn’t a marathon. Neither is the World Baseball Classic.
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