Japanese national team ace Yamamoto Yoshinobu (Orix) threw a fastball at 156 km/h in live pitching in February. This shows that regardless of the start of the regular season, the focus is on the World Baseball Classic (WBC).
Daily Sports and other Japanese media reported on the 8th, “Oryx Yamamoto smoothly paced toward the WBC with a maximum speed of 156 km per hour.” Yamamoto did live pitching at Orix Camp in Miyazaki that day. He threw 30 pitches, where the speed of the fastball reached 156 km per hour.
Reportedly, Yamamoto allowed two well-hit hits while dealing with six batters. He showed the pitch to hitters and threw it, and even when he threw with a new form that corrected his pitching form, he achieved satisfactory results.
Yamamoto is the best pitcher in Japanese professional baseball who has won the Sawamura Award for two consecutive years. Last year, he went 15-5 with a 1.68 earned run average in 26 games. He has also become familiar to Korean baseball fans through the 2019 Premier 12 and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He is also expected to be selected for the Japanese national team at the WBC.
Head coach Hideki Kuriyama is preparing for the tournament with two major leaguers, Shohei Ohtani (Angels) and Yu Darvish (San Diego), Yamamoto and Rocky Sasaki (Chiba Lotte) as starting pitchers. Chiba Lotte head coach Yoshii Masato, the national team pitching coach, expressed his personal opinion that he wanted to send Yamamoto and Sasaki as starting pitchers after the semifinals. Yamamoto is a player Japan is proud of. 바카라
In Orix, in addition to Yamamoto, Hiroya Miyagi and Yuki Udagawa compete in the WBC. Miyagi, who is
in his 4th year of professional debut this year, took steps from the youth representative to participate in the WBC. He helped Orix transform into a strong team, which had a strong image of a weakling, by winning double digits for two consecutive years.
Udagawa was selected for the national team last year after being converted from a training player to a full-time player and making a surprise performance. He captivated coach Kuriyama with an average ERA of 0.81 in 19 games in the first team and 1 win, 2 holds, 10 strikeouts and no runs in 5⅔ innings of 4 games in the Japan Series.