Japanese slugger mystified by 186-mph fastball
I bought a new Toyota the other day, and the finance manager was Eric Ludwick, the former Eldorado High and UNLV baseball star who pitched for the Cardinals, A’s, Marlins and Mets. Ludwick also spent a couple of seasons in Japan, toiling for the Hiroshima Carp of the Central League.
One of the guys he pitched against in Japan was Takeshi Yamasaki of the Chunichi Dragons. Yamasaki also played for the Orix BlueWave and Tohuku Rakuten Golden Eagles and hit more than 400 home runs during his career.
Granted, some of them were home runs that traveled only 305 feet, which is how far the left-field fences are in a lot of the Japanese ballparks. Still, they were homers over there.
Here is a link to a story and video of Yamasaki I came across after financing my car:
It shows Yamasaki trying to hit a 186-mph fastball off a pitching machine on some Japanese game show.
He did not get the bat off his shoulder, except to try to bunt.
That didn’t work, either.
The video I saw was longer — it has since been taken down due to copyright infringements. It showed Yamasaki reacting by bailing out of the batter’s box and laughing at the audacity of a 186-mph heater, and saying lots of things that made the studio audience laugh.
He was speaking in Japanese, so he might have mentioned “Eric Ludwick never threw this hard when I faced him in 2001” though chances are that wasn’t what he was saying.