Baseball
Japan's victory in the 2007 Asian Baseball Championship qualified the Japan national baseball team for Olympic competition. Japan, along with Cuba, has appeared in every Olympic baseball tournament since the sport was elevated to official status. Japan has reached the semifinals each year and taken one silver and two bronze medals, but has yet to win the Olympic championship.
- Roster
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Pitchers:
Catchers:
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Infielders:
Outfielders:
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Group stage
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Group table
| Team | G | W | L | RS | RA | WIN% | GB | Tiebreaker |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| South Korea | 7 | 7 | 0 | 41 | 22 | 1.000 | - | - |
| Cuba | 7 | 6 | 1 | 52 | 23 | .857 | 1 | - |
| United States | 7 | 5 | 2 | 40 | 22 | .714 | 2 | - |
| Japan | 7 | 4 | 3 | 30 | 14 | .571 | 3 | - |
| Chinese Taipei | 7 | 2 | 5 | 29 | 33 | .286 | 5 | 1-0 |
| Canada | 7 | 2 | 5 | 29 | 20 | .286 | 5 | 0-1 |
| Netherlands | 7 | 1 | 6 | 9 | 50 | .143 | 6 | 1-0 |
| China | 7 | 1 | 6 | 14 | 60 | .143 | 6 | 0-1 |
Semifinal
| Team | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | R | H | E | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 6 | 2 | |||||||||||
| South Korea | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4 | X | 6 | 10 | 1 | |||||||||||
| WP: Kwang-Hyun Kim (1-0) LP: Hitoki Iwase (0-3) Home runs: JPN: None KOR: Seung-Yeop Lee (1) |
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Bronze medal game
| Team | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | R | H | E | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | 1 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 6 | 1 | |||||||||||
| United States | 0 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | X | 8 | 9 | 0 | |||||||||||
| WP: Brett Anderson (1-0) LP: Kenshin Kawakami (0-1) Home runs: JPN: Masahiro Araki (1), Norichika Aoki (1) USA: Matt LaPorta (2), Matt Brown (2), Jason Donald (1) |
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Read more about this topic: Japan At The 2008 Summer Olympics
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)