The World Baseball Classic (WBC) Japanese national team convened on the 17th and started official training.
The Japanese national team, led by head coach Hideki Kuriyama, started training for the first time at Camp Miyazaki, Japan.
Among the major leaguers included in the final roster, Yu Darvish (San Diego Padres), the only major leaguer to join the national team early, Roki Sasaki (Chiba Lotte), the youngest player in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB)
to have a perfect game, and Mune Murakami, who was the NPB Most Valuable Player (MVP) last season. Taka (Yagult Swallows) and others appeared.
Of the five major leaguers in Japan, only Darvish joined early. Four other major leaguers, Shohei Ohtani (LA Angels), Seiya Suzuki (Chicago Cubs), Masataka Yoshida (Boston Red Sox), and Lars Nutba (St. They plan to join the national team ahead of the opening of the tournament after building up their bodies enough for their team.
Many fans gathered at the camp site, where stars representing Japanese baseball gathered, proving their keen interest.
According to the Japanese media ‘Spoccini Annex’, on this day, as many as 1,000 fans gathered at San Marin Stadium in Miyazaki, where the Japanese national team held their first training session to greet the players.
The Japanese national team limited the number of people who can watch the national team training at the baseball field during the camp to 18,000 per day to prevent any possible life-threatening accident, and distributed tickets in advance, but it is known that all tickets have already been sold out.
Japan, which has started to quench the WBC in earnest, trains until the 24th and then learns a sense of actual combat through practice matches against the Softbank Hawks on the 25th and 26th.
On the 3rd and 4th of next month, they will move to Nagoya’s Vantelin Dome to play two consecutive matches against the Chunichi Dragons, and on the 6th and 7th, they will move to the Kyocera Dome in Osaka to play an evaluation match against the Hanshin Tigers and Orix Buffaloes, before entering the first round of the finals.