For the past few days, I’ve been working on importing raw play-by-play data for Japanese baseball. Once the import scripts and queries were written, I needed a way to audit the results. To do that, I needed a source for up-to-date statistics on Japanese baseball players.
Yahoo! provides a rather robust web site for the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). Unfortunately, the web site is in Japanese, a language I don’t read or have support for on my computer, so the screen was, for the most part, filled with question marks, as seen below.
Yahoo! Sports NPB Baseball (before translation)
By using Google Translator, I was able to transform this into the following:
Yahoo! Sports NPB Baseball (with Google translation)
I wasn’t expecting a perfect translation (it would be silly to do so), but the results were certainly entertaining.
- A “base on balls” is a “giving Annie Oakley”.
- A “hit batter” is a “giving dead sphere” (the poor batter).
- “On base percentage” is “coming out base ratio”.
- “Slugging percentage” is “long batting average”.
If you look at a translated hitter’s page, you’ll see this unusual description of a player’s at-bat:
Two racketeers, empty three swing, medium flying it is cheap, the left ? flying, two racketeers
Who says there’s no racketeering in professional baseball today?