Finally, the U.S.-based teams are in the books. Three international teams remain. This is … one of them.
About 20 years ago, all of Asia and Australia would have been combined into one team. But then came Nomo, Ichiro and the rest of the Japanese players into the major leagues, and so those guys have broken off and formed their own team (which we’ll look at in the next post).
So what to do about the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere? We can form a team, but there aren’t very many guys to choose from. Still, we want everyone to have a chance to play if they’re good enough, and we would prefer a certain number of teams. We have 54, with 44 from the U.S., and 10 international squads. Since 53 is a prime number, it would be hard to come up with a league without breaking it oddly in “half” somehow.
So for those reasons, we have this team. Maybe in 10 years, the Aussies or the Koreans will be able to go it alone as well. The NJA name stands for Non-Japan Asia … and I threw the second A on there for Australia. I don’t think I’ll be able to settle on a nickname to cover all of them, so we’ll go with Easterners for the hemisphere.
This team includes Russian Eddie Ainsmith; Jeff Bronkey, probably the only MLB player born in Afghanistan for the forseeable future; Saudi Arabia-born Craig Stansberry; Vietnam’s Danny Graves; Robin Jennings, a Harry Caray favorite from Singapore; and Tony Solaita from American Samoa (and another Harry favorite). Unforunately, Harry Kingman, the only player born in China so far, didn’t make the team.
The rotation is headed by Chan Ho Park, whose name Harry Caray famously mangled, with Chien-Ming Wang and Jae Seo behind him. The bullpen is good, with Graves, Byung-Hyun Kim, Peter Moylan, Hong-Chih Kuo, Grant Balfour and Graeme Lloyd. The more I think about it, the best strategy for this team might be to use six or seven pitchers in most games. There are 13 on the staff. What do they have to lose?
One reason there are so many pitchers though is there just aren’t very many position players to choose from. The best hitter is probably Shin Soo-Choo or Dave Nilsson. There are only two catchers on the whole team, Ainsmith and Nilsson.
One of the players, Joe Quinn, is the only MLB manager from this region. Born in Australia, he was the first one from his country to make it to the majors – by 102 years, until Craig Shipley arrived in 1986. Quinn ran the 1895 St. Louis Browns and the infamous 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who went 12-104 under Quinn (20-132 overall, the worst MLB record ever). That wasn’t really his fault, as the St. Louis team owners also owned the Spiders and shifted Cleveland’s best assets to the St. Louis team.
Here we are, 110 years later, and no other native Aussie has since been given a shot to manage in the big leagues. Quinn, perhaps fittingly, owned a funeral home after his career ended. In any case he’s getting another shot to manage. Unfortunately, this team could be the Spiders of our league.
NJAA EASTERNERS
CA Eddie Ainsmith
RH Grant Balfour
RH Jeff Bronkey
OF Chin-Feng Chen
1B Hee Seop Choi
OF Shin-Soo Choo
UT Trent Durrington
RH Danny Graves
2B Brad Harman
SS Chin-Lung Hu
OF Justin Huber
RH Mark Hutton
OF Robin Jennings
RH Byung-Hyun Kim
LH Hong Chih-Kuo
LH Graeme Lloyd
LH Damian Moss
RH Peter Moylan
CA Dave Nilsson
RH Chan Ho Park
2B Joe Quinn
LH Ryan Rowland-Smith
RH Jae Seo
3B Craig Shipley
1B Tony Solaita
2B Craig Stansberry
RH Chien-Ming Wang
3B Glenn Williams
Next: Japan. Down to the last two.
Base instincts 