What Happened to JBall?

I've written to Latham-san and asked. We'll see if the mail bounces or if we get a response.

In the mean time, you can still get most (if not all) of what you're looking for on the Wayback Machine (at archive.org).

Hope this helps.

My message bounced to his Baywell account, so it looks like he's no longer using that provider. I'll try to track him down later.

Not many of the maps appear to be in the Wayback Machine. But the text is still good for getting directions.

Didn't Dan say he was going to be writing for the Asahi Shimbun? It might be worth checking out asahi.com.

Yes. That was back in 2002. And that's why his site says that Nippon Ham is based at Tokyo Dome. But his site remained up all these years, and despite it not being maintained any longer, it was still a valuable resource.

I searched Asahi.com and there's no trace of him there at all. I did find a Dan Latham making YouTube movies in his garage, but it doesn't look like the one we're looking for.

He's also the "list owner" of the J-Ball mailing list, but as that list has come under fire from spammers without any response from him, it's unlikely that he's even monitoring that any more.

Latham-san's interest in Japanese baseball and building his site was merely to get a better job, which he got in 2002. I'm afraid that he may have left our community for good.

I don't know how helpful this may be, but I managed to find Latham-san's Yakult Swallows Home Plate website still intact. It has quite a wealth of information. Hope this helps.

Hey, that was his original site, before Baywell had user home pages moved to a different server. Good find! And the maps to the stadiums are still in tact.

Dan moved from the Asahi to The Japan Times in 2002 but he left in September last year to take up a job in the U.S. Basically he just didn't have the time and motivation to keep up his baseball site as the JT kept him very busy, both on the Sports Desk where he started out and later when he moved to the Foreign Desk. He's a great guy and is sadly missed at the JT. A thought that I am sure his old workmates at the Asahi would echo.

By the way, if anybody has any opinions about the sports coverage at the JT, or anything else about the paper for that matter, feel free to send an e-mail in to the paper. I must admit, we could do with more local baseball in the paper, especially if it is about the Dragons of course.