New to Japanese Baseball, How to Follow?

- Just by standings and box scores?

You can find the standings and box scores on the main page when the season starts. Though I suggest you try and read some of the discussions here and try to get a better understanding of the game overall in Japan.

- I'm assuming there are probably radio broadcasts on the web

Yeah, many of the NPB teams have radio broadcasts, though like you said, without an in-depth understanding of the Japanese language, that will feel empty when trying to grasp the game. Furthermore, some of the broadcasts, from what I'm aware of, are blocked to listeners outside of Japan.

Luckily, many of the NPB teams have live online video broadcasts. The SoftBank Hawks and Rakuten Eagles have online broadcasts for everyone around the world to see.

I'm not sure of your living location, as that would make a major difference in what teams you can watch online. For instance, if you live in Japan, you have a much better selections of teams you can watch online. Otherwise, as I mentioned above, you pretty much only have the choice of watching either SoftBank or Rakuten.

PeerCast is great for NPB radio broadcasts. Each stream has a game on the left and right channel and you can just pan your MP3 player to either side to get the game you want. I followed a lot of games doing this.

I suppose the first thing is to check whether that beautiful Japanese girl has a favorite team. If she's a Hanshin fan and you go with Orix, it might not be the best situation. (As you'll notice, Hanshin fans take their baseball seriously - perhaps too seriously at times.)

I started off buying the sports shimbun and going through the box scores in Japanese. That helps you to recognize the kanji of the various players and for stat categories. If you watch the same game on TV and do your own box score, it's not hard to work out which is which.

Radio broadcasts (on the actual radio) are good, too. Listen to a radio game while watching the TV and you'll pick up a lot more about how the Japanese game is played, and the types of plays they deem to be more impressive. The commentary is a little fast, but hey, you're learning Japanese, so it's great for listening comprehension.

Then go to a game, or visit an izakaya with a TV, and meet some real fans. Don't worry about your elementary Japanese because they'll invariably want to try out their English, and you'll end up using a mix of the two. They'll be interested to know what you think about the key players, so make sure you know who they are.

Thanks for bringing this up; I was also wondering how to get broadcasts for NPB games. I've been following just the live scoreboards and using this site's chat room (for Nippon Series games) ever since I returned to the US.

As for the team to choose, I agree with mijow on asking the girl what fan she is a team of; make sure you don't choose a rival. (Although it is fun sometimes - a good friend of mine is a Hanshin fan, and I made sure to give her a hard time after last year's 1st round playoff series. )

As for Orix, I'm a bit down on them just because they were bad when I was there, but they've made some moves that in theory will help them, and the teams at the top of the PL all have had different problems over the off-season.

Zam, thanks for the tip on PeerCast! Do they also do post season games?

Yes they do, and believe it or not, this is how a lot of guys get their fix of NPB games. Even people in Japan have to resort to PeerCast, since NPB is so clueless as to how to increase their fan base and let the games be seen by as many people as possible.