This is a site about Pro Yakyu (Japanese Baseball), not about who the next player to go over to MLB is. It's a community of Pro Yakyu fans who have come together to share their knowledge and opinions with the world. It's a place to follow teams and individuals playing baseball in Japan (and Asia), and to learn about Japanese (and Asian) culture through baseball.
It is my sincere hope that once you learn a bit about what we're about here that you will join the community of contributors.
Michael Westbay
(aka westbaystars)
Founder
Through previous exchanges with Owen-san, I knew that he, like me, started his site as a hobby, so we had a lot in common from the start. However, I was a little leary of doing any kind of business promotion. I'd turned down a number of "business opportunities" before his offer, but the idea of hosting a contest for the fans didn't sound like anything other "opportunists" were asking of me.
I thought about it a bit. The YakyuShop does provide a very important service to the Pro Yakyu community. I'd waited for such a service since I first started getting requests for caps and jerseys since I started writing on the Web in 1995. Furthermore, when Ichiro became a big hit in the Majors, the YakyuShop could have boosted prices for Ichiro goods, but didn't. It's actions like those that tell me that Owen-san and Garcia-san have their hearts in the right place for Pro Yakyu fans.
So, Owen-san and I exchanged several more messages and decided on criteria for the contest. I then created a table in the database and set out to write a page to cast your submission for the contest.
On the contest page, you can see who voted for what team, in how many games, the point spread, and who they think will be MVP. Of these four fields, you must get the first two right to qualify for a prize. Since there may be many people who guess, for example, Kintetsu in 4, the point spread will be used to decide the order. But even that may have a tie, so if somebody gets the MVP right, (s)he will win! Multiple guesses with the same MVP as well? Well, that's OK. The final deciding order will be the timestamp of each vote, so earlier correct guesses weigh more.
You may vote as often as you like, but once every 24 hours. I'm sure that some people will get around it by creating multiple users. If it looks like there is over abuse (and the abuser is using masked and/or hidden IP addresses), I will remove the abusive entries. I would like to think that Pro Yakyu fans are above such things, though.
Oh, and be sure that your e-mail address is correct in your personal profile, or it'll be hard to contact you should you win. (No e-mail addresses will be given to anyone, including the YakyuShop, for the purposes of mass mail advertising. This is something I feel very strongly about. And I recommend that all of you keep your personal e-mail addresses hidden in your profile to prevent spam-bots from harvesting addresses from the web.)
Well, entries will be excepted up until 6:00pm on the evening of Game 1 - October 20th, JST. What are you waiting for?