Japanese Sports Dailies - Any Good?

For sheer vibrancy and energy, the Daily Sports is the one to read. It's also the de facto Tigers papers and contains everything you could want on the Tigers.

In the Kansai region, you'll find that Daily Sports is probably the most popular as it deals almost exclusively with the Hanshin Tigers. If you want a round opinion of what's going on in the rest of baseball, I doubt you'll get it from there.

Sports Hochi is equally Giants-centric. But they do have very good coverage of Koshien (at least on their web site).

I subscribe to Nikkan Sports (Kanto edition). While several of the writers are clearly biased toward the Giants, the editor does a good job of promoting Pacific League teams fairly evenly with the Central League teams. The past few years, it seems that the editor may have even had a preference for the PL as the Pacific League stars have graced the front page very often. (The weekend editor seems to avoid baseball on the front page very often.)

I've liked Sponichi Annex on-line for a quick round up/summary of the day's action and news.

Sanspo (Sankei Sports) and most of the evening papers are best avoided unless you like geinokai (celebrity) news. Sanspo is responsible for the whole "Darvish will be posted after this season" rumor (which you'll notice that none of the other sports dailies even bothered to repeat). They started another annoying rumor during the off season, but I don't recall what it was any more - just that a number of foreign news agencies picked it up and reprinted it without validating. I like the Sankei Group (Fuji TV). But Sanspo should be only read for entertainment, not information.

- Sanspo should be only read for entertainment, not information.

Once you can work out what's fact and what's clearly speculation, some of the made up bits are hilarious.

How good/fast is your reading?

For me, I buy Shukan Baseball every week and just keep it in my bag and read it whenever I have spare time on the train. It takes me about a week to get through everything I'm interested in in one issue, so it seems just about right. It's not a daily, it's a weekly magazine that costs 350-380 yen, but it reports on all teams and the majors and there's always something new and interesting in it (plus the "Locker Room" segments alone are usually worth the issue in amusement value). There's also a baseball-related crossword puzzle in every issue and I've found that to be a lot of fun to try every week as well (though I get a lot of weird looks on the train).