International Pastime looks at baseball's influence outside the U.S.There are few pitches as strength-agnostic as the knuckleball. Get a good knuckleball, and you can look like John Daly's fat cousin and still probably end up making money to play baseball. It's a golden ticket, that knuckler. Use it wisely.
That's exactly the plan for 16-year-old Japanese girl Eri Yoshida, who is attempting to use her knuckler to go pro against men in Japan. So far, so good:
High school student Eri Yoshida was drafted by the Kobe 9 Cruise, a professional team in a new independent Japanese league that will start its first season in April. "I always dreamed of becoming a professional," Yoshida, who is 5-feet (152-centimeters) tall and weighs 114 pounds (52 kilograms), told a news conference Monday. "I have only just been picked by the team and haven't achieved anything yet."If you factor in mathematical probability -- carry the one, add the three, and so forth -- it is a near certainty that one of those batters was Kosuke Fukudome. He was being held hitless somewhere, anyway.
Yoshida took part in a tryout held earlier this month and passed with flying colors. The right-hander held male batters hitless for one inning in the tryout and her successful outing helped her become one of the 33 players picked in the draft.
