Koryo High School of Hiroshima has defeated Shugakukan of Kumamoto (Yatsushiro). The impression I got from the Japanese article I’m introducing is that Koryo was considered to be the underdog; though they could not overpower Shugakukan outright with power hitting, they were able to win with a combination of “smaller” techniques such as bunting.
Out of curiosity, I took at look at a web page showing the junior high schools from which the Koryo players graduated (making such information public seems to be customary in high school baseball):
http://apapnews.com/famousmember/1486/
Koryo also has a few players from other prefectures but the majority are kids from the local area. As I wrote earlier, that’s something that’s not true of Shugakukan. On the other hand, Koryo may not be all that different from Shugakukan. If you go to the Wikipedia page of the high school, you’ll see a very, very long list of professional baseball players listed as notable graduates:
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/広陵高等学校_(広島県)
The NHK Koshien page says that they’ve made it to the spring and summer tournaments three times each:
http://www9.nhk.or.jp/koushien/school/
Hiroshima City has a population of over a million so they have a much larger pool of local talent to draw from than does Yatsushiro — and even so they get some of their talent from places like Fukuoka, Osaka, and Okayama. When I think of it that way, perhaps a school from Yatsushiro trying to win at this game as a relative newcomer should be considered the underdog after all, regardless of where they find their players.
This confused little essay, which lacks a clear conclusion, has been brought to you by Kirk.
