Tigers scout gets front-row seat to baseball history

LAKELAND, Fla. — Kan Ikeda was like hundreds of thousands of baseball followers on Tuesday evening, glued to a display watching Shohei Ohtani face Mike Trout with the World Baseball Classic on the road. Unlike hundreds of thousands of followers, the motion was proper outdoors his door.

Kan was within the clubhouse for Team Japan throughout video games, answerable for potential replay challenges. Before video games, he ran the advance scouting. His job revolves round poring over video. So when Japan’s formidable pitching workers confronted hitters, whether or not from the Major Leagues or from different international locations and federations, they had been relying largely on Ikeda’s stories.

It was much like his function with the Tigers as their advance scouting supervisor — however with a nation’s baseball hopes on the road.

“After outings, [pitchers] all came in and told me how nervous they were, but they didn’t look like it on the mound,” Ikeda stated. “Those guys were built for this moment, every single one of them. That was fun to watch.”

With Ohtani and Trout, Angels teammates dealing with each other, there was no advance report wanted. No replay, both. So for a second, Ikeda soaked all of it in.

“Mostly I was just staring at the screen,” he recalled Friday. “‘OK, I’m not going to worry about the keyboard. Just stare at it. Anything close, hit-by-pitch, I’ll just tell them to go for it and challenge.’ Well, probably not, because I didn’t want to kill the moment.”

Ikeda didn’t must. When Ohtani unleashed the nasty two-strike slider that set Trout down swinging, Ikeda was a champion, too.

“I watched the last pitch, and all of us went straight to the dugout, hugged the coaching staff and we all went to the field,” he stated. “It took some time to hit me, what was really occurring. I did not even think about what it could appear like to win that.

“This WBC kind of told all of us how big of a deal it is for a lot of people, and certainly for Team Japan. Ohtani said he was dreaming about this when he was a kid. We all grew up watching Ichiro, Daisuke [Matsuzaka] and even [Yu] Darvish back when he was young before he came to the States. We watched all of them at the beginning, where it started. I couldn’t guess I could be a part of it.”

While Miguel Cabrera, Eduardo Rodriguez and Javier Báez had been within the highlight taking part in for Venezuela and Puerto Rico, Ikeda was behind the scenes. Before Hideki Kuriyama managed Team Japan, he managed the Nippon-Ham Fighters, who spent Spring Training in Arizona in 2016. Ikeda, then a Tigers intern, went to Arizona to assist the Fighters part-time. Team Japan approached him final yr.

Ikeda knew learn how to scout for Major League collection. He didn’t understand how and what to scout for Japanese gamers in a global event. So the staff introduced him to Japan for an exhibition collection to search out out.

“They let me be in the dugout and talk to players during games, and so I got to know what they look for during games,” Ikeda stated. “Because I do know what Major League gamers often ask, however I had no thought what NPB gamers ask. That was the start.

“After I came back from Japan, after Thanksgiving, after the Winter Meetings, I started looking into it. By then, I knew what they like to know, what they like to see, that kind of stuff. I got a sense of what they wanted me to prepare for them.”

Ikeda made it work, and he discovered quite a bit within the course of. When he rejoined the Tigers, supervisor A.J. Hinch put him in entrance of the staff, along with his gold medal, and honored him.

“It was very, very cool,” Ikeda stated. “When I left [Tigers camp], I felt bad because I was missing pretty much the whole Spring Training. Our camp started way earlier than everybody else. I felt bad, especially for my co-workers and the coaching staff. I was going to skip a lot of work. I didn’t even expect to bring some hardware [back] with me. I didn’t even think about that.”

Said Hinch: “It was cool, particularly for Kan. It’s one factor for the gamers and coaches, however Kan’s an unsung hero with all of the work that he does behind the scenes and the interplay with the gamers, FaceTiming with Miggy. Kan has such a terrific connection that no one is aware of about outdoors our doorways, and it is enjoyable to have him on the middle stage.”