These are some manhole league baseball players.

They say in Japan, you’ve never really made it until they make a manhole lid of you… OK, fine, they don’t actually say that, but they should because the proliferation of honorary manhole covers has been widespread in recent years with utility holes capped by the likes of Pokémon, Gundam, Sailor Moon, Kabosu, Love Live!, and SaGa Frontier to name a few.

Now, it’s time for some of Japan’s greatest baseball heroes to shine in glistening cast iron and MLB Japan is set to install a series of 12 manhole lids all over the country. Each lid will feature a Japanese player who is currently making waves in the North American league and will be installed in a location significant to their rise to fame.

Iwate Prefecture alone will be home to three of the lids, the most notable one belonging to Shohei Ohtani who was born and raised in what is now the city of Oshu, where his lid will be placed. Ohtani’s teammate on the Dodgers Roki Sasaki and Yusei Kikuchi, who currently pitches for Ohtani’s former team the Angels, both also hail from Iwate and will get lids in their respective hometowns, Rikuzentakata and Morioka.

Other notable players will get lids in the cities where they were either born or raised, with the exception of Lars Nootbaar who was born and raised in the USA but has a mother from Higashimatsuyama, Saitama Prefecture, where his lid will be placed.

Here’s the full list of players, the location of their lids, and when the lids will be installed.

Shohei Ohtani – Oshu, Iwate Prefecture (16 June)
Yusei Kikuchi – Morioka, Iwate Prefecture (16 June)
Roki Sasaki – Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture (16 June)
Yu Darvish – Habikino, Osaka Prefecture (17 June)
Yuki Matsui – Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture (18 June)
Shota Imanaga – Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture (19 June)
Lars Nootbaar – Higashimatsuyama City, Saitama Prefecture (23 June)
Seiya Suzuki – Arakawa Ward, Tokyo (24 June)
Yoshinobu Yamamoto – Bizen, Okayama Prefecture (25 June)
Masataka Yoshida – Fukui, Fukui Prefecture (26 June)
Kodai Senga – Gamagori, Aichi Prefecture (27 June)
Tomoyuki Sugano – Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture (29 June)

Each lid features an illustration of the player by a different artist, featuring details such as Kodai Senga winding up for a pitch with a phantom coming out of his hand in honor of his signature ghost fork. Yu Darvish’s lid also shows him in mid-wind-up but with 10 arms radiating out from him, each one holding the ball in a different way to celebrate his outstanding arsenal of 10 different pitches to keep opposing batters on their toes.

If you want to learn more about these players and where they came from, just stop by any of their manholes. That’s because these lids do much more than prevent people from falling to their deaths, by scanning them with your smartphone an AR short film can be seen. The MLB is planning something else with these lids in conjunction with airline JAL, but details won’t be released until after the lids start being installed.

While it’s certainly understandable the MLB wants to promote active players, hopefully, they’ll also pay respect to past greats too like Sadaharu Oh, Hideki Matsui, and Ichiro Suzuki. And even though his stats might not be up to the others, I think we can all agree that Munenori Kawasaki’s contributions to Major League Baseball have more than earned him a lid.

Source, images: PR Times
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