Japan baseball, media charting new territory under virus precautions

Professional baseball may have returned to Japan, but with new rules in place due to the coronavirus pandemic every aspect of the game has been affected, including player-media relations.Take the traditional postgame "hero of the game" interview as an example.After the Rakuten Eagles defeated the Lotte Marines 5-3 last week, Hideto Asamura and Kazuhisa Makita appeared in front of the cameras for a joint hero interview, maintaining social distancing and physical separation with a transparent partition barrier.Asamura homered in Rakuten's first three runs of the game, and Makita provided some…READ FULL ARTICLE