{"id":636717,"date":"2026-03-22T05:58:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T05:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/636717\/"},"modified":"2026-03-22T05:58:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-22T05:58:21","slug":"baseball-japan-manager-hirokazu-ibata-says-hes-stepping-down-after-elimination-in-wbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/636717\/","title":{"rendered":"BASEBALL\/ Japan manager Hirokazu Ibata says he\u2019s stepping down after elimination in WBC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>National team baseball manager Hirokazu Ibata has said he will step down following Japan\u2019s loss to\u00a0Venezuela\u00a08-5 in Miami in the quarterfinals of the World Baseball Classic.<\/p>\n<p>The newspaper Sports Hochi reported\u00a0Ibata\u00a0saying it was his \u201cintention to resign.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Japan is the defending champion and had won the event three times. It marked Japan\u2019s first failure to reach the WBC semifinals despite a team stacked with major league talent including\u00a0Shohei Ohtani.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe result is everything,\u201d Sports Hochi reported Ibata saying. \u201cAlthough we lost this time, I hope Japan will grow stronger and win next time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Japan was 4-0 in play in Tokyo in Pool C \u2014 victories over Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and the Czech Republic \u2014 before being eliminated by Venezuela in the loss in Miami.<\/p>\n<p>The MLB players on the Japan team included: Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Seiya Suzuki, Yusei Kikuchi, Masataka Yoshida, Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto and Tomoyuki Sugano.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"National team baseball manager Hirokazu Ibata has said he will step down following Japan\u2019s loss to\u00a0Venezuela\u00a08-5 in Miami&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2302],"tags":[2559,5,2372,169,2353,2352,185],"class_list":["post-636717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-npb","tag-asahi-shimbun","tag-baseball","tag-japan","tag-news","tag-nippon-professional-baseball","tag-npb","tag-sports"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116271297685541145","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}