Talk:Climax Series

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Climax Series/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: KV5 (Talk • Phils) 18:20, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

I'll begin reviewing this article tonight, but I'm always impressed with Torsodog's work and would like the chance to work with him on this article. KV5 (Talk • Phils) 18:20, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

First tranche of comments

Lead

• Are there really no appropriate images for this article at all?

• I've racked my brain, and I can't think of one. Images for Japanese baseball are pretty rare on Wiki anyways, so it makes it extra hard. They are mostly limited to players and stadiums. If you have ANY suggestions, I'm open!
• Actually, I just found File:Tokyo Dome 2007-15.jpg, which appears to be a picture of the Tokyo Dome during the 2007 CLCS. I think that this is probably our best shot at having an image in the article, but I'm not really sure what kind of caption I'd use though if in included it. Thoughts?

• That would be a great image. Since it's from 2007, which I believe was the first climax series, perhaps an appropriate caption would be "The Tokyo Dome, home of the Yomiuri Giants, was the host stadium for the inaugural Central League Climax Series." Don't forget to include alternative text. KV5 (Talk • Phils) 12:50, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

• Added. I also changed "the host stadium" to "a host stadium" because the Nagoya Dome hosted Stage 1.

• "the Central League (CL) always sent the team"

• Done

• "the two leagues again sent the team with the best regular season record in their respective league"

• remove "again"
• "the teams"
• "regular-season"
• "respective leagues"

• Done, done, done, done

• "against each other" - against one another is more formal.

• replaced all instances

• "this two-stage playoff then advanced"

• gone

• "to the Japan Series" - add comma after "Series"

• added

• "The winner of this three-game series" - "winner" should be winners, and "this" should be these; more than one series occurs

• good catch!

• "regular season champion" - regular-season (twice)

• added

History

• If you are going to repeat the CL and the PL and their abbreviations in the first paragraph, you should also repeat NPB in full.

• You are right, I should be consistent here, but I don't really mind either way. Do you have a preference? I looked at the MOS, but it didn't give me much direction.

• I'd say it's good practice to repeat them again in prose (I write mostly lists which are quite a different prospect), so I would add Nippon Professional Baseball in the opening sentence. KV5 (Talk • Phils) 12:51, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

• added "Nippon Professional Baseball"

• "only postseason-play" - remove hyphen

• gone

• "they would play against" - they played against

• fixed

• "This system proved problematic, however, as the Hankyu Braves won both the first and second halves of the 1976 and 1978 seasons, eliminating the need for the playoff series. " - I don't know why I have an issue with this sentence. I know that a lot of leagues have contingency plans for a both-half winner; didn't the PL have one? Did it really "eliminate the need" for the series?

• Hm, I guess the phrase "eliminate the need" isn't really the best for what I was trying to convey here. As far as I can tell, the PL didn't have a contingency plan for this situation though because they positively did not play a post season series those two years. What about something like "making a playoff series impossible"?

• How about unnecessary rather than impossible, as they technically could have done something if they felt like it...? KV5 (Talk • Phils) 12:52, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

• Better word, changed

• "after the 1982 season," - change comma to semicolon

• changed

• "the following season the PL announced that after the 130-game regular season had been completed, the first and second place teams would compete in a best-of-five playoff series if five or fewer games separated the two teams" - kind of awkward. I suggest the following re-word: the PL announced the following season that the first- and second-place teams would compete in a best-of-five playoff series after the 130-game regular season if five or fewer games separated the two teams. Note also the corrections to punctuation within this re-word, which need to be implemented regardless.

• Got it. Thanks for the re-write. I had trouble writing this article at times because of its technical nature. And sometimes the more I tinkered, the more awkward it got.

• "The two leagues then went back to sending"

• Remove "then"
• Change "went back" to returned; more formal

• changed, much better

• Where did that link to "regular season" come from all of a sudden? You've mentioned regular season several times in the lead and this section before adding this link. Either remove or relocate.

• Hah, who knows what happened here. I relocated the link to the first instance of the phrase in the lead. Thanks again for reviewing this article. These fixes have been crucial to improving its flow and readability! --Torsodog^Talk 04:48, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

This is the conclusion of my first group of comments; I'll resume from "Pacific League Playoffs" when I've got time. Hope these comments help you. KV5 (Talk • Phils) 01:04, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Second tranche of comments

I apologize that it has taken this long for me to get back to this article; IRL concerns have led my Wikipedia time to be extremely limited over the past few days.

Pacific League playoffs

• "to be used in the 2004 NPB season" - if the Climax Series is not part of the regular season, then this should be after the 2004 NPB season, rather than "in"

• Possibly. I wasn't really sure how to word this. I want to make sure the reader knows that the Climax Series started in 2004 not 2005. If I changed "in" to "after", would that be clear enough?

• That would work. KV5 (Talk • Phils) 12:37, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

• "as the end of the regular season neared" - nearing the end of the regular season

• changed

• "was attempt to rectify" - an attempt

• whoops, added

• "The new postseason plan invited the top three PL teams" - were teams that qualified obligated to participate? If so, invited isn't a good word here as it implies the possibility of rejecting the invitation. Perhaps The new postseason plan initiated a two-stage playoff in which the top three PL teams competed.

• hmmm, good point. went with your wording instead to avoid confusion

• "went on to face" - faced

• changed

• "The Stage 2 winner then advanced"

• gone

• "to the Japan Series" - add comma after "Series"

• added

• "was only supposed to receive"

• gone

• It might be worth it to explain that home-field advantage, in this case, meant that all games would be played at the home field of the first-place team, what with home-field advantage in MLB being a different system.

• I kinda threw some stuff in there about it, but you are right, there's really no reason to be so subtle about it. Give me a little bit to fix your other issues first, then I'll whip something up.

• "In conjunction with this change, however,"

• removed

• "the resulting remaining four games were to be split evenly"

• Switched out "resulting" with "remaining", however I kept in "to be". Since the Fighters clinched in two straight games at their home field, the last two games were never played and the games were not split evenly. Then the following year the Climax Series was created, so this split never really happened. Are you on board with this, or am I way off here?

• I removed "to be" because it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence. Just because it was hypothetical doesn't mean that it wasn't part of the plan to begin with. KV5 (Talk • Phils) 12:37, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

• "This rule change became a non-factor, however,"

• I'm thinking of keeping this "however" in as well, kind of going along with the previous issue?

• "During the 2005 Japan Series, The Japan Times' Stephen Ellsesser called NPB's unbalanced postseason a 'bad system' and believed that the CL's decision to not implement a playoff system of their own was 'foolish.'" - since there are two direct quotes in this sentence, it needs to have a citation right after it.

• added

• "lack of postseason-play was disadvantageous" - remove hyphen, and change "disadvantageous" to a disadvantage; more easily read.

• changed, much better

• "the first their Japan Series game"

• oops again, gone

Climax Series creation

• "postseason playoffs in the 2007 season" - change "in" to for or after - your choice

• Went with "for". Actually, "for" probably answers my question about your first comment in the Pacific League playoffs section...

• This solution works too. KV5 (Talk • Phils) 12:37, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

• "while simply using the playoffs"

• gone

• "despite which team wins" - rather than the team that won

• changed, much better

• "the PL introduced their its playoff system"

• changed

• "neither regular season champion" - regular-season is a compound adjective here

• added

• "should not receive" - double negative was created

• yikes, you're right. good catch

• "in the Climax Series' Stage 2 best-of-five series" - in Stage 2 of the Climax Series is less wordy

• changed

• "when both leagues decided to award their respective league champion" - when each league awarded its champion

• hah, much better. I think figuring out this system started to mess with my head by this point...

• "'bad', 'bull' and 'messed up'" - bull and messed up are great descriptors, but bad is really sort of anti-climactic. I would change it to "unfair", which is also used as a descriptor in the cited article.

• changed

Current format

• "top-three teams" - remove hyphen

• gone

• "This stands in contrast to Major League Baseball (MLB), who instead employs a one-game playoff."

• "This stands in contrast to" - This contrasts with
• "who" should be which
• remove "instead"

• All changed

• "second and third-place" - second-

• added

• "all of the games being played"

• removed

• "to face league's pennant winner"

• the league
• pennant-winner

• I really had troubles with hyphens in this article. I apologize

• "This series is a best-of-six series," - This series is best-of-six;"

• changed

• "The winning team advances" - teams advance

• changed

• "where they compete against the winner of the other league's Climax Series winner" - where they compete against one another

• much simpler

Overall, I find this article to be well-researched, well-written, and very well done. The only other thing that I would like to see added (besides the corrections above) before passing it is a list of results. A reader might want to just see a quick overview of results instead of reading every single Climax Series article individually. If you'd like help creating this, let me know and I will make myself available. Cheers! KV5 (Talk • Phils) 18:02, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Again, thanks so much for the review/copyedit. As for the list of winners, I thought I would create a separate article for it one day, but then got side tracked. You're right though, since there's been so few Series though, the very short list could easily be added on the end. What kind of list did you have in mind? Did you just want a list of Stage 1 and Stage 2 winners in each league? Include the losing Stage 1 team as well? --Torsodog^Talk 22:00, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

I quickly put this together just to get things started. Feel free to edit/let me know what you think. --Torsodog^Talk 00:18, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

I like the list of winners, though I might consider making two separate tables and floating them so as to avoid browser issues with that center column. Decorative color should be removed too (WP:COLOR). I might include the losing team in Stage 1 as well, but I don't think it's particularly important just so that readers can see who won. You'll want to be clear with the header row that it's "Stage 1 winner" and "Stage 2 winner", so that readers understand (I was a bit confused as first glance). Oh, and I don't think a separate results article is necessary right now since there have only been three years of series. Once you get up around 10 years, then a fork/split starts to look more appealing (a featured list, maybe?). KV5 (Talk • Phils) 12:37, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Another option might be something like what I whipped up below, which could be made sortable:

Results

Stage 1

Year	League	Winning team	Games	Losing team	Ref
2007	Central League	Chunichi Dragons	2–0	Hanshin Tigers
2007	Pacific League	Chiba Lotte Marines	2–1	Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks
2008	Central League	Chunichi Dragons	2–1	Hanshin Tigers
2008	Pacific League	Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters	2–0	Orix Buffaloes
2009	Central League	Chunichi Dragons	2–1	Tokyo Yakult Swallows
2009	Pacific League	Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles	2–0	Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks

Stage 2

Year	League	Winning team	Games	Losing team	Ref
2007	Central League	Chunichi Dragons	3–0	Yomiuri Giants
2007	Pacific League	Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters	3–2	Chiba Lotte Marines
2008	Central League	Yomiuri Giants	3–1	Chunichi Dragons
2008	Pacific League	Saitama Seibu Lions	4–2	Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters
2009	Central League	Yomiuri Giants	4–1	Chunichi Dragons
2009	Pacific League	Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters	4–1	Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles

After some minor modifications and additions, I added the tables you created. Thanks for putting them together! I think most (if not all) of the issues have been addressed now, but let me know if I missed something or there is anything else. Also, what do you think this article would need in order to be considered a respectable WP:FAC? I've been thinking that getting this article to FA might be a worthy pursuit. --Torsodog^Talk 19:32, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

The tables look great. I'm not sure what would be needed further to get this to FA, as I don't work much in that area (just GAs and FLs). I might suggest peer review, as some folks over there are more familiar with the FA criteria than I am. As is, though, this article is definitely worthy of being called a good article, and is thus passed. KV5 (Talk • Phils) 19:55, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Copy edits

Copy edits have been completed as requested. --Diannaa ^(Talk) 03:11, 31 August 2010 (UTC)