Fighting History

You know, the frustrating thing about writing about Mariners spring training is that everyone else is already posting tons of links to articles, or pointing out the new blogs by various writers. Even Shannon Drayer has one now, and Geoff Baker is also blogging spring training for the Seattle Times. I can't think of much to add that hasn't been mentioned already, in all honesty.

Of course, everyone knows that the most interesting story so far out of Mariners spring training is that Ichiro has funny taste in clothes. My own opinion of the situation is that he has been hanging out too much with Munenori Kawasaki, going shopping for knit caps and crazy t-shirts together, and working out together exactly how high their high socks should be for maximum cool-dude factor.

The body part of the week, by the way, is Mark Lowe's elbow, although one could also argue that it's Kazuhiro Kiyohara's knee. I guess the bizarre ritual he did two weeks ago of pouring some sake on his knee that was stored by the late Akira Ogi ten years ago didn't actually help at all.

I had a real entry in mind to write tonight, but I found this amazing Fighters Collection page and have been looking through it for the last few hours instead. I originally found it while looking for pictures of the Fighters atrocious 1980's uniforms to reply to a post on Stop The Wave, but it's just plain chock-full of awesome pictures of players I'd never really *seen* before, just read about. And then there's fun things like a team pin set which had to be 2002 (the clue being that it's the only year Yamaguchi and Katoh were #11 and #12). But the old cards, and old Shukan Baseball issues, and such... man, this is just plain awesome. Yutaka Enatsu, Tony Solaita, Matt Winters, the other Yukio Tanaka, Yukihiro Nishizaki, Isao Harimoto, Kazumi Takahashi, (others I'm forgetting), old pictures of Korakuen stadium, even a section on the early Tokyu/Toei Flyers, who became the Nippon Ham Fighters in 1974. And then all the pictures of the various merchandise and clothes and caps and pins and noisemakers and...

Just amazing. I love stuff like this. Now I feel like I should go doing some sort of project to translate a whole lot of this into English, except I simply don't have the time right now.

By the way, happy birthday on February 22 to both Kazuhiro Sasaki and JJ Putz! Maybe it should be a requirement in the future for Mariners closers to all have this birthday.