Marinerds, etc.

A Number a Day, Jan 9-12

2012-01-12T22:25:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to do this during the weekend of Jan 13-16 on account of the fact that I'm going to Boston for the MIT Mystery Hunt.

Do you remember when Freddy Sanchez was the lone All-Star for the Pittsburgh Pirates? Yeah, nobody else does either. But that's when I bought this shirt, when I was in Pittsburgh for CMU Carnival or something and decided I wanted another Pirates t-shirt that wasn't for someone named Jason (ie, I already had Bay and Kendall). And I kinda liked Freddy Sanchez and didn't trust Zach Duke. So.

Anyway, he's #12 for the 12th, even though I realize that's not the number he wears on the San Francisco Giants.

I flipped a coin. Kenshin Kawakami won for being #11 on the 11th, though it's just as well as I don't really want anyone at work to ask me about Darvish :)

You know, what's really nostalgic is how this was the Game 1 matchup in both the 2006 and 2007 Japan Series... and both times, the team that lost that Game 1 ended up winning the entire thing.

(Also, my post for Game 1 of the 2007 Japan Series is probably one of the funniest things I ever wrote on this blog, period.)

Anyway, I wonder what Kenshin will be up to this year. I thought he was super-awesome when he was on Chunichi, wanted him to succeed in the MLB, but last I heard he was basically in the AA team for the Braves and just kind of stoically doing his best like a good Japanese boy. His contract finished last year, so... I guess we'll see what happens next. It'd be awesome if he came back to Japan and was on the Carp with Yusuke Nomura, who I basically see as the second coming of Kenshin... but yeah, that's not very likely.

This may be the oddest one I'm doing this month, but #10 on the 10th is the entire 2010 Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles roster, in the shape of a giant 10. I wore this shirt a LOT around the earthquake time as a show of solidarity for Tohoku.

#9 for the 9th could only be one man for me, Yasushi Iihara of the Yakult Swallows. Iihara's this really funny-looking righty-batting outfielder who unfortunately only kicks ass when he's given regular playing time, and just really wasn't in 2011 so he kind of had a bad year. The thing is, he's that kind of player that people like me want to cheer for -- fringe, good guy, working hard, just so damn close to being the awesomeness that you know he can be, etc.

The other thing is, at the time I started seriously going to Swallows games a few years ago and learning the songs, he actually had the easiest song of all the Swallows, so it was the first one I learned. (It has since changed and become more difficult.) Anyway, assuming Aoki is out of the picture for 2012 I hope Yasushi gets a chance to kick ass and take names again.

A Number A Day, Jan 6-8

2012-01-08T16:05:00.000-08:00

My #8 for the 8th is one of my all-time favorite players, Makoto Kaneko of the Nippon Ham Fighters. Kaneko's birthday is Nov 8th and I often wondered if that's why he wears #8.

It's really hard not to like him -- he's not a superstar by any means but he's been a solid player for his career, anchoring shortstop for the Fighters for pretty much the last 15 years or so. His glove is generally much better than his bat, but that doesn't stop him from doing crazy things like opening the 2009 season by batting .423 over the first month with like 8 doubles and I forget what else. And batting out of the 9-spot all the time, too! He also served as team captain and as player representative for the league -- he's just kind of a natural leader. Trey Hillman also said that Kaneko was one of the few Japanese players who would actually talk straight to him, like "If you had a booger on your nose, Kaneko's the only guy on the team who'd tell you."

Also we cheer for him by holding up Shinsengumi banners, how awesome is that? His player color is light blue, too, which I think is super-pretty.

For the record, btw, this is a t-shirt, not a jersey -- the Fighters "replica t-shirts" this year are actually really nice and have the asymmetrical colors/sleeves/etc on them. I'm just not particularly a fan of the new front logo, but you can't see that...

I'm not actually sure Tomochika Tsuboi will manage to get a contract for the 2012 season, and he was last seen with the Orix Buffaloes anyway, but for me, #7 on the 7th is Tsuboi when he was this amazing hotshot outfielder for the Nippon Ham Fighters.

Actually, this is the first Japanese baseball t-shirt I ever bought, in September of 2003, when the Fighters's home stadium was still the Tokyo Dome. So it actually has a lot of sentimental value. I met several of my best friends in Japan because of this shirt, even. Tsuboi never had another great year like 2003 (where he hit .330 and played in almost every game), but he did hang around with the team for several years, mostly as a 3.5th outfielder. He had actually made a name for himself with the Hanshin Tigers originally, which is probably why he had a lot of fans already when he came to the Fighters and to Hokkaido (before the Fighters moved up there, the only teams anyone could really watch were the Giants and Tigers). Also, they kept his fanfare "PL~ Aogaku~ Toshiba~ (Hanshin!) Tsu-bo-i~~~" which, according to one of my friends who followed him to the Fighters from the Tigers, brought tears to her eyes the first time she heard it. :)

He's the son of a former pro player as well, Shinzaburo Tsuboi. The younger Tsuboi definitely had a longer career and a hell of a lot more fans, anyway.

The funny thing about this shirt is that I noticed Tsuboi originally because he was left-handed and wore high socks and happened to wear my lucky #7, but then it actually turned out he's totally the sort of player I tend to completely fall in love with. I love how that works out!

This will surprise everyone except Pau, but I do actually own a Tomoaki Kanemoto #6 shirt, so he's #6 on the 6th. What is slightly weirder is that I don't have any other 6's... I never did get a Yukio Tanaka jersey/shirt, had too many Dragons shirts to get Ibata, and had been resisting Sho Nakata as the new #6 for the Fighters for a while, though maybe I should get over that.

Anyway, Kanemoto is the Iron Man of Japanese Baseball -- his consecutive-games-played streak of 1492 games is also the world record (and the 904 consecutive games of every inning played as well). At this point it's kind of strange watching him play because he's like 43 and slowing down in left field but can still sure swing the bat and hit home runs (notably he seems to do so every time I see him at Jingu) but since the Hanshin Tigers are in the league without a DH, and are probably keeping him until he retires or dies...

I bought this t-shirt the first time I went to Osaka, in 2006, before I had really developed any NPB prejudices aside from "Screw the Giants". I think I've actually worn it to more MLB games than NPB though, because it amuses me to wear it to Detroit Tigers games.

A Number A Day, Jan 3-5

2012-01-05T13:35:00.000-08:00

This has been kind of amusing so far.

My housemate Jenny just took this photo for me. Last night she said "I didn't realize you were WEARING these every day! I thought it was just a queue of photos!"

Anyway, #5 for the 5th is Takuro Ishii, in his Baystars era. I was and am a huge Takuro Ishii fan... he's just a very enigmatic player, with a very unique career that NOBODY will ever have again for various reasons. He started out in 1989 signing with the Baystars (then the Yokohama Taiyo Whales) as an undrafted pitcher from Ashikaga HS, whose name at the time was Tadanori Ishii. After 4 years of not making it as a pitcher for the most part (although he DOES have 1 win to his name at the major-league level with the Stars, he had a 1-4, 5.69 ERA in 28 games), he switched to being a shortstop, changed his name to Takuro, and went on to get over 2400 hits in a FANTASTIC career, anchoring the Baystars championship 1998 team. Then after the 2008 season the Baystars decided to cut him because he's old (but hung onto Saeki, WTF?) and so Takuro signed with the Hiroshima Carp and is still kicking ass despite that he turned 41 this summer.

I look forward to visiting his plaque in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame someday. He is the only player in NPB history besides Tetsuharu "God of Batting" Kawakami to have 2000+ hits and a pitching win.

Also somewhat funny is that I have a Baystars #5 jersey -- which is the number that Hichori Morimoto (my #1 for the 1st) wears with them now -- but it's not Hichori's :)

I've had so many times in my life I've had to find a 4th, but this was the first time I had to find a 4, and failed. So I'm cheating, and #4 for the 4th is actually #44.

I was a pretty big Mike Cameron fan when he played for the Mariners, because Safeco has this cavernous outfield and he was just awesome at running around it. Being a right-handed batter didn't help him at all in that place, but he still hit well anyway. I got this shirt when I spent a week in NYC over the summer of 2005 and went to some Mets and Yankees games, and Cammy had gone to the Mets and I was sad about it. Oddly, I haven't really followed his career since I went off to Japan, so it's nice to see that he had a few more good years.

(I think my favorite current player wearing #4 is actually Meiji University's Takashi Uemoto, oddly enough. And his brother wears #4 for Hanshin...)

#3 on the 3rd is the Seibu Lions' Hiroyuki Nakajima, mostly because 1) this is the first time I've actually worn this t-shirt and 2) I'm wondering whether he'll let the Yankees dick him around or not. (Answer: No. But I wonder what'll happen when he goes back to Japan.)

I guiltily bought this t-shirt at the last Lions-Fighters game I went to... like, I went out of the stadium wearing all my Fighters gear and bought the shirt from a Lions vendor claiming it was a "souvenir", then when I got back into the stadium where my friends were, shoved it into my bag without letting anyone know what it was. I figured, though, there was a chance Nakaji may end up on an MLB team I care about and thus it'd be neat to meet him. Alas.

I thought about Kazuyoshi Tatsunami for the 3rd. It was close. I wear that shirt a LOT though. Believe it or not, I don't actually have a Kensuke Tanaka shirt at all.

A Number A Day, Jan 2012

2012-01-02T21:51:00.000-08:00

Last time I did this was the countdown to Opening Day 2007. This time I'm just doing this for the heck of it. Instead of real baseball players, I'm trying this month to wear a baseball t-shirt or uniform for every day of the month that I have one. I don't ACTUALLY have one for every single number between 1 and 31, though I'm close.

So far I've worn them on the 1st and 2nd:

For #2 on the 2nd I decided to go with Kenji Johjima during his Mariners phase, partially because I came to Seattle for New Year's weekend.

Johjima was a curious character for me because I'd been familiar with him for a long time, being a Pacific League All-Star catcher and all, but never actually saw him in person until he came to Seattle. But at his first Mariners Fanfest in early 2006, I actually did briefly meet him and get him to sign a (Japanese) baseball card for me, which both of us were delighted by. I was happy when he did well in 2006 and 2007, and sad that it didn't work out for him in the long run. It's nice to see him being somewhat successful back in Japan again, though it sucks to see him injured all the time.

(Runner-up for #2 was either a Johjima jersey or an Ogasawara jersey, but just didn't feel like schlepping them up here with me.)

The obvious #1 for me is Hichori Morimoto. Not only will this month end with his birthday on January 31st, but this is still one of my favorite t-shirts (and he's still one of my favorite baseball players). This shirt was made during the 2008 season for the special "colors" associated with various Fighters players, so Hichori was green, Kensuke was pink, Kaneko blue, Darvish black. I think Inaba was gold.

Of course, now Hichori plays for Yokohama and wears #5 and changed his "character color" to yellow, but... whatever.

Your 2011 Japan Series Champions, the Hawks

2011-11-20T06:31:00.000-08:00

But it's 6:30am here in Seattle, so I'm going to sleep in a bit. Unlike the last time I was watching a Japan Series game in the US (the 2006 Fighters-Dragons series), you have plenty of other places to learn about what happened during the game in English these days, so you should go take a look at them.

Personally, I really wanted this series to go to seven games, so I'm happy for that, at least. I thought it was pretty silly of the Dragons to let Ochiai go as manager, in the midst of what is clearly the most successful run in franchise history. (The Dragons were in the Series in 2004, 2006, 2007, 2010, and 2011, although they only won it in 2007.) His contract was up at the end of October, so the Dragons were paying him a million yen a day for the postseason.

Curiously, the last time the Hawks won the Japan Series was in 2003 against the Tigers, and in that series the home team won every game. This time, the home team lost every game until the final game, and even funnier, four games were decided by 2-1 scores (game 1, 2, 4, and 6, with the Dragons winning 3 of those), and the other 3 games were shutouts.

As a primary Pacific League fan, the Hawks are a very frustrating team to go up against in recent years, as they have a pitching staff to die for and a fairly stacked lineup as well. And it was particularly heartbreaking to see the Fighters fall behind them this year. So I suppose I was pulling for Chunichi in this series, but when things happen like Tanishige going 0-for-23, there's only so much you can do.

Kokubo as the MVP was a little bit odd (it felt like it really should have been one of the pitchers, didn't it?) but it was kind of amusing when they pointed out to him during the interview that he, at the age of 40, had ousted his manager Akiyama from the oldest Japan Series MVP, as a 37-year-old Akiyama had gotten that award in 1999 when the Hawks beat Chunichi then. (And at that time Kokubo and Matsunaka were a LOT younger! It was definitely weird watching Matsunaka hobble home and flop onto home plate for the 2nd run of the game tonight, let's just put it that way.)

Anyway, the Jingu Taikai is in a few days, and then after that is the month of fan festivals and rookie unveiling events and holiday parties, and then in January starts rookie training, and February is spring training... Japan is nice in that baseball season never *truly* ends, if you're a crazy diehard fan. Which makes it all the more sad to me that I'm not there anymore.

(2 weeks until I move to San Francisco!)

Monday Foto: Soukeisen

2011-10-31T12:40:00.000-07:00

Actually, this is just me being too tired to write ANYTHING about the four games I attended this weekend, where Waseda won both of the Soukeisen games (6-2 and 4-2) and Yakult won on Saturday night 3-2 but the Giants won on Sunday night 6-2.

This is my favorite photo I took all weekend:

Waseda's Shota Sugiyama slides headfirst into 3rd base for a triple. It's really rare to see a headslide from the "oh my god he's flying towards us!" perspective!

Friday Foto: Draft Aftermath, the paper version

2011-10-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

For amusement value, I often like to buy the daily sports papers after a big event has happened, to see their different takes on it (and occasionally to cut out articles to stick up on the wall or whatever).

Anyway, here's your spread of the "big" papers today:

Let's see, first, 4 out of 6 have Sugano on the cover. None have Fujioka.

Upper left, Sports Hochi (a Giants-based paper anyway) has "Impossible! Chosen by Nippon Ham in the lottery!"

Upper right, Sankei Sports (aka Sanspo) has "Hara is completely stunned! Nippon Ham stole Sugano!!" (where 強奪 really means more like "plunder" or "extort", a very strong version of steal)

Middle left, Sponichi has a big "SUGANO SHOCK!!" with tears in his eyes and a note about "He could enter Nihon Seimei or..."

Middle right, Nikkan has "Sugano is stunned! He may refuse to sign!"

Then in non-Sugano news, Daily Sports, a Tigers-based paper, has "Hayata Itoh is the 2nd incarnation of Shinjiro Hiyama!" in the lower left :)

Also in non-Sugano news, Tokyo Chunichi Sports has THEIR front page headline, "Morimichi got his big job done and picked Shuhei Takahashi!"

Sponichi and Nikkan have the Fighters' 7th-round pick Takumi Ohshima (from the Waseda University softball club) on their SECOND PAGE. With his softball team, being a dork with softballs and baseballs, etc. Apparently, for the record, Ohshima is some kind of ungodly good softball player who's done things like hit homeruns in 13 consecutive games, was a world-class Japanese softball team member up through high school, and basically went to a tryout earlier this month and passed -- the scouts liked his large frame and power. (It's unclear to me how good his batting will translate to baseball.) Amusingly one scout even says "Sure, he has no experience in baseball, not since elementary school, but we think he'll be an interesting project".

There's not as much on Fujioka as expected, but I kinda like it that way. Papers have photos of him with captain and 3rd-round pick Daichi Suzuki and with his parents. It's expected that he will get Number 18 as Naruse already has 17.

Can you imagine a Lotte rotation of Karakawa, Naruse, Ueno, Fujioka, and Shunsuke? That's just crazy. It's like my fantasy team or something.

Yusuke Nomura, for the record, seems pretty happy going home to Hiroshima and wants to face Tomoaki Kanemoto.

And for fun, here's Yokohama HS's Otosaka and Kondoh.

Draft 2011 Liveblogging

2011-10-27T16:53:00.000-07:00

Will be done here. I'm going to finish up a pre-draft photopost (ongoing college player photopost is here) in the morning and the draft itself is in the afternoon.

I'm on pins and needles as usual -- just like last year I was so worried about where Ohishi and Kagami were going to end up, this year I'm hoping Takahiro Fujioka ends up somewhere good. But there are a ton of other guys I'm worried about too, of course.

And yeah, I've been to 22394092309439 games in the last month but haven't been blogging about them here. I apologize for that, especially the lack of Tokyo Big 6 coverage in what has been one of the more interesting semesters in recent history. But well, I'm returning to the US on Nov 3rd. So, busy.

[Moving the "liveblogging" part below the draft chart. Also I made a new label for these draft tables -- "Draft Results". Then I can look back through my 6 years of draft tables without going through all of my posts with "draft notes" and photos and such under "draft".]



Name                   Pos  HS/Univ/Company         T/B   DOB          Ht/Wt  
--------------------   ---  ---------------         ---   ----------   -------
Dragons: 
1 Shuhei Takahashi      IF  Tokaidai Kofu HS        R/L   01/18/1994   185/83
2 Kentaro Nishikawa     P   Seiryo HS               R/R   04/18/1993   184/72
3 Shinji Tajima         P   Tokai Gakuen Univ       R/R                181/84
4 Takehiko Tsuji        P   Nittai Univ             R/R   07/27/1989   182/86
5 Takahiro Kawasaki     P   Tsu Higashi HS          R/R   08/02/1993   186/77
6 Sanghun Song          P   信一高校 (HS in Korea)   R/R   02/24/1993   190/93

Swallows: 
1 Shuhei Takahashi
  Ryuhei Kawakami       OF  Kosei Gakuin HS         R/R   05/08/1993   181/80
2 Ryohei Kiya           P   Nihon Bunri Univ        R/R   04/07/1989   180/85
3 Wataru Hiyane         IF  Nihon Seishi Ishinomaki R/R   06/20/1987   180/73
4 Yuya Ota              P   Nihon Seishi Ishinomaki L/L                175/73
5 Yuji Nakane           P   Tohoku Fukushi Univ     R/R   09/07/1989   180/80
6 Masato Furuno         P   Mitsubishi Junko Kobe   R/R   09/27/1986   178/78

I1 Takeaki Tokuyama     P   Ritsumeikan University  R/S   07/21/1989   185/83
I2 Hugo Kanabushi       P   Hakuoh University       L/L   05/22/1989   180/71

Giants: 
1 Tomoyuki Sugano
  Ryuya Matsumoto       P   Eimei HS                L/L   04/29/1993   193/78
2 Nobutaka Imamura      P   Osaka Gakuin Univ HS    L/L   03/15/1994   180/73
3 Ryuji Ichioka         P   Oki Computer Gakuin     R/R   01/11/1991   179/70
4 Kyosuke Takagi        P   Kokugakuin Univ         L/L   09/05/1989   183/79
5 Go Takahashi          IF  Nihon Bunri HS          R/R   04/30/1993   183/75
6 Yuki Egarashi         P   Toshiba                 R/R   11/14/1986   183/78
7 Seiji Tahara          P   Kurashiki Oceans

I1 Kazuki Mori          P   Shiritsu Kashiwa HS     R/R   06/23/1993   185/92
I2 Mizuki Tsuchida      P   SIL Ehime               R/R   01/01/1990   181/91
I3 Shogo Shibata        P   Meiji University        L/L   04/13/1989   175/70
I4 Yoh Yoshikawa        C   Rakuhoku HS             R/R                183/102
I5 Takashi Amemiya      P   BCL Niigata Albirex     R/R   07/06/1987   174/83
I6 Takahiro Watanabe    P   BCL Niigata Albirex     L/L   08/26/1992   173/70

Tigers: 
1 Hayata Itoh           OF  Keio University         R/L   05/08/1989   178/84
2 Hiroaki Saiuchi       P   Seiko Gakuin HS         R/R   07/19/1993   182/80
3 Naoto Nishida         OF  Osaka Toin HS           R/L                187/92
4 Kazuo Itoh            P   Tokyo Kokusai Univ      R/R   12/13/1989   184/82
5 Ryoma Matsuda         P   Hasami HS               R/R   02/08/1994   183/83

I1 Seiya Hirokami       C   Gunma Diamond Pegasus

Carp: 
1 Yusuke Nomura         P   Meiji University        R/R   06/24/1989   177/75
2 Ryosuke Kikuchi       IF  Chukyo Gakuin Univ      R/R                171/69
3 Takaya Toda           P   Shonan HS               L/L   06/10/1993   180/66
4 Shohei Habu           OF  Waseda University       R/L   08/16/1989   180/76

I1 Hajime Tominaga      P   SIL Tokushima           R/R   06/20/1989   179/80
I2 Masataka Nakamura    OF  SIL Kagawa              R/R   11/07/1983   183/90
I3 Kohei Tsukada        P   Waseda University       R/R   08/24/1989   192/89
I4 Kazuma Mike          OF  Shiritsu Wakayama HS    R/S                180/76


Baystars: 
1 Takahiro Fujioka
  Ryuya Matsumoto
  Yujo Kitakata         P   Karatsu Shogyo HS       R/R   01/25/1994   180/80    
2 Shuto Takajo          C   Kyushu Kokusai HS       R/R   05/03/1993   176/79
3 Yuki Watanabe         IF  Kanzei HS               R/R   04/09/1993   180/74
4 Masayuki Kuwahara     IF  Fukuchiyama Seibi HS    R/R                171/73
5 Tomo Otosaka          OF  Yokohama HS             R/L   01/06/1994   183/75
6 Mikihisa Travis Samura P  Urasoe Shogyo HS        R/R   10/09/1993   191/80
7 Hyuma Matsui          IF  Mitsubishi Hiroshima    R/R   03/17/1991   180/80
8 Komura Toru           P   Chigasaki Nishihama HS  L/L                177/76
9 Takuro Itoh           P   Teikyo HS               R/R   04/02/1993   185/86

I1 Kosuke Tomita        P   SIL Kagawa              R/R   04/24/1988   186/88
I2 Masashi Nishimori    C   SIL Kagawa              R/R   12/29/1987   182/80

Hawks: 
1 Shota Takeda          P   Miyazaki Nichidai HS    R/R   04/03/1993   187/77
2 Shoji Yoshimoto       P   Adachi Gakuen HS        R/R   06/26/1993   186/75
3 Masayoshi Tsukada     IF  Hakuoh Univ             R/L   07/23/1989   180/79
4 Naoki Shirane         P   Kaisei HS (Shimane)     R/R   04/28/1993   185/98
5 Shinya Kayama         P   JX-ENEOS                L/L   11/23/1989   172/62

I1 Go Kamamoto          OF  Sairyo HS               R/L   09/03/1993   180/80
I2 Kyohei Kamezawa      IF  SIL Kagawa              R/L   10/15/1988   174/73
I3 Shota Miura          P   Iwate University        R/R   11/10/1989   177/67
I4 Takashi Shimizu      P   Gunma Diamond Pegasus   L/L   05/15/1984   177/76
I5 Shinya Arasaki       IF  Nihon Bunri University  R/L                171/73
I6 Akihiro Sasanuma     C   All Ashikaga Club       R/R   07/17/1987   183/81
I7 Kazuya Iida          C   SIL Kochi               R/R   03/10/1986   182/83

Fighters: 
1 Tomoyuki Sugano       P   Tokai University        R/R   10/11/1989   185/86
2 Go Matsumoto          IF  Teikyo HS               R/R   08/11/1993   180/80
3 Shingo Ishikawa       OF  E. Osaka Kashiwara HS   R/R   04/27/1993   178/73
4 Kensuke Kondoh        C   Yokohama HS             R/L   08/09/1993   172/83
5 Toshiharu Moriuchi    P   JR Higashinihon Tohoku  R/R   01/02/1985   180/80
6 Naoyuki Uwasawa       P   Senshudai Matsudo HS    R/R   02/26/1994   187/85 
7 Takumi Ohshima        C   Waseda Univ Softball    R/L   02/14/1990   180/97

Lions: 
1 Ken Togame            P   JR Higashinihon         R/R   11/07/1987   183/82
2 Hirotaka Koishi       P   NTT Higashinihon        L/L   04/13/1987   177/85
3 Hitoto Komazuki       C   Tonan HS                R/R   04/21/1993   176/86
4 Kyohei Nagae          IF  Kaisei HS (Mie)         R/L   05/07/1993   173/75
5 Shotaro Tashiro       OF  Hachinohe University    L/L   12/13/1989   177/72

I1 Komei Fujisawa       C   Matsumoto University    R/L   11/11/1989   180/80

Buffaloes: 
1 Shuhei Takahashi
  Ryoichi Adachi        IF  Toshiba                 R/R   01/07/1988   178/74
2 Takuya Shimada        IF  JR Higashinihon         R/R   01/22/1987   178/76
3 Tatsuya Satoh         P   Honda                   R/R   07/26/1986   178/75
4 Tomoyuki Kaida        P   Nihon Seimei            L/L   09/02/1987   178/78
5 Ryuji Shoji           C   J-Project               R/R   02/01/1987   176/81
6 Yuki Tsutsumi         IF  Saga Ryukoku HS         R/L   09/21/1993   172/70
7 Shuhei Kojima         IF  Sumitomo Metals Kashima R/L   06/05/1987   177/75
8 Takayoshi Kawabata    OF  JR Higashinihon         R/R   02/04/1985   176/80

I1 Daiki Inakura        OF  Kofuku HS               R/R   05/11/1993   180/85
I2 Shoki Kakihara       IF  Tosu HS                 R/R                175/75

Eagles: 
1 Takahiro Fujioka
  Yoshitaka Mutoh       P   JR Hokkaido             R/R   07/22/1987   177/72
2 Yoshinao Kamata       P   Kanazawa HS             R/R   10/26/1993   177/75
3 Takumi Miyoshi        P   Kyushu Kokusai HS       R/R   06/07/1993   173/74
4 Takero Okajima        C   Hakuoh Univ             R/L   09/07/1989   174/68
5 Rintaro Kitagawa      OF  Meitoku Gijuku HS       R/L   06/21/1993   185/82
6 Hiroaki Shimauchi     OF  Meiji University        L/L   02/02/1990   180/75

I1 Takahiro Jinbo       OF  Hokkaido Transys        R/R   12/09/1986   174/76

Marines: 
1 Takahiro Fujioka      P   Toyo University         L/L   07/17/1989   183/85
2 Yuhei Nakaushiro      P   Kinki University        L/L   09/17/1989   182/72
3 Daichi Suzuki         IF  Toyo University         R/L   08/18/1989   176/76
4 Naoya Masuda          P   Kansai Kokusai Univ     R/R   10/25/1989   176/80

-----------------------

I've got the TV on but the show isn't on yet. Hmm.

Well, here's a nice blank grid to fill in as things go!

4:53pm The show is starting!!!

5pm They're announcing the teams and representatives, who are coming into the room in waiver order, so, I'm going to get prepared with the waiver order for the first round:

5:10pm: They showed Fujioka and Sugano in their college's press rooms, and Nomura with Shimauchi and Shibata and the rest of the Meiji club in their dorm. It's very quiet as people submit their first round picks...

Marines: Takahiro Fujioka
Baystars: Takahiro Fujioka
Eagles: Takahiro Fujioka
Carp: Yusuke Nomura
Buffaloes: Shuhei Takahashi
Tigers: Hayata Itoh
Lions: Ken Togame
Giants: Tomoyuki Sugano
Fighters: Tomoyuki Sugano
Swallows: Shuhei Takahashi
Hawks: Shota Takeda
Dragons: Shuhei Takahashi

So Nomura goes home to Hiroshima unchallenged, Itoh is going to Hanshin (oi), Togame as a sleeper pic to Seibu, and Takeda to the Hawks as expected. And WTF on challenging Sugano.

5:20 Lottery #1 is for Fujioka and... he's going to CHIBA MARINE!

I'm actually happy for him. He can get to ichi-gun quicker in a currently weak team like this, AND it means that the Marines now have BOTH of my absolute favorite Toyodai pitchers EVER (the other being Ueno). Also it's great for him in that he's from Gunma and his family can come see him play.

5:22 Lottery #2 is for Takahashi Shuhei... and .... and he's going to Chunichi after the Chunichi rep Takagi actually seemed to screw up the draw.

5:26 Lottery #3 is for Tomoyuki Sugano. WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY SO IMPROBABLE I CAN'T BELIEVE THE FIGHTERS ARE GOING FOR HIM. And would you believe it but SUGANO IS GOING TO THE FIGHTERS??!?!

Hara looks pissed. I wonder if Sugano will actually sign or will pull some kinda stunt. Jason Coskrey just invoked the word "Chono"...

Well, anyway, it's time for the backup first round picks...

Baystars: Ryuya Matsumoto, P
Eagles: Yoshitaka Mutoh, P
Buffaloes: Ryoichi Adachi, IF
Giants: Ryuya Matsumoto, P
Swallows: Ryuhei Kawakami, OF

5:35 second lottery... and Matsumoto is going to the Giants.

For the record, I LOVE the Adachi pick.

Baystars finally get a first-round pick with Kitakata from Karatsu Sho HS. Yay for Saga-ken players!!!

Okay, shortly stuff will go into waiver order for the rest of the picks.

Your overall first round picks:
Marines: Takahiro Fujioka, LHP, Toyo University
Baystars: Yujo Kitakata, RHP, Karatsu Shogyo HS
Eagles: Yoshitaka Mutoh, RHP, JR Hokkaido
Carp: Yusuke Nomura, RHP, Meiji University
Buffaloes: Ryoichi Adachi, IF, Toshiba
Tigers: Hayata Itoh, OF, Keio University
Lions: Ken Togame, RHP, JR Higashinihon
Giants: Ryuya Matsumoto, LHP, Eimei HS
Fighters: Tomoyuki Sugano, RHP, Tokai University
Swallows: Ryuhei Kawakami, OF, Kosei Gakuin HS
Hawks: Shota Takeda, RHP, Miyazaki Nichidai HS
Dragons: Shuhei Takahashi, IF, Tokaidai Kofu HS

5:45pm It's off TV here and I'm basically kinda thumbing through the draft magazines to dig up info while looking at the Sportsnavi and such to see what the picks are... hm, sounds like Kozo has a justin.tv feed as well.

It was nice to see Fujioka's interview, he seems nervous but happy. Sugano... I couldn't really read what he was saying.

6pm NAKAUSHIRO TO LOTTE!!!! TAKAJO TO YOKOHAMA!!!! that's so cool! Nakaushiro is also super-interesting and Takajo was my favorite catcher not named Suzuki in this last Koshien :)

6:13pm Teikyo connection with the Fighters continues as we get captain Go Matsumoto. He's a great raw pick, kinda like Sugiya, very talented shortstop, I saw him at Koshien as a freshman. Great pick.

I am also, btw, a fan of the Rakuten picking Kamata in the second round, glad Saiuchi has gone already too. A little surprised Matsumoto went before Itoh Takuro to be honest -- wonder what's up there. We'll see :)

6:15 Third round starts. Softbank took Yoshimoto in the second round, I guess they are going for a monopoly on "Nantoka no Darvish" HS pitchers this year.

6:28 Still entering data but OMG Miyoshi goes to Rakuten? Glad to see both him and Takajo get picked, though. Awesome.

-----------------------

It's 7:50pm and the main draft is over. I guess ikusei is starting. Interesting to see which guys DIDN'T get drafted, in some ways, I suppose.

Shogo Shibata, the nice boy with Behcet's disease, got chosen in the Ikusei rounds, by the Giants. Not sure how I feel about that.

Lots of interesting Ikusei picks honestly. I've seen a lot of the indie league guys play, actually. Have a photo with Seiya Hirogami.. just posted one of Iida catching for Irabu... heard about Takashi Shimizu pitching his no-hitter... so wacky.

Everyone is wondering what's up with this Waseda Softball guy for the Fighters... apparently he was a world-class softball player, but how does that project to baseball? There's got to be some bizarre story here.

Draft 2011 -- Photopost preview

2011-10-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

Well, even though I wasn't in Japan for most of this year, myself and my camera have gone to an awful lot of amateur baseball games over the years anyway, especially local college games, so here's a few of the guys who submitted letters for this year's draft. (I'll be updating this as the afternoon goes on to take my mind off being nervous. And then I'll move the liveblogging post to the top.)

Tokyo Big 6

Hayata Itoh, Keio University, OF

I used to write a ton about Itoh and nicknamed him "Clutchy McClutchitude" because he always came through for the team in big situations. He's often compared to Atsunori Inaba because he's an outfielder from Chukyodai Chukyo who bats lefty for power and average, has a good arm and speed and so on.

He's a pretty smart guy overall, and he knows Pi to 115 places. And in the spring he missed the batting Triple Crown by ONE HIT. But this semester he's been kind of erratic, and I'm really not sure what's up with that. A few weeks ago there was a game where a whole bunch of close umpiring calls went against Keio, culminating in a guy getting tagged out by being punched in the head basically, and Itoh and Etoh-kantoku both were really angry about it, to the point that Itoh wasn't even bowing to the umpires before each at-bat like he used to, and didn't have the team line up and bow to the stands, and that one day, snuck out of Jingu so he wouldn't have to face fans or press! (Seriously.)

Anyway, he's a veritable superstar and should do pretty well in the pros. He hits for power and average and has a really sweet swing. Over his college career he's also really filled out a lot more and really looks like, well, a baseball player. I don't think he'll be a cleanup batter in the pros, and I'm not even sure he'll have as good a rookie year as, say, Shota Ishimine, but he'll do fine. (I'd love to eat those words, but the fact is, if he DOES get drafted by a team like Hanshin, he's unlikely to get a lot of playing time his first year, you know?)

The swing.

At the USA-Japan tournament.

This is one of my favorite photos I ever took of him -- he's standing at 3rd base during Soukeisen talking trash with Waseda's Ayuki Matsumoto (the Baystars' Keijiro's little brother)

Yusuke Nomura, Meiji Univ, RHP

I've also talked about Nomura a lot, being as the first time I ever saw him pitch was in Koshien 2007. He was the Koryo HS ace and was considered fairly unstoppable, until he ran up against the Miracle Saga Kita team and ran out of steam in the 8th inning and Hiroshi Soejima hit that grand slam and well, that's history.

Nomura has had a fairly awesome college career in Big 6 though; he pitched 34 scoreless innings as a freshman to get the ERA title then and also got the ERA title last spring. He just got his 30th win last weekend and he passed 300 strikeouts during the 2011 spring semester. Almost all of the pitchers who accomplished that in Big 6 have gone pro and most have had successful careers. I suspect Nomura will too -- he's been very solid his entire time, never misses a game, never gets injured, always strikes out a ton of guys and never walks anyone. He's not huge and he's not going to ever throw 150+, but his control is great and he's got a very stoic manner on the mound.

As you can see, he's VERY consistent in his form. I have so many photos of him that look exactly the same that it's hard to choose one. The top is from the fall 2011 semester and the bottom is from the Japan-US tournament.

Here's how I'll always remember him, actually -- he has this habit while standing on the sidelines of tossing a ball up and down in the air, almost like juggling, so here he is on the mound doing the same thing.

Just for fun:

Nomura during his sophomore year. Clearly younger, but not much else has changed about him. He's simply consistent.

Shogo Shibata, Meiji University, LHP

Shogo has an amazing story -- he suffers from Behçet's disease, an incurable immunodeficiency, which he was diagnosed with when he was in junior high school. But he entered Aikodai Meiden HS anyway (you may recognize that as Ichiro's alma mater) and worked as hard as he could given the disease he was facing, and his 3rd year he pitched at Koshien. Then he entered Meiji University, and has been trying his best, but of course has also been in the shadow of many other pitchers there, what with being the same year as Nomura.

(There was a TV special about him when he was in high school. You can watch it on Youtube starting here).

I don't think Shogo will get drafted unless some team does it for the story, like Chunichi, but he IS a decent lefty pitcher and a really nice guy too. There was an article about him in Shube this past week how he basically is entering the draft because he wants to follow his dream and refuses to ever run away from things no matter how unlikely or difficult they are.

Hiroaki Shimauchi, Meiji University, OF

I haven't talked about Shimauchi much. This has been a gross mistake on my part. He has very quietly managed to have 3 amazing semesters playing for Meiji as a lefty-batting lefty-throwing outfielder from Seiryo HS, who sometimes even gets compared to being a "smaller Matsui". He put up a 1.064 OPS in the fall 2010 semester but didn't play during opening weekend and so didn't qualify for the batting leaders. He put up a .954 OPS in the spring 2011 semester, good enough for 4th, and his .385 BA was good enough for 3rd. He put up a .959 OPS this semester, with a league-leading 16 walks (the only way anyone's catching that during Soukeisen is if they walk EVERY TIME THEY COME TO THE PLATE pretty much) and a home run. (Oh, and 2 strikeouts against those 16 walks.)

It kinda sucks that I never actually got to know Shimauchi, since I did get to know a bunch of the other 4th-year Meiji players, and he seems like a nice guy. I gave him a bunch of photos last week and got him to sign one and told him good luck in the draft and all, and he seemed surprised but happy. We'll see what happens.

Keisuke Okazaki, Rikkio University, IF

I honestly don't know what's going to happen to Okazaki in this draft. I could see reasons for him getting drafted: he's been a consistently good batter in his last 2 years of Big 6, including leading the league in OPS by far this semester with an 1.184 as well as being the batting champion at .424. He was Rikkio's captain this year and they've actually done better this year than they had in a while. He played 2nd base for a long time, though has been mostly at 1st this year. He's from PL Gakuen HS and was on that same team as Kenta Maeda, they were both regulars from their freshman year. He has some power and he has a decent glove.

On the other hand, I've met Okazaki several times, and we even got a photo together in the US, and he is barely bigger than me, and I mean both heightwise and weightwise. (I'm 5'7".) In Japan that doesn't actually matter as much as it would in the US, but I don't think Okazaki runs enough to make up for his small frame. And of course, there have been lots of Big 6 batting champs who haven't made it to the pros, or did make it and haven't been all that great there.

On the other other hand, I never expected Fumiya Araki to get drafted last year, and look how that worked out! So who knows.

(I am mostly showing off my mad photo-taking luck here.)

Shohei Habu, Waseda University, OF

A teammate of Nomura's during that Koshien 2007, Habu has been a consistently decent player over his years at Waseda, though he hasn't been stellar this year per se. Still, he's a Waseda outfielder who bats lefty and can run, so there may be teams interested in him. Or not.

Tohto League

Daichi Suzuki, Toyo University, SS

Toyo captain, national team captain as well. Decent shortstop, decent lefty batter. My impression of him personality-wise is that he's kind of a jackass, but that's not really fair. He comes from Toin Gakuen HS, which is a nice academic and baseball pedigree to have.

Takahiro Fujioka, Toyo University, LHP

My favorite player going into the draft. He's tall, left-handed, throws 150 km/h (for reals, not this Jingu gun stuff), strikes out a ton of batters, throws a ton of complete games, goes to the mound with a smile on his face no matter what the situation, and has a great personality in general. In short, he's like a left-handed Kagami, but actually probably better in that his mechanics are less likely to get him injured and his manager isn't an idiot in overusing him.

(I have a few more photos of him in a preseason game post from the Hosei grounds, where I met him for the first time, and the US-Japan tourney. I also have a whole ton of photos of him from earlier, back to April 2009, that I never posted. Whoops.)

Takuya Uchiyama, Toyo University, RHP

Kyosuke Takagi, Kokugakuin University, LHP

Other Leagues

Tomoyuki Sugano, Tokai University, RHP

Widely regarded as the best pitcher in this draft, Sugano is the nephew of Giants manager Tatsunori Hara, and there's a good chance that ONLY the Giants will take him, like with Sawamura last year. Lame, but at least it means Fujioka won't go to the Giants.

Pre-season game at Meiji university's grounds (this is when I met him and got a photo together)

2010 All-Japan national collegiate tournament.

2011 US-Japan tournament in North Carolina.

Shotaro Tashiro, Hachinohe University, OF

Kinda another Shogo Akiyama type, though probably a little more on the speed and less on the boom. These are from the same 2010 All-Japan tournament. I have a lot of photos of him, though I'm not sure why. Something must have struck me as intriguing about him at the time, maybe it's the way he puts his arms together when he bats? I just don't remember at this point.

Photopost: Lions vs. Fighters ni-gun - Ohishi Theater Returns!

2011-09-28T23:15:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since I got to do a good Tatsuya Ohishi fangirling post! Hooray!

Last Wednesday, I had planned to go to Seibu for both the minor-league Lions-Fighters game during the day, and the major-league Lions-Fighters game at night. Mostly, this was because I had a hunch that Ohishi would start for Seibu in the ni-gun game, and also, it'd be a nice way to spend a day out in Seibuland. The weather had other plans, though, and a typhoon completely cancelled every game in the area that day. The top team game still hasn't been rescheduled, but the ni-gun game got rescheduled for the 28th.

I decided to go for the rescheduled game anyway, because it'd be the last Seibu minor-league game of the year, and I still hadn't been out to a game at Seibu #2 stadium. Plus, I was at Kamagaya on Monday and it rained the whole time, so it'd be nice to see the Fighters without the rain.

I got to the stadium around 12:40pm. Seibu #2 is very close to the Seibu Dump; from the train station, instead of just turning left and seeing the dome, you go straight, up a hill and across a parking lot, up some more stairs, and there's the field. It's really barebones, but suffices for a minor-league park I guess. They have a clubhouse building behind it and then the player dormitory and indoor practice building by the outfield. Seating for fans is pretty much a row of benches along the 1st-base side in the outfield, a row of benches behind the 3rd base (home) dugout, and a lot of ground to sit on. I happened to be lucky and ask if a spot of concrete right by the dugout was taken, and it wasn't, so I sat behind a fence about 4 feet from the dugout for the whole game. It was an excellent spot to take photos as well as an excellent spot to listen in on players' conversations, AND as it turned out to talk to players, and as well, it meant the starting pitcher was throwing right in front of me between innings.

And guess who the starting pitcher for the Lions was? None other than Tatsuya Ohishi!!!!!

(If you are not a longtime reader of this blog you may not know that I had this ridiculous crush on him for his 4 years at Waseda despite that I hate Waseda. He was just lights-out as a closer, and his interviews and such were also interesting, and crazy stuff kept surrounding him, like when he was a shortstop at Soukeisen.)

Of course, this meant that I was sitting right by the Lions dugout. Cheering for a Lions starter. Against the Fighters, who have been my team for the last 8+ years.

Whatever, these things happen. I only ran into a few Fighters friends of mine, after the game, and they saw my Tokyo Big 6 shirt and were like "Ahhh, of course, you were here to see Ohishi... he was good, wasn't he?"

Anyway, it was a kind of crazy game. Ohishi started for Seibu, and the Fighters starter was Kenji Tsuchiya, a lefty from Yokohama HS who's been with the team a few years.

Lineups:

Fighters          Seibu
--------          -----
Nishikawa, dh     Ishikawa, cf
Murata, cf        Hayashizaki, ss
Sekiguchi, rf     Hirao, dh
Watanabe, c       T. Gotoh, 1b
Ichikawa, 3b      T. Satoh, lf
Taniguchi, lf     Onizaki, 3b
Arahari, 2b       Misawa, 2b
Asanuma, 1b       Takeno, c
Nakashima, ss     Hoshi, rf

Tsuchiya, p       Ohishi, p

(It's kinda crazy how the Fighters really don't have a minor-league 2B right now since Kensuke is injured and Imanami and Sugiya are up with the top team, so they've been putting all their extraneous catchers in there, like Masaya Ozaki, Ryota Imanari, and now Yuji Arahari as well.)

The Fighters got in on Ohishi first, in the 2nd inning. Ryuichi Watanabe led off with a single, Suguru Ichikawa followed that with another single, and then Yuta Taniguchi hit a double to left that scored the other two, 2-0. The Fighters put two more on that inning but left them there. They added a run in the 5th inning when Kazuya Murata led off with a triple, and then Yuta Sekiguchi brought him in on a squeeze bunt play to make it 3-0.

Tsuchiya sailed through the first 6 innings for the most part; the most he allowed was 2 runners in the 1st, and in reality it shouldn't have even been that if Arahari hadn't dropped a throw in from the outfield on a catch.

But then in the bottom of the 7th he got into a bit of a jam as he walked a pinch-hitting Kosuke Noda. It was Noda's retirement game, and so his whole family was out there cheering for him as well as a bunch of other people, so his at-bat took something like 10 pitches to get through. It probably seemed harmless enough, but then with 2 outs Mitsugu Ishikawa singled to center, moving Noda to 2nd, and then Ryo Hayashizaki doubled to left and that scored the other two, making it 3-2. Tsuchiya came out of the game and Yodai Enoshita came in to strike out the next batter (who happened to be Ryan Mulhern. More on that in a second).

Enoshita, who is generally awesome, was not awesome enough to keep Shogo Saitoh from hitting a triple in the bottom of the 8th, and then Masanori Hayashi allowed him to score on an infield single that Takuya Nakashima was amazing to get to but couldn't throw in time. 3-3.

So, it was tied in the 8th and stayed that way for the rest of the game. Amazingly, Ohishi pitched the first 9 innings. I don't think I ever saw him throw a complete game EVER in college -- he was generally a reliever and pretty good at that. But here he was, going the distance, 130 pitches for 9 innings on the Fighters, 3 runs, 6 hits, 6 strikeouts. Hironori Matsunaga took the 10th inning and former Keio guy Shuichiro Osada took the 11th.

On the Fighters side of things, after Hayashi was Kikuchi, and after Kikuchi was Masahiro Inui! Inui was lucky enough to end the game on a lineout by Ishikawa -- I was kind of wondering what'd happen if he faced Hayashizaki next. The two were teammates pretty much not only through college at Toyo University, but they were ALSO teammates on the Toyodai Himeji HS team that went to Koshien in the summer of 2006! I'm not sure if they've faced each other this summer, but it must lead to some funny conversations afterwards.

But yeah, it was a 3-3 tie game. Probably for the best for me, really -- I didn't have to see my Fighters lose and I didn't have to see my Ohishi lose.

Also, since I was sitting by the Lions dugout, somewhere around the 9th or 10th inning Ryan Mulhern, who'd looked over a few times at me before, came over like "hey, so are you American? can you speak English?" and we got to talking for a while. That was pretty interesting. He said something about working on his swing and trying to figure out what was weird about his hands; I noted that he has his index finger sticking out weird but I couldn't tell anything else. But I said I'd show him the photos I took of his AB if he wanted.

Well, after the game I stuck around for a while because I really wanted to meet Ohishi. Instead, I ended up meeting a bunch of Fighters players, and I got my photo with Enoshita and Nishikawa (!!), and eventually when it started getting dark, I was thinking to leave, and Mulhern came out again, signed stuff for a bunch of fans, and he ended up getting Ohishi to sign a shikishi for me, like "Your boy's doing his laundry, so he's not coming out." I'm happy about it, but I hope I'm not getting a reputation as a whiny gaijin (like the entire Kagami incident). Plus this means I still need to stalk Ohishi next year -- I want to meet him someday! But Waseda players never EVER interacted with fans outside Jingu during the Yuki Saitoh regime.

Anyway, I rode the Seibu train with Mulhern part of the way home. That was interesting and awesome -- but I felt kind of stupid because I really wasn't up on my Lions stuff and barely knew what he was up to in the organization at all, whereas a year or two ago I would have totally been like "Dude, can I interview you for my blog?" Overall it sounds like he's enjoying his time here and he has a really good attitude about the country, wanting to get out and see things, and interact with fans, and just do his best to help the team and all that stuff. (Plus it certainly sounds like Japan is a great step up from Mexico, to be sure.) Hopefully the team will pick up his option next year!

Alright, enough babbling out of me. Photos!

First, the man, the myth, the legend, the Tatsuya Ohishi. Fear him.

Pre-game bullpen. Bit of a true "on the farm" feeling going on here with that warehouse-looking dormitory in the background.

On the mound.

Warming up between innings. Oh, that smile :)

Some other Lions players...

Showin' some love for Yuji Onizaki, who just got traded to the Lions mid-season from the Swallows.

Hidekazu Hoshi. He was sitting like 5 feet from me for most of the game, when he wasn't in the field.

Ryan Mulhern during his at-bat in the 6th inning. I can't really tell what's up with his hands...

Kosuke Noda's last at-bat in a Lions uniform, and his cheering section.

Yoshihito "Pride of Saitama" Ishii. No, just kidding, but I do cheer for Urawa Gakuin guys in general...

Hironori Matsunaga.

Shuichiro "Pride of Keio" Osada. Probably a misnomer, I think more people can remember Tomoaki Satoh :)

And Fighters players!

Fighters starter Kenji Tsuchiya.

Yodai Enoshita. (Yes, he really looks that scary mid-throw, but other than that he's adorable)

Masanori Hayashi.

Kazumasa Kikuchi.

Masahiro Inui!

Super high-tech bullpens at this stadium...

Ryuichi Watanabe hitting a single.

And as a catcher.

Suguru Ichikawa hitting a single, striking out, and in the field playing 3rd base.

Taniguchi at 3rd, waiting to run home... where he was left both in the 2nd and 4th inning. Aww.

Kazuya Murata almost getting an inside-the-park homer but stopping at 3rd.

Misc stuff, Stadium, players, etc.

Final score, tied 3-3 in 11.

View along the pathway by the right field fence.

My view during the game (I was on a concrete bunker about 2 feet back from this fence, but I was also about 4-5 feet away from the dugout). You can see the Dome in the background.

And another shot of the dome in the background from the #2 stadium outfield.

GG Satoh signing for people. I got him to sign a shikishi too :) He wouldn't take photos with anyone, just signed stuff... most people were okay with that but one lady was really really insistent, eventually she got her friend to take a photo of her in front of GG while GG was signing for other people. Kinda funny.

I didn't ask Yodai Enoshita to sign anything, I just wanted a photo together. This is mostly to make Dani jealous if she's reading this. :)

Haruki Nishikawa!!!! I saw him play at Koshien and thought he was really awesome, and I'm happy I finally got to get a photo with him! He's super-popular, you can tell by the amount of random gift bags he's holding, stuff that his fans gave him.

With Ryan Mulhern on the Seibu train. He had just been talking about how he likes signing for fans and getting photos with them all, so I asked if I could also get a photo, even though it was not a baseball setting.

What a crazy day, really. And this was coming off of me thinking that I really ought to just stop talking to baseball players altogether after a few awkward moments at college games earlier in the week. Go figure.

(Yeah, I really don't have time to write up all the games I go to, because I'm too busy going to games every day. It's a catch-22, I suppose... BTW, if anyone's in either Sapporo, Nagoya, Osaka, or Hiroshima, and reading this blog, I'm hoping to head to games in your cities over the next few weeks. I'll be in Japan through the end of October. Hooray! Well, and of course I'll be at a ton of games in the Tokyo area too.)

Game Reports: Fighters vs. Lions and Swallows vs. Baystars

2011-09-20T00:19:00.000-07:00

Monday, I decided not to go to the 3rd game of the Meiji-Hosei series and instead did a doubleheader of the Lions vs. Fighters at the Seibu Dump, then the Swallows vs. Baystars at Jingu.

I guess I arrived at Seibu around 12:30pm. First thing I noticed was a lot of people taking photos of the Seibu train cars. This is why:

I'm assuming it must be a new makeover for the cars or something. Remember, if 20 Japanese people are all taking a photo of something, it must be special.

I tell you this because I went into the stadium, put down my stuff in the spot my friends had saved for me, and then noticed another huge group of people clustered by the outfield fence taking photos of something. This is why:

Apparently Yuki Saitoh is working on a new pitch. I dunno. Clearly if 50 Japanese people are all taking a photo of something, it REALLY must be special. Me, I spent 4 years watching Saitoh pitch for Waseda, so I'm kind of already over the hype, you could say.

Seibu still sucks for actually getting decent food within the stadium, at least if all you have is an outfield ticket, so like most people, I went back OUTSIDE of the stadium to find lunch. They had a lot of fancy bento boxes for various players, but what caught my eye was their "special limited edition Sapporo vs. Tokorozawa" bento:

Interesting mix of stuff, though I have to admit I don't really get how it was either Hokkaido-themed OR Saitama-themed except for the potato croquette (that's a typical Hokkaido thing). I'm a sucker for these kinds of bento boxes, though; I love how you get a filling healthy meal with such a wide variety of stuff for such a reasonable price.

I guess we spent the next hour before the game either chatting, doing opening cheers, or watching the Lions fans do their new chance theme which reminds me of a weird cross of MVP-era Lotte plus the Fighters Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cheer, as it had a lot of "LA LA LA LA LAAAAAAAAAA" stuff going on, as well as a split part where men sing first and then women.

Shota Ohno was playing in this game, and hadn't at the Tokyo Dome on Thursday, so I spent a while studying his cheer, too. Fortunately, one of my friends who's a college student and fluent in English was sitting next to me, so I made him help me figure them all out.

Brian Wolfe started for the Fighters, and Kazuhisa Ishii for the Lions.

The first half of this game was pretty awesome from a Fighters fan perspective. We got on the board in the 3rd inning when Bobby Scales hit a home run, and then added two more runs to it in the 4th inning on a Sugiya hit, stolen base, an RBI double by Koyano, and an RBI single by Inaba-sama. 3-0.

We loaded the bases in the top of the 5th, even, when Ishii hit both Yoh and Itoi with pitches. Unfortunately, we didn't DO anything with that.

Even so, things seemed good going into the bottom of the 5th. But Yutaro Ohsaki led off with a close single to second. Shogo Akiyama followed that up with a single, and Ginjiro bunted them both up to 2nd and 3rd. Yasuyuki Kataoka, batting 9th (??) singled in Ohsaki, making it 3-1. Well, okay. But then Takumi Kuriyama followed that with another hit, bringing in Akiyama, 3-2. And Takuya Hara followed that with YET ANOTHER HIT, bringing in Kataoka, 3-3.

Naturally the only other thing that could possibly happen then was a 3-run homer from Hiroyuki Nakajima, right? Right. 6-3. By this point I'd had enough and got up to go to the bathroom, expecting that Wolfe would be taken out and I'd have some time, but apparently that isn't what happened, and instead, while I was in the bathroom I could hear a really big roar of Lions fans cheering... as Okawari-kun Nakamura had hit his 41st home run of the year. 7-3.

I've joked in the past that Seibu should hang me from the ceiling as an omamori for their players hitting homeruns, because BOY do they hit a lot of homers when I'm there.

(Side note: I don't know if it's this new ball or what, but it's kind of insane that Okawari has 41 homeruns, the next highest in the PL is Softbank's Matsuda with 23, then Seibu's Nakajima with 16. Even in the CL, the leader is Wladimir Balentien with 27 right now. There are some TEAMS -- I'm looking at Lotte with their 39 and Hiroshima with their 43 -- that barely as a WHOLE TEAM have as many homers as Nakamura does.)

Got back to my seat to see the inning end, anyway. And I got to see Kazuhito Tadano pitch the 6th, and I'm a relatively big fan of his all things considered, so it was nice to see him get into a game, at least.

The Fighters managed to take back 2 runs in the 7th from a Sugiya double, an Itoi single, a Koyano RBI single and an Inaba fielder's choice, making it 7-5, but that's all they'd get as the Lions won the game.

To nobody's surprise, the game hero was Nakajima:

But I didn't stick around for the post-game at all because I was running off to Jingu. I basically quickly gathered up my stuff, packed up my bag, had Taicho make fun of me for having an Iihara jersey, and then ran to the Seibu train station. Quite frankly, my legs were killing me after 3 hours of sitting/standing on the slanted Seibu outfield turf -- I'd forgotten how painful that gets when you're not used to it.

The only other comment I have about the Seibu game offhand was that I'm not sure how to explain the exact difference, but without Hichori and Hichori fans in the outfield, there's a slightly different feel to things at Seibu. He was always a really big showman of sorts and always waved to fans and threw them baseballs and did antics and climbed on the fences, and his fans also kind of had goofy banners and lots of crazy green stuff, and I guess with Hichori gone and Kensuke injured, it felt like a lot of the goofiness was gone, and mostly replaced by a sort of glumness. And lots of Saitoh jerseys.

But anyway.

Onward to Jingu -- I managed to get a Seibu train that went straight from there to Shibuya, and then took the subway to Gaienmae, and I got into Jingu at about 6:30pm, or in the bottom of the 2nd inning.

Now, the nice thing about being late is that I deliberately decided not to keep a scorecard, which means that as a result, if you really want to read a more detailed log of what happened in the game, you ought to go read the official Tsubamegun writeup on their blog.

I mean, what I recall is:

- It was 1-0 when I arrived
- I saw Aoki hit his homer into the foul pole shortly after that to make it 1-1
- I had gotten back from my first jaunt around the concourse (more on that in a second) in time to see the WTF moment of the game when Fukuyama balked in a run to make it 2-1
- I saw Aikawa's home run too, which made it 3-1.

Now anyway, for what really happened to me during this game:

Kozo and I went hunting for food at some point in the 3rd or 4th inning. I bought a Shingo Kawabata t-shirt first, which I'd been meaning to do for a while, and then we surveyed a bunch of the places in the left field stands before Kozo decided to just get bulgogidon at the yakiniku-place that I forget the name of.

HOWEVER, when we got to the end of the stands, I saw Hossiezo, one of the Baystars mascots, posing at the food counter and with some fans! I went to take a photo and one of the "diana" girls was like "Would you like your picture with him?" and I said sure. I also told her how my name is ALSO Deanna, pronounced the same as their "diana", but spelled different.

I was so super-psyched about this, except GET THIS, the "diana" girl didn't press the button on my camera hard enough for the flash to fire, and the picture DIDN'T TAKE!

SIGH.

I was really bummed out about that. It's silly because usually I wouldn't have even had the chance to get a photo with a mascot anyway, this was just dumb luck, and I did get a photo with a Baystars star mascot a few years back. But it still kind of sucks to have that chance and to pose and all and then not get a picture. I realize that part of it is that I have a really cheap camera, but...

Anyway, we got food and went back to the stands. Shortly after that, I decided I wanted some soft serve ice cream, and went back hunting for that. The stupid thing there is that they sell it literally right underneath where we were sitting, but I didn't notice, and walked all the way to the other end of the outfield and back before figuring it out.

So, public service announcement: IF YOU WANT SOFT ICE CREAM AND ARE SITTING IN THE RIGHT FIELD BLEACHERS AT JINGU, IT IS IN THE SAME STAND ALCOVE AS THE PLACE WITH THE SAUSAGES. Which makes it right under the ouendan, basically.

Though I have to admit that the Belgian waffle place that just opened this year looks pretty damn good too. I'll try to report on that at a future time.

Anyway, I think that I had a decent time at this game, relaxing for once and not keeping score, mostly hanging out with Kozo and our friend Kentaro, who wants me to come to a Carp game with him sometime (and I really should, since I brought my Carp Saitoh jersey with me to Japan). Though I dunno, I was pretty exhausted by the time I got to Jingu in the first place -- the Fighters game took a lot out of me. So I was mostly at Jingu to hang out, really, and so the Swallows win was nice, but since I was zonked and since it was against the Baystars, I guess it didn't really feel like that big a deal.

Oh, one final photo from the day, along the same sort of "Spot what's wrong with this" variety:

DEAR THE SEIBU LIONS:

I AM FAIRLY SURE YOUR LITTLE SCHEDULE BOOK DOES NOT INFACT SAY WHAT YOU THINK IT SAYS. ARE YOU PLANNING TO INCINERATE ALL OF YOUR PLAYERS?

LOVE, THE MARINERD

Game Report: Swallows vs. Baystars - "But Takasaki's Their Ace!"

2011-09-19T02:36:00.000-07:00

After spending all afternoon Saturday at Jingu dying of heatstroke, and being unable to endure the pro game that evening, I came up with the brilliant idea to only watch 1.5 games of Big 6 ball on Sunday and go home for 2-3 hours to change and shower and cool off and become human again. Then I came back to Jingu for the pro game in the evening.

I was at this game with Kozo and David from Tsubamegun, and also Ben, a a friend of ours who used to live in Tokyo and come to games sometimes, but now lives in Osaka. I had bought Ben's ticket that morning, so I met up with him at the subway station, and when we got to Jingu, guess what we saw -- fans taking photos with Swallows mascots! So I made Ben line up with me and take my photo with Entaro:

Then spent the hour before the game basically greeting people and getting food and learning the new songs and so on. (No, I'm sorry, but Hatakeyama's cheer is right out. His old one was hard enough, why did they have to change it?)

I will say that it was a spectacular sunset over Jingu, as usual:

And actually, apparently, due to it being some kind of Yakult Family Night thing where they were giving out tickets or selling cheap tickets to Yakult company employees, a lot of the stadium was PACKED. The outfield was REALLY PACKED and even the infield on the 1st-base side was pretty full. Here's a view during the 7th-inning stretch:

Now uh... the bad thing is that the first time anyone got out their umbrellas WAS infact the 7th-inning stretch.

(If you don't know, when the Swallows score a run, the Swallows fans get out umbrellas and sing "Tokyo Ondo" and dance around with umbrellas. If you don't know Tokyo Ondo, you might know it as "the 'Kutabare Yomiuri' song". The other time that Swallows fans get out the umbrellas is always for the middle of the "Lucky 7"th inning.)

The Baystars' starter was Kentaro Takasaki, who I was saying is their "ace". This is because he had 4 wins to his name (5 now!), which is more than anyone else on their pitching staff. He also has thrown more innings than anyone else on the team, and, honestly, were he on any other team in the league, he'd probably have a winning record rather than his current 5-12, 3.08 mark. 115 strikeouts and 34 walks in 155 innings is really not bad at all. Also, he's a pretty decent soccer player, which I learned this winter. But that's beside the point.

Takasaki, for better or worse, basically was just mowing down the Swallows lineup left and right. He pitched 4 PERFECT INNINGS before finally giving up a base hit to Shinichi Takeuchi. And it didn't stop there -- in eight innings, Takasaki allowed two baserunners. TWO. That Takeuchi hit, and a Kawabata hit that was barely a hit, if it hadn't gone off Tsutsugo's arm. Seriously.

In the meantime, the Swallows starter was Tatsuyoshi Masubuchi. Don't get me wrong, I loved Masubuchi as a reliever, and always looked forward to seeing him come into the game, and not just because he uses that Taio Cruz "Break Your Heart" song as his entrance music. (True story: I was in a store in Seattle, and that song came on the radio/whatever, and I just stopped in my tracks and said "Masubuchi??" Several people looked at me really weird. But I digress.) I don't know, though, I've never really thought he's all that great as a starter. Or maybe he just has bad starts whenever I see them.

In this case, he gave up a home run to Shuichi Murata in the 4th inning -- and we'd just been saying how Murata's power numbers are down this year. Then he had a disaster of a 5th inning, where even pitcher Takasaki led off with a single, and then Aranami tried to bunt him up but replaced him on base instead with a 1-6 FC. Ishikawa also singled, and then Shimozono walked, which loaded the bases for Murata... who didn't hit another homer, but instead was HIT BY A PITCH to give the Baystars another run. To add insult to oshidashi, then Tsutsugo hit a sac fly to center, and Tatsuhiko Kinjoh (!!) singled in another run. It was 4-0 by the time everything cleared.

Everything was looking great for Takasaki even into the 9th inning -- Aikawa led off with a single, but a pinch-hitting Whitesell hit a pop out to second, and then Aoki hit into a fielder's choice -- almost a double play but not quite. With two outs and Hiroyasu Tanaka at bat, Aoki ran to second base on defensive indifference. Unfortunately, that might have made the big difference in the game -- Hiroyasu then hit a solid single to center which scored Aoki to make it 4-1. Having lost the shutout, the Baystars pulled Takasaki and put in Shun Yamaguchi, their closer. Yamaguchi then walked Kawabata, putting runners at 1st and 2nd for Hatakeyama... who hit a REALLY HIGH POP FLY right over the mound and would you believe it, whoever fielded it (Tsutsugoh?) DROPPED THE CATCH. Oh man. Hiroyasu scored. 4-2.

But that was it -- Takeuchi then hit a pop fly to right that even Kinjoh couldn't possibly not catch, and that was the game.

Most of the people in the group we were cheering with fell asleep up on the tarps for half the game. They at least woke up for the 9th inning.

Takasaki was, understandably, the game hero. And he mentioned how it was the first time since June that the Baystars had won 2 consecutive games, and how he was proud of the whole team's effort in the game. I think I'm finally over my anger at the Baystars administration to the point that I now just feel bad for them.

2011 Game Log

2011-09-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

This really should be a good indicator of exactly how much I enjoy going to games in Japan vs. games in the US, given that I was in Japan until April 12 this year and am back now for a month and a half to catch the end of the year and the university leagues. Will update this as the month progresses.

March 20: Baystars vs. Lions ni-gun, Yokosuka Stadium
March 24: Odate Houmei vs. Tenri, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 24: Yokohama vs. Hasami, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 24: Kanazawa vs. Kakogawa Kita, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 25: Nichidai San vs. Meitoku Gijuku, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 25: Tigers vs. Buffaloes ni-gun, Naruohama Stadium
March 26: Chiben Wakayama vs. Sado, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 26: Sogo Gijutsu vs. Riseisha, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 26: Kokugakuin Kugayama vs. Kyushu Gakuin, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 29: Fighters vs. Marines ni-gun, Lotte Urawa Stadium
March 30: Hosei vs. Chuo Unversity, Hosei Stadium, university preseason
March 31: Swallows vs. Lions ni-gun, Yakult Toda Stadium
April 1: Meiji vs. Tokai, Shimaoka-Utsumi Ballpark, university preseason
April 2: Swallows vs. Carp, Jingu, charity game
April 3: Swallows vs. Carp, Jingu, charity game
April 5: Chuo vs. Komazawa, Jingu, Tohto University League opener
April 6: Fighters vs. Baystars ni-gun, Kamagaya Stadium
April 7: Hosei vs. Toyo, Hosei Stadium, university preseason
April 10: Keio vs. Rikkio, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
April 10: Todai vs. Waseda, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
May 5: Rangers vs. Mariners, Safeco Field
May 7: White Sox vs. Mariners, Safeco Field
May 29: Yankees vs. Mariners, Safeco Field
June 9: Reds vs. Giants, AT&T Park
July 3: Japan College Team vs. USA College Team, Durham Bulls Athletic Park
July 5: Japan College Team vs. USA College Team, National Training Center (Cary, NC)
August 5: Phillies vs. Giants, AT&T Park
August 16: Orioles vs. Athletics, Oakland Coliseum
Sept 15: Marines vs. Fighters, Tokyo Dome
Sept 16: Buffaloes vs. Marines, QVC Marine Field
Sept 17: Rikkio vs. Todai, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Sept 17: Hosei vs. Meiji, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Sept 18: Meiji vs. Hosei, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Sept 18: Baystars vs. Swallows, Jingu
Sept 19: Fighters vs. Lions, Seibu Dome
Sept 19: Baystars vs. Swallows, Jingu
Sept 20: Giants vs. Swallows, Tokyo Dome
Sept 23: Swallows vs. Baystars ni-gun, Yakult Toda Stadium
Sept 24: Hosei vs. Keio, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Sept 26: Fighters vs. Giants ni-gun, Kamagaya
Sept 27: Toyo vs. Nihon, Jingu, Tohto University League
Sept 27: Swallows vs. Tigers, Jingu
Sept 28: Lions vs. Fighters ni-gun, Seibu #2 Stadium
Sept 29: Swallows vs. Tigers, Jingu
Sept 30: Marines vs. Fighters, QVC Marine Field
Oct 1: Meiji vs. Keio, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 1: Todai vs. Waseda, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 2: Waseda vs. Todai, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 2: Keio vs. Meiji, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 2: Giants vs. Carp, Tokyo Dome
Oct 4: Fighters vs. Eagles, Sapporo Dome
Oct 5: Fighters vs. Eagles, Sapporo Dome
Oct 7: Swallows vs. Carp, Jingu
Oct 9: Todai vs. Hosei, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 9: Rikkio vs. Meiji, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 9: Swallows vs. Carp, Jingu
Oct 10: Dragons vs. Swallows, Nagoya Dome
Oct 11: Dragons vs. Swallows, Nagoya Dome
Oct 12: Buffaloes vs. Fighters, Osaka Dome
Oct 14: Swallows vs. Tigers, Jingu
Oct 15: Baystars vs. Swallows, Yokohama
Oct 16: Hosei vs. Waseda, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 16: Shutoku vs. Sundai, Jingu #2, Tokyo HS Fall Tournament
Oct 16: Keio vs. Rikkio, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 17: Hosei vs. Waseda, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 17: Keio vs. Rikkio, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 18: Lions vs. Fighters, Seibu Dome
Oct 19: Chuo vs. Asia, Jingu, Tohto University League
Oct 23: Todai vs. Meiji, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 23: Rikkio vs. Hosei, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 24: Meiji vs. Todai, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 24: Hosei vs. Rikkio, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 25: Toyo vs. Aoyama, Jingu, Tohto University League
Oct 25: Swallows vs. Carp, Jingu
Oct 29: Keio vs. Waseda, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 29: Swallows vs. Giants, Jingu, Central League Playoffs
Oct 30: Keio vs. Waseda, Jingu, Tokyo Big 6 University League
Oct 30: Swallows vs. Giants, Jingu, Central League Playoffs
Oct 31: Swallows vs. Giants, Jingu, Central League Playoffs
Nov 2: Hosei vs. Meiji, Jingu, Rookie Tournament Finals

Game Report: Marines vs. Buffaloes at QVC Whatever

2011-09-16T23:15:00.000-07:00

I gotta admit, I didn't even know what the hell QVC was until I just looked it up.

Going to The Stadium Formerly Known As Chiba Marine isn't all that much fun for me anymore. I have a lot of memories there, of course, from all the time I spent there during Bobby Valentine's time as manager, and so going there now feels strange, unless I'm sitting in the Fighters cheering section in left field.

But well, on Thursday night I had been sending phonemails with Steve to see if he was at the Tokyo Dome (he wasn't), and he suggested I come to Chiba Marine sometime during the weekend. And then they announced the starting pitchers for Friday night, and you wouldn't believe who was starting for Lotte...

Hiroki Ueno is one of my favorite favorite baseball players and through a lot of dumb luck, I barely ever get to actually see him play. Infact, I think the last time I got to see him start a game might have been Draft day 2008 when he was still at Toyo University.

Unfortunately, in this game at Chiba, he had a rough first inning -- he walked 3 batters, loading the bases, and then Seung-Yeop Lee (wearing the wrong uniform, apparently he didn't have his?) hit a 2-RBI single and Shogo Akada followed it up with another RBI single to make it 3-0.

The Marines put one on the board themselves in the bottom of the 1st, with Shota Ishimine leading off with a walk and stealing second, and coming in on a Jose Castillo single.

But that was it for a very long time as Buffaloes starter Yuki Nishi, all 20 years old of him, pitched a bunch of scoreless innings after that. In the meantime, the Buffaloes added a run in the 4th off a Sakaguchi RBI single, making it 4-1.

Nishi game out of the game in the 6th after giving up another run -- this time largely on letting Castillo advance on a wild pitch, so when Hisao Heiuchi made a dramatic infield single, headsliding into first just ahead of the throw from shallow center, it made the score 4-2.

As for Ueno, he went 7.2 innings, and if not for that horrible first inning, he would have won the game, so that made me kind of sad. Instead, the Buffaloes won 4-2, with Mamoru Kishida getting the save for them, and the Marines putting in Yuta Kimura for their last 2 innings.

Other things:

There were fireworks. Apparently they change the firing location each game? We couldn't see them at ALL from the infield jiyuuseki on the 1B side:

Another observation is how popular Shota Ishimine is. Batting leadoff with an interesting cheer song (hailing to him being from Okinawa with a big "I-YA-SA-SA" cheer in the middle), I'm surprised by how many #5 shirts I saw at the stadium, and they were Ishimine shirts, not all just old Koichi Hori shirts. I thought people might be more pissed off about #5 going to someone again so soon after Hori left, but Ishimine's a likely Rookie of the Year candidate and is trying to fill those shoes as best he can. I said it last fall and I'll say it again, Ishimine is the MAN. Heck, one of my college baseball friends was at this game just because she's been following Ishimine around, she doesn't usually go to pro games all that much.

I'm saddened by how boring the Lotteria at the stadium got. Ever since the Bobby Burgers went away it's been kind of silly, the Taekyun burger was terrible, and apparently this year's special was a Saburo menchi katsu burger, but of course, the team traded Saburo -- err, Ohmura -- to the Giants, so now there's basically nothing special. I forgot to hunt down some Karakawa karaage. Oh well.

I went to the Marines team store to try to find ANYTHING of Ueno, too -- a t-shirt, a towel, a cell strap, ANYTHING. But there was nothing. I even asked a store clerk, like "Hey, do you have any Hiroki Ueno merchandise?" "Uh, who?" "Hiroki Ueno. Tonight's starting pitcher. Number 15." "Oh, number 15. No we don't."

Sigh.

Hanging out with Steve and and his friend Lou was fun though. I really have no reason to go to Chiba much anymore except Fighters games, so it was good to have people to hang out with.

Oh yeah, and after the game...

Way too many mascots in Chiba. This one is "Cool".

Game Report: Fighters vs. Marines at the Tokyo Dome -- ただいま！

2011-09-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

Fighters games at the Tokyo Dome are really special to me. It was, infact, at the Tokyo Dome 8 years ago that I got my start as a Fighters fan. Thus, I planned my trip to Japan this fall to allow me to get to at least one Tokyo Dome game, and I'm really glad I did.

I showed up around 3:30 for the 4pm doors opening for the 6pm game, and there were already a ton of people out there, mostly because they now make Marines and Fighters fans both come in at the same gate for the outfield, which sucks. On the other hand, all of the established groups of friends I have were already out there waiting, so I basically just said hi to a bazillion people, and snuck in with one of my closer friends, who let me just get in line with him. This resulted in me getting into the stadium before the friends who were actually saving me a seat.

Mostly, people were like "Welcome back! When did you get in?" but several didn't know I'd left the country and reacted like "WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN THIS YEAR?!!?"

I was fortunate to run into a friend of mine who speaks fluent English and engineered it so that I ended up sitting with him for most of the game (his group and mine had saved seats next to each other). So that was great; I made him teach me some of the new cheer songs.

We went up to do pinbadges, too. (We ran into BB on the way and took the above photo then.) Of course, this is my only real chance this year to get them for sure; I want to go to Sapporo but don't know that I'll do it or not yet. My only real goal was getting an Imanari badge, since I have one for every year he's been on the Fighters. So I got my raijo badge, then went to get in line to do gatchapon badges... and while we were all there, some guy comes up to Crazy Matsuda like "I got these, they're mostly crap, anyone want to trade?" and I said "OMG YOU HAVE IMANARI!!!! I WANT I WANT I WANT!!!" so he basically just gave it to me for my Tadano, which is the one I got for just showing up. I *knew* that something would work out for me getting an Imanari badge as usual, I just had no idea what it would be. I immediately affixed it to my uniform, I was so happy:

Anyway...

I took videos of some of the new songs so I could study them later. Here's a few:

Fighters full lineup cheer before the game:
1. Scales 2. Yoh 3. Itoi 4. Koyano 5. Inaba 6. Nakata 7. Hoffpauir 8. Imanami 9. Tsuruoka

Micah Hoffpauir cheer song.
鍛え抜かれた体で　迎える敵を蹴散らせ　内に秘めた闘志　熱く熱く燃やせ
kitaenukareta karada de osaeru kataki wo kechirase uchi wo himeta toushi atsuku atsuku moyase

This was actually Micah Franklin's song ten years ago, bizarrely...

Bobby Scales cheer song.
溢れる力を出し　その名を刻め　希望の道を拓け　Ｇｏ！ＭＹ！ＷＡＹ！　レオン
afureru chikara wo dashi sono na wo kizame kibou no michi wo hirake GO MY WAY Leon!

This one was used for Andy Green for like, the 2-3 months he played for the Fighters in 2007... which was before I moved there that summer.

Atsushi Ugumori's new cheer song -- actually entirely new just for him.
ひかりの中に　素晴らしい明日あすを見つけて　がむしゃらに追い掛けろ　煌めく世界を
hikari no naka ni subarashii asu wo mitsukete gamushara ni oikakero kirameku sekai wo

On the subject of those guys, bizarrely, this one person had some cheering props for Scales and Hoffpauir, both of which were bad puns in Japanese. For Scales he had a 助さん (suke-san) sign, which I first thought was something to do with the word "suketto", but I have since been informed that it's probably a reference to Mito Komon's bodyguard. For Hoffpauir, whose first name is Micah, this guy had a squid hat. Get it? Micah sounds like "maika" in Japanese, which is a kind of squid.

Anyway, as for the game itself, it was less exciting than it could have been. The Fighters scored runs in the first and second innings; first off Scales reaching base on a dropped fl to right field, being bunted up and scored on a Koyano single, and in the second inning, Tsuruoka doubled, and Scales doubled, and that was it. Things largely progressed like that for the next few innings, with the Marines scattering some kinda sucky plays in the field that somehow didn't let the Fighters score, and eventually in the 8th inning Shota Ishimine led off with a walk, advanced on a single and a bunt, and then scored on an error by Bobby Scales, who dropped a fly ball in shallow center. That's most of the action for the game right there and the Fighters won it 2-1.

Bobby Keppel pitched 7 strong innings and was the game hero. It was Nashida's last game managing in the Tokyo Dome so they made a big deal out of that.

On one last note, here's a photo I took out of the Tokyo Dome:

Notice anything... strange... about that?

Friday Foto: Hideki Irabu

2011-09-09T15:54:00.000-07:00

I intended to put this up several weeks ago. But, well, things are busy. I finished up my summer job contract last weekend, and this weekend I'm helping host Microsoft Puzzle Hunt, and then ON TUESDAY I AM FLYING TO TOKYO!! On Thursday I'll be at the Tokyo Dome for the Fighters game!!! I'll be in Japan for around 6 weeks, then I'll be moving to San Francisco and starting a full-time job in December. Exciting, huh?

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about the past -- my photos from one of Hideki Irabu's last professional appearances ever, playing for the indie league Kochi Fighting Dogs.

Two years ago, in the dead heat of August, I took my first Seishun 18 trip across Japan, with the intention of watching a few days of Koshien and then going to Kyushu and Shikoku to visit some friends and to watch some Shikoku Island League baseball. By COMPLETE RANDOM CHANCE, the day that I was planning to be in Shikoku anyway on my crazy train schedule happened to be the day that Irabu was debuting as a starter for the Kochi Fighting Dogs! When I heard about that, I just HAD to go to Kochi and see the game; it was too bizarre a coincidence.

I wrote about the Nagasaki Saints game I went to at the time, but for the Kochi game, all I had time for was a placeholder. This is mainly because the day afterwards, I literally spent 19 hours straight on local trains to make my way back to Tokyo from Kochi, leaving Kochi at 10am and arriving in Tokyo at 5am the next day.

Anyway, the game was at Kochi Municipal Ballpark, which holds 6000 people; they had 1400 or so on this day, which is a big crowd for these indie leagues.

I found a space in the "shade", which is to say, under one of the weird stand boxes they had on the bleachers. It was around 95 degrees F outside; they had people at the top of the stands with huge coolers full of cold Japanese tea that you could get cups of for free; I must have run up there every inning or so.

And yeah, I saw Irabu pitch, for the first time in yeeeeears; I never saw him pitch in Japan, but I saw him pitch in the Majors, go figure. But for a 40-year-old he really wasn't that bad -- 7 innings, 3 runs, 5 walks, 3 strikeouts. He was somewhat comical fielding bunts, but what would you expect? The game was eventually a 4-4 tie as the bullpen gave up a run after he was off the mound. It was kinda strange, as the Saints game I saw was also a tie.

Official game score, with scorecards.

After the game, by which point I was pretty much totally ready to leave because 4 hours in the sun was starting to melt my brain, it turned out Irabu was doing a signing session for 10 minutes, so I went and lined up for that and got his autograph on a Kochi shikishi. I greeted him in Japanese, but chatted with him a bit in English. I remember that I asked him whether the weather was better in Japan or in CA, and he said something like "I think it's better to be in Japan right now." I thanked him for the autograph and wished him good luck.

I was pretty surprised to learn of Irabu's death a month or two ago. I think he could have probably done some great things for baseball if he wanted to. It's sad how things work out sometimes.

Anyway, here are a ton of photos from that day in Kochi.

The Fighting Dogs mascot is... a fighting dog.

It was a very big deal about Irabu being there, and they were already selling merchandise for him, despite that he hadn't made his official debut yet.

This was the only real shade you could get in this stadium, underneath these concession stands.

The Ehime Mandarin Pirates had quite a representation up as well -- someone told me it's only a 4-hour drive or so, and this was a double-header.

I got someone to take a photo of me; I don't actually have a lot of shots of the whole stadium, oddly.

Closer-ups of the ladies sitting in the front row who had made those uchiwa fans for all the Ehime players. (I talked to them for a while; they woke up at 5am to drive there.)

Here are a bunch of shots from Irabu's pre-game warmup. You could pretty much go right up to the railing and lean up against it, as many people did, so I was only a few feet away from him.

Anyway...

For pregame ceremonies, both teams came onto the fields with kids from the local little league teams.

All of the players had to say something brief to address the home fans and thank them for coming out on such a summer day; the guy talking here is Iida, who warmed up Irabu in the bullpen.

Here's the Kochi ouendan leader. Pretty tough-looking fighting dog sort himself!

The ceremonial first pitch -- thrown out by a local old guy wearing an Irabu jersey already. He was completely thrilled to be out there.

And the game...

A few of Irabu actually out there on the mound during the game.

Francisco Caraballo. I saw him with Kochi and also later with the Gunma Diamond Pegasus, before he got picked up by the Orix Buffaloes.

The Ehime Mandarin Pirates starter, Shinpei Shinohara. I know he was in some draft lists for a while, but guess he wasn't quite good enough. I thought he was decent.

Fighting dogs leadoff batter Yamashin.

A tagout on the 3rd-base line.

A Kochi guy slides into home plate. (He was out.)

Ehime's ouendan leader... not nearly as scary as the Kochi guy.

Scoreboard halfway through the game. The lower left corner says "From today, you can buy Irabu replica uniforms and t-shirts!!!"

The building out there behind right field is a cafe slash okonomiyaki restaurant called, of all things, "Timely". (In Japanese English, that's the word they use to describe an RBI hit.)

5th-inning stretch. In the indie leagues, the players themselves get to go out there with the brooms and be the grounds crew themselves.

And the dancing girls are, probably, on average, around 8 years old.

Mound conference with Irabu. (He finished the inning, though.)

Dogs pitcher Jeon pitched the 8th, and gave up the tying run.

And Iyono pitched a scoreless 9th.

Bowing lineup after the game.

Final score.

As I mentioned, after the game, Irabu signed for people for around 10 minutes, between the doubleheaders.

Here's Irabu sitting at the table.

And here's the shikishi I got signed! (It was 400 yen or so for a Fighting Dogs shikishi, since I didn't have anything at all to get signed with me. I guess I was really lucky!

Well, and since not all my posts are always 100% baseball, here's a bonus shot...

Kochi castle, at their little "datestamp" post.

Looking back, that was a really fun trip. I still remember being on those trains the next day, and checking the Koshien scores frantically -- it was Chukyodai vs. Bunri in the finals, and as you may recall, that was one heck of a crazy final game! Good times.

Nichidai San, Koshien champions! 日大三、優勝！

2011-08-19T23:17:00.000-07:00

I created a special tag just for this team: Sanko 畔上組, meaning the "Azegami Team". I needed something to specify that I meant this particular Sanko team; it's a strong baseball school in general, but like I've been saying, this year's particular group of 9 boys are particularly special.

Anyway, in case you didn't already hear, this morning was the final match of Koshien, and your 2011 Koshien champions are none other than Nichidai San!

Blatantly stolen from Mainichi. Go see their photos of the final game.

Really, this all started slightly less than a year ago, when a couple of 9th-grade boys at my JHS and I were reading the sports news and talking about high school baseball, and two of them had been at a Sanko game for the Tokyo Fall Tournament and told me that I HAD to see this Yoshinaga kid (and that Yokoo kid too). Unfortunately, I missed the end of that tourney thanks to Big 6, but I did make it to the Jingu Taikai a few weeks later. And sure enough, that Yoshinaga kid was worth seeing. I'd give anything to be able to go back and talk to my JHS kids about this, since it's partially their fault I went nuts over this Sanko team.

Anyway, the upshot is, I'm really overjoyed to see Sanko win. They were clearly the best team in the tournament, from the top to the bottom of the lineup. And I'm also horribly sad that it's all over.

Not to say that Kosei wasn't a decent opponent, because that's not true. Their pitcher Akita actually seemed to have a lot more energy than Sanko's Yoshinaga, who was clearly exhausted. But, just like he's done the last few games, when he really, really needed to, he could reach back and get something extra for a strikeout, and wait for a patented Sanko Big Inning to blow the game open.

Which they did.

Sanko took the lead in the 3rd inning when Azegami got hit by a pitch, Yokoo hit a bloop-ish single to right (just out of the reach of the running 2B), and then Shun Takayama blasted a home run over the wall in dead center to make it 3-0.

(Nevermind that the inning really started with Shimizu getting hit in the foot by a pitch, but since he swung at it they called it a strikeout.)

Takayama then made the play of the game in the top of the 5th, when he fielded a single and gunned a runner out at the plate to preserve Yoshinaga's shutout. In the bottom of the 5th, Kaneko got a hit, Azegami tried to bunt him over but failed (forceout at 2nd), moved up on a wild pitch to Yokoo, and then to 3rd on Yokoo's single. Runners at the corners again for Takayama, who grounded out into a 4-6 fielder's choice at 2nd (which was actually a really nice play, the 2nd baseman scooped it off the ground and threw to 2nd while still down). Azegami scored on that play, 4-0. Takayama then got himself caught stealing to end the inning. :P

But then Takayama made a running sliding catch of a fly to right to end the top of the 6th, and all was forgiven.

The Patented Sanko Big 7th Inning started with Shimizu singling, and Kaneko bunting him over to 2nd (why?!?!!?). Azegami then hit a double out to right-center and that brought in Shimizu to make it 5-0. Yokoo then legitimately blasted one out to the left field wall for a double, scoring Azegami, 6-0. Takayama followed that up with a single to right, scoring Yokoo, 7-0. Suganuma grounded out, but then Takahiro Suzuki hit a homer over the left field wall and that made it 9-0 and also took Kosei's pitcher Akita out of the game. Yoshinaga then struck out to end the inning.

Whatever.

Sanko added two more in the 8th when Shimizu reached on an error, Kaneko walked, and Yokoo hit a 2-RBI single to right, making it 11-0 and making him 4-for-5 on the day with 3 RBI, second only to Takayama's going 2-for-5 with 5 RBI. Infact, every Sanko batter reached base, although Taniguchi got there on an error and Yoshinaga got there on a walk.

Somehow Yoshinaga finished out the last 3 Kosei batters with a popout and two strikeouts, and that was it! 125 pitches, 8 strikeouts, complete-game shutout...

To steal another one from Mainichi, of course :)

Here's the game log / article on Asahi's site in Japanese.

(I'll add a little more to this in a bit, hopefully)

Oh, this article from the semi-finals has the BEST PICTURE OF SUGANUMA EVER in it, when he hit that 3-run homer :)

Friday Foto: Kentaro Yoshinaga

2011-08-19T01:30:00.001-07:00

I have been so swamped by work in the last few weeks, including a 2-week period where my group actually went off-site and holed up in a hotel in order to work on our project, that I've barely seen any of Koshien EXCEPT Nichidai Sanko and the occasional outlying game like Kyukoku or Teikyo or Yokohama.

I kept holding off on making the Yoshinaga mega-photopost because I wanted to write something significant about him, being as he captured my heart last November at the Jingu taikai and has been at the forefront of my "irrational emotional attachment to high school pitchers" this past year. I've probably read way more about him than any sane person would, from his tribulations learning how to throw a sinker to his obsession with actress Erika Toda.

But right now I don't have the time. And in about 16 hours, assuming no rainout, he's going to be pitching in the final game of Koshien 2011. The Azegami-team, which I've been writing about here on and off for the last several months, will come to an end in a few short days no matter what the outcome is. I find that so very sad. Part of why I love Japanese high school baseball, but definitely don't usually spend the time getting to learn the players as much as I do in college or the pros, is because the teams are so ephemeral, it's so hard to learn them and really grow any attachment to them. By the time the kids truly mature, it's time for them to step down after the summer of their 3rd year, and let the underclassmen take over.

So this Sanko team has been truly special for me, watching these boys over the last year, seeing Suganuma mature into a power hitter, seeing Suzuki show how to play through the pain, seeing Azegami's leadership on the field. And most of all, seeing Yoshinaga mature as a pitcher. He's got stuff, sure, but he's certainly not the most overpowering pitcher out there. He has his moments of weakness, which make him that much more human. But he also has a fantastic team behind him, and they score more runs than he gives up, and they back him up on the field. And he comes through when they need him most, and they come through when he needs them most.

What can I say, I love this team, and I love this guy.

These are from Senbatsu, but does it really make a difference? :)

(oh, that smile!)

(oh yeah, he can bat too, you know)

I don't know for sure if I'll get to watch tomorrow's game live, but I'll certainly be frantically checking the scores either way. I haven't been this into a team since Saga Kita. Seriously!

Welcome to Koshien, Meet Nichidai-San -- FOR REAL! Yoshinaga strikes out 14 and Sanko beats Sojitsu 2-1!

2011-07-29T23:37:00.000-07:00

This boy...

is going back to this place!

:)

So yeah, fairly close final game to close up the West Tokyo qualifiers, between Nichidai San and Waseda Jitsugyo. In 2006, these two teams also faced off, and Waseda's ace at the time was this kid named Yuki Saitoh. You may have heard of him. Waseda won in the 11th inning and went to Koshien, and the rest is history. Saitoh went on to beat Ma-kun and Komadai Tomakomai and stop their 3-peat, and set the rest of the country on a rage for blue handkerchiefs. Half of Sanko's team went on to attend Meiji University and spent the next four years still trying to beat Saitoh and Waseda. (Fumiya Araki did a fairly good job and found his way back to Koshien as a Hanshin Tiger.)

This year's Sanko team, aka the Azegami squad, has been pretty magical. They've got all the parts of a successful team there -- a strong-hitting and strong-fielding outfield in Taniguchi, Azegami, and Takayama, a bunch of power bats in Yokoo and Suganuma, a strong infield in Shimizu and Kaneko, a rock behind the plate in Suzuki, and most importantly, something else Sanko's lacked in the last few years -- a true ace in the form of Kentaro Yoshinaga. As long as he could keep things together, they would win. And today he certainly did -- 14 strikeouts to win it 2-1.

It was a deadlock of a 0-0 game until the 5th, when Yuta Taniguchi, batting 9th, got hit in the head by a pitch -- literally, it was just a high curve that curved into the front of his helmet. Taniguchi stole second, and 2nd-year Ryoya Kaneko hit a double to center to score Taniguchi to make it 1-0.

The boy I've dubbed "Secret Power", Kenichi Suganuma, launched a homer in the 6th to make it 2-0.

Waseda threatened in the top of the 7th when Watanabe led off with a double and was bunted to 3rd; during Shigenobu's at-bat, Yoshinaga threw a wild pitch into the dirt that bounced up and Watanabe was able to score on it to make the score 2-1. But fortunately Yoshinaga then struck out Shigenobu and Manabe to end the threat, and that was kind of the game right there.

I was able to watch the game on justin.tv (though with no sound, so I had to guess that the men they were interviewing in the stands were Yoshinaga and Suzuki's dads, for example), and it was really great to see them win. Yoshinaga couldn't stop crying afterwards. It's got to be a big weight off his shoulder -- the ghosts of the last time Sanko and Sojitsu faced off in addition to what people have called the "Jingu Taikai curse", meaning that the team who wins the Jingu Taikai can't have further success at Koshien that year. Who knows?

Anyway, this is the high school team that I irrationally fell for this year, and you have no idea how tempting it is to get a plane ticket to Osaka. Alas. (And yes, that second photo is me at Senbatsu this spring...)

Friday Fake Foto: 1987 Koshien Magazine Scans

2011-07-29T15:32:00.001-07:00

I'm calling this a "fake photo" because I didn't take these photographs. No, these are from one of the gems of my tendency to always look through the baseball magazines of any Book-Off I went to in Japan, just to see what oddball stuff might end up there. One time, I found a copy of the 1987 issue of 甲子園の恋人たち, a Koshien photobook magazine that seems to have mostly been around in the 1980's, for 350 yen.

Guys who went to Koshien in 1987 are basically all 41 or 42 years old now, so it's pretty amusing to look back at the photos of them as teenagers. (What's even weirder is, while I recognized a whole bunch of the players in here, I'm sure there were even more guys that went pro but were already finished way before I would have heard of them.)

So in honor of the fact that Koshien is starting in slightly over a week, and for another reason that'll become obvious at the end of this post, I decided to scan in a few things from this magazine. Some are just magazine pages, others are from the 3x3 "cards" pages they had in the back of the book. (Not real cards, though they called them that in the table of contents.)

Some Young Whippersnapper Catcher From Shimane

Proof that Motonobu Tanishige is not, infact, a robot from another planet. (And may be infact be the best catcher of the last 20 years in Japan not named Furuta.)

A Pro Golfer. You've Probably Heard Of His Brother

Izumi Kuwata, who also played baseball at PL Gakuen, two years behind his brother Masumi, though Izumi was an outfielder, not a pitcher. He's still an active pro golfer in Japan.

Here There Be Dragonlings

Kazuyoshi Tatsunami, who seems to have been the biggest superstar of this Koshien class, judging by this magazine and others from the time period. Also one of the greatest Japanese baseball players of all-time.

Another Spaceman From Teikyo To The Fighters

Hiroshi Shibakusa, who had a long career pitching for the Fighters, a few years of doing other stuff, and is now back with the team as a pitching coach. (His name is pronounced "hiroshi" but the kanji are for "space". I think it had something to do with him being born in the summer of 1969.)

Some Pitcher From Tochigi, or A Whale Of An Infielder

At the time of the 1987 Koshien, this guy was named "Tadanori Ishii" and he was pitching for Ashikaga high school. 4 years later, after winning one game as a pro pitcher for the Yokohama Taiyo Whales, he converted into an infielder and changed his name to Takuro Ishii, and went on to get over 2000 hits in an excellent career as a shortstop, mostly with Yokohama. He'll be 42 next month and is still occasionally in the starting lineup as a 3rd baseman with the Hiroshima Carp, because he's JUST THAT AWESOME.

When Tigers Fade

Patrick and I were just talking about Atsushi Kataoka, so this is for him.

Kokorozashi, or Barnstorming All The Way To Lancaster

Toshihisa Nishi was a Koshien star with Ibaraki's Joso Gakuin HS, then Waseda, then the damn Giants. I'll still remember him best leading off for the Baystars, though. He retired last year after playing in the indie leagues in the US.

He Shocked Us In Many Ways, Including His Last.

This is a boy named Hideki Irabu, who you may have heard of. His career was always one of ups and downs, and his life probably wasn't easy a lot of the time as a half-Japanese kid trying to hide that fact, but it's interesting to look back and see him smiling out from a page like this, and think of what kind of future people imagined for this big fireballer back then...

I'm intending to do an Irabu photopost sometime soon, since I never did get around to doing one when I saw him pitch in the summer of 2009, on what was my first great Koshien roadtrip, so this seems like an appropriate time for it anyway.

Kokoyakyu: Welcome to Koshien, Meet Nichidai San (Part 3)

2011-07-27T23:03:00.001-07:00

Part 3 in a series. See Part 1, See Part 2.

As we close in on the finals of the summer taikai, I find myself wanting to revisit and finish my monster Nichidai San posts from the spring. They did infact go on to win the entire Tokyo spring taikai, though that shouldn't really surprise anyone, and now they're contending for a spot at summer Koshien. I started this series of posts as a sort of glorified "Sanko Senbatsu Photopost", and then got distracted.

Last time I covered the first 4 of the lineup -- oddly, the lineup I saw at the Jingu Taikai last year, and the lineup at Senbatsu, and the lineup in the West Tokyo Qualifying Tournament, hasn't significantly changed between then and now, although the last 5 spots tend to get switched around a bit. The only thing is, I found a lot more stuff written about the first four guys in the lineup than the next four, to be sure. They're certainly all strong players though -- none of these guys is a weak spot in the lineup at all, and every one of them is prone to launch a homer at any time (and has).

The Youngster, Ryoya Kaneko
(HS meikan)

This year's power team is almost all 3rd-years with the exception of Kaneko, the sole 2nd-year in the starting 9. (Which practically guarantees he'll be team captain next year, although there are certainly a few other 2nd-years on the 18-man roster.) Despite being one of the youngest on the team, Kaneko is also listed as being one of the tallest on the team, at 180cm. He's said to have a really good batting eye and is expected to develop into a power hitter when he fills out, which bodes well for him as a lefty-batting first baseman.

Kaneko also played for the All-Tokyo team when the Urban Youth Academy came over for a few friendship games in June, again being one of the only underclassmen.

Shortstop Koki Shimizu

Voted by the rest of his team as the biggest "yancha", which kinda means "pain in the ass", Shimizu is a solid shortstop with strong footwork. You probably wouldn't notice how good he is because he's one of those stealthy shortstop types like Hirokazu Ibata.

The Secret Power, Kenichi Suganuma

Suganuma didn't particularly appear to be a huge power threat when I saw him, and he batted only .235 during that Senbatsu, but then he went on to hit 4 homers in the Tokyo Spring Taikai, which was pretty insane. Shimizu claims that Suganuma's become a "weight baka", and he said (in the Kagayake Koshien no Hoshi magazine) that he went from being able to lift 45kg to 90kg in a year.

Suganuma usually wears uniform number 7, and was ostensibly the left fielder at some point, but has been playing second base in pretty much every official game Sanko's had in 2011. I'm guessing that he works together well with Shimizu, though I recall him being a decent 2nd baseman in the games I saw him in...

Taking One For The Team - catcher Takahiro Suzuki
(HS meikan)

Here are your normal photos of catcher Takahiro Suzuki -- smiling by the dugout, bunting up the runner, both of which he's good at. But what really made Suzuki a hero in the eyes of many high school baseball fans is what happened in the top of the 8th inning of this game, on March 25, 2011. I happened to be sitting behind the dugout for this just because I wanted to see Sanko, so I also had a great angle for what happened.

Edwin's blog recount and the Sanko blog recount (in Japanese).

Basically an errant throw to the plate bounced and hit Suzuki in the face, and it allowed Meitoku to score a go-ahead run. The game paused for a while as Suzuki kind of got knocked out, and they put a towel to his mouth as he appeared to have a bloody lip and might have lost a tooth. I was using my zoom lens as a binoculars to figure out what was going on, and got the following shots...

The game paused for a bit, and then Suzuki did what was way above and beyond the call of duty -- he came back out after a few minutes, finished the inning, and then in the bottom of the 8th, with runners at first and second, he said he wanted to bat, went to the plate, and SMACKED ONE to the center field wall, scoring Suganuma and Yoshinaga to bring Sanko up 6-5 over Meitoku, which is where the game would end.

The Sanko blog describes it as "Covered in blood and sweat, Suzuki showed his fighting spirit and hit the go-ahead 2-RBI double."

Here's a Youtube Video recap of the game. If you go to about minute 10:45 you can see what happens -- Suganuma's throw to the plate and Suzuki going down. Then at 12:04 Suzuki comes up to bat, clearly with a bloody lip, and BAM. I've seen players play through a lot of random things, but this was definitely up there.

Anyway, the great postscript to this is that Suzuki -- who has been described more as "the guy catching Yoshinaga, a solid but not spectacular player", in the Tokyo Spring Taikai final game against Kosei... the game went into extra innings, and Sanko even brought in Yoshinaga to pitch, who had largely not been pitching in that tournament. Anyway, Sanko does win the game... on a walkoff grand slam by Suzuki.

Awesome.

And now that I'm finishing this, Sanko and Waseda Jitsugyo are slated to face each other in 2 days. I'll try to put my Yoshinaga monster photopost out before then...

Tokyo Big 6 Spring 2011 Best Nine, stats, etc

2011-07-25T02:29:00.001-07:00

This post is about a month and a half late. I actually ran the numbers for it a while ago (I hoped to tell Hayata Itoh exactly how much he dominated the league even though he missed the triple crown by one hit, but I didn't really get to talk to him at the Japan-US tournament), but well, you know, hopping between Seattle and San Francisco is time-consuming.

When last we visited our heroes, it was just after Week 6 of the season, and there was this complex dependency chart of who had to win what to win. If Rikkio went 2-0, which they did, then Keio had to win Soukeisen to win the league, which they did.

It never gets old seeing Keio pound Waseda, even though I know that right now Waseda is pathetically bad. I caught the final game over justin.tv; Daisuke Takeuchi was Keio's starter. Just as I was watching in the 3rd, Keio got a few runners on, captain Hayata Itoh came up to bat, and I'm like "He's gonna knock one, just watch" and sure enough, BLAM, liner to right field, 2-RBI double. Waseda did threaten to catch up a little, and made it all the way to 4-3, but Koji Fukutani came in and pitched the last half of the game and was AMAZING! He even hit 155 km/h on the Jingu guns a few times -- the only other recent Big 6 guy to do that was Ohishi and I keep saying Fukutani is BETTER, and god knows I used to talk about how awesome Ohishi was all the damn time.

Keio won the league, Daisuke was crying, Itoh was smiling up a storm, etc, they had a doage, and my three favorite boys were the game heroes as well. And in Itoh's interview, when they mentioned he was one hit short of the triple crown (17-for-42 .405 to Yuji Naka's 23-for-55 .418), he's like "Oh man. Well, we won the league, that's what really counts, right?" But then he admitted something like "One more hit? Only one? Yeah... I guess I suck for being that close..." Either way, Itoh had the most RBIs in the league with 17, homers with 4, and then he also walked 12 times to Naka's 4.

Anyway, on that note, let me post some season-summarizing stuff:


Best Nine
Pos  Name                 College  Yr.  Votes  Times   High School

P    Masato Komuro        Rikkio    3    18      1     Hino
C    Naoki Harada         Hosei     4    16      1     Ube Shogyo
1B   Ikuhiro Takeda       Meiji     4    10      1     Hotoku Gakuen
2B   Keisuke Okazaki      Rikkio    4    16      1     PL Gakuen
3B   Ren Yamasaki         Keio      3    21      1     Keio
SS   Koichiro Matsumoto   Rikkio    2    17      2     Yokohama
OF   Hayata Itoh          Keio      4    22      3     Chukyodai Chukyo
OF   Yuji Naka            Rikkio    4    22      1     Osaka Toin
OF   Hiroaki Shimauchi    Meiji     4    17      1     Seiryo

Full vote is 22, and it's clear that big-hitting outfielders are everyone's favorites. I'm guessing Hosei's Hiroshi Taki took the other 1B votes that Takeda didn't (they were both up there on the batting, but Taki made 2 errors). It's also awesome to see Naoki Harada get a Best Nine -- he's a really great guy who was mostly just a random baseball club member for 3 years, and kind of had to be a backup catcher behind Ishikawa and then Hiromoto and Doi, but now as a senior and co-captain of the Hosei team got a decent chunk of playing time and really put it to good use. It's a little funny because I was positive that Meiji's Kawabe and Waseda's Ichimaru would be the ones vying for the catcher Best Nine this semester, and both of them had pretty lousy results.

I'm happy to see Komuro get a Best Nine, because he literally carried his team on his back this semester -- he led the league in IP at 66.2, and appeared in 10 out of 14 of the games his team played. The only person even close to logging that much time was Yusuke Nomura, who pitched 65 innings in 9 games, the difference being that Komuro made multiple appearances every weekend except vs. Todai. He also led the league in wins -- here are the top 4 in innings logged (and, of course, wins -- nobody else had more than 45 IP or 4 wins):


Pitcher     College     Games  W   L   IP     ERA    WHIP
Komuro      Rikkio      10/14  6   2   66.2   1.35   1.11
Nomura      Meiji        9/14  5   3   65     2.07   0.78
Mikami      Hosei        8/13  4   2   47.2   2.26   1.32
Takeuchi    Keio        11/13  5   2   46.1   2.13   1.19

Also, I stalked Komuro briefly outside Jingu during opening weekend and told him I'd cheer for him this semester, so I feel like I had to stick to that. :)

As an aside, after last semester I compared Yusuke Nomura to Koji Fukutani as a case for the Best Nine, and noted that Nomura's peripherals were far superior to Fukutani's in terms of strikeout and walk rates. I'm proud to note that it's no longer the case, but this is largely because Fukutani became Keio's closer, and still put in 30 innings for the semester, just that this time they were all the last 2-3 innings of every Keio game. He didn't even give up a run at all until 3/4 of the way through the season, though...

Here's Spring 2010 Nomura vs. Fukutani:


            IP    H  HR  BBH  WHIP   BF    K/BF  BB/BF   H/BF
Fukutani   61.1  43   0  19   1.01  237   18.1%   8.0%  18.1%
Nomura     55.1  48   0   8   1.01  216   25.0%   3.7%  22.2%

And here's Spring 2011 Nomura vs. Fukutani:


            IP    H  HR  BBH  WHIP   BF    K/BF  BB/BF   H/BF
Fukutani   30.1  17   0   5   0.73  107   37.4%   4.6%  15.89%
Nomura     65    44   1   7   0.78  243   28.0%   2.9%  18.11%

Seriously, these two are the best pitchers in Big 6 right now, at least when it comes to control. Nomura simply does not walk batters or give up home runs to them. Infact, his only home run was given up to Hosei's Ryosuke Itoh, the kid from Shinko Gakuen who hit 94 homeruns in his high school career.

Also, the craziest thing is that despite being the 9th highest in the league in terms of IP, Fukutani was the 3rd highest in the league in terms of strikeouts (Nomura 68, Komuro 43, and Fukutani 40). Those are Ohishi-esque numbers if nothing else. Of course, I've been getting a little bit of flack for having been such a huge Tatsuya Ohishi fangirl when he's been struggling to adjust to the pros so far, so maybe it isn't in my better interest to point out how similar Fukutani is developing as a closer.

Another Yusuke Nomura tidbit, just repeating here from a few months ago: his 68 strikeouts put him above 300 strikeouts in his Big 6 career. It'd take a miracle for him to get to 30 wins too, I think -- he's currently at a 24-11 record. It wouldn't be impossible, just a lot longer shot than if he went in with 25.

Batting and ERA champs

Batting champion: Yuji Naka, Rikkio, .418/.450/.527
ERA champion: Koji Fukutani, Keio, 1-0, 0.59

I don't mean to be dissing Naka at all, because a .418 batting average is nothing to sneeze at. He only had 2 hitless games all semester, 8 multihit games (out of 14), and bizarrely, those multihit games were NOT against Todai (though Todai accounts for 2 of his 4 walks).

But well, I mentioned that I started running stats in order to show exactly how awesome Hayata Itoh was this semester, right...?

Other "Relevant" Stats
I realize that 11-13 games and 50ish plate appearances are not a huge sample size, but well, that's what you get in a season here.

Top 10 Batters by OPS:


(K4) Hayata Itoh         .405/.527/.857    1.384
(R4) Yuji Naka           .418/.450/.527     .977
(H3) Kento Tatebe        .294/.390/.569     .958
(M4) Hiroaki Shimauchi   .385/.467/.487     .954
(H3) Hiroshi Taki        .320/.393/.500     .893
(M2) Hiroki Nakashima    .270/.370/.486     .856
(R3) Koichiro Matsumoto  .288/.377/.462     .839
(R4) Keisuke Okazaki     .282/.396/.436     .832
(K3) Ren Yamasaki        .269/.367/.462     .829
(K4) Masaki Miyamoto     .278/.378/.417     .794

WTF? No, really, WTF? I think this is seriously the first time since I've been doing these that a guy made it into the top ten OPS with less than .800...

Also, if it's not clear, Itoh completely dominated the Big 6 league at the plate this year. He led the league with homeruns with 4 (Hosei's Kawai had 3 but he didn't have enough PA to make it into batting leaders with his .143/.314/.500 line in 35 PA), led the league in walks with 12 (the next highest two were Keio's Fukutomi and Meiji's Uemoto with 9 each), and nobody even remotely came close to him on OBP or SLG with enough plate appearances to count.

Meiji's co-captain and all-around-nice-guy Masataka Nakamura is the stolen base leader with 10.

Team batting:


                                      HR   SB    E
Keio        .265/.335/.397   .732      9   11   12
Hosei       .256/.330/.402   .732     11   12   14
Rikkio      .284/.333/.381   .714      5   19   12
Meiji       .239/.305/.307   .612      2   22    8
Waseda      .223/.277/.277   .554      1    9    8
Tokyo       .203/.255/.237   .492      0    6    9

Despite Todai ostensibly sucking, they were actually much better than last semester. Truly impressive is the power numbers out of Keio and Hosei, IMO -- and how far Waseda has fallen.

Team pitching:


               ERA   WHIP    K/9   BB/9
Keio          1.61   1.04   8.09   3.00
Meiji         2.10   0.99   8.49   2.03
Rikkio        2.20   1.28   5.90   3.27
Hosei         2.83   1.36   6.93   3.15
Waseda        4.61   1.52   8.92   5.50
Tokyo         5.10   1.74   3.90   5.57

Again, amusing to see how far Waseda has fallen now that they don't have their Big Three... and kind of sad with Hosei. I hope Kazuki Mishima has a better semester in the fall. It'd be nice to see him and Mikami as starters but also to have Funamoto and Yoshikoshi get some quality innings in...

I dunno. The one thing is that Rikkio really pushed forward a lot this semester in most ways. If Komuro can repeat his performance and one other pitcher can step up at all (Hayato Saitoh, I'm looking at you), it's going to be a pretty serious race in the fall. Basically, I think every team has improved in some way since last year except Waseda, which took a huge punch in the face. A lot of individuals will be looking towards their own personal goals, and of course the scouts will be out there looking particularly closely at Nomura and Itoh. Some of the Koshien hero 1st-years may get some more time out on the field as well.

On that note, almost every school has posted their summer camp and preseason info. Meiji is going to KOREA for a week! I wrote a birthday card to Tomoya Kumabe and told him to have a good trip (and to convince the team to visit the US next time...)

Rikkio: Miyazaki camp from Aug 2-13 and preseason game schedule
Meiji: Nagano camp from Aug 4-13, and Korea trip from Aug 16-22, and preseason game schedule
Hosei: preseason game schedule
Waseda: preseason game schedule
Tokyo: preseason game schedule

If anyone actually does want to venture out to any of these games and wants some tips on getting to their stadiums, let me know. I've been to Meiji and Hosei's grounds a whole bunch...

On that note, I'm still glued to Koshien qualifier scores, and I even managed to watch Hosei Dai-ni's game the other day over justin.tv -- it was really nice to see a Hosei game even if it wasn't *my* Hosei team. I won't be at Koshien this year, but I should be in Japan for some of the fall 2011 semester of college games!

Short takes

2011-07-16T01:12:00.000-07:00

You remember Ryuji Tachibana? The guy who went to the Mets in '97 as a conditioning coach, and worked for Bobby Valentine for several years with the Marines, and so on? Yeah, this guy? Apparently he's been working with the Rikkio University team as a coach as well. I believe Kenichi Yazawa is still working with the Tokyo University team off and on too. Wouldn't it be amazing if Rikkio managed to win the Big 6 this fall and Todai managed to win a game?

Anyway, I have no real point here, I just felt like posting. I started a Twitter account, which may be more useful when I go to Japan this fall.

Qualifying tournaments for Koshien are going on all over the place. I am, for the record, pulling for Nichidai San in West Tokyo (which should surprise nobody, and I really ought to finish my series on them), though if they don't make it I guess I hope Waseda Jitsugyo does again, because Konsu Yasuda is now their team captain and I was pretty captivated by him last summer, despite that I'm anti-Waseda on principle.

East Tokyo, I'm hoping for either Shutoku, Kanto Daiichi, or Teikyo. Well, or as a complete dark horse, Rikkio Ikebukuro. My student who I went to watch last year is now catching and batting cleanup for the team, and they've got a sophomore pitcher named Nishino who is apparently pretty good.

Shutoku, I have a former student who's a 1st-year there, so he didn't make the roster, but I still want their team to do well.

Kanto Daiichi, in an even more bizarre coincidence, their ace pitcher Ryo Minakawa (pictured on this page) is the older brother of one of the most annoying boys I had to deal with at my JHS last year. And their shortstop Yutaka Saitoh played for Arakawa Senior.

Teikyo, well, I used to live a 10-minute bike ride from there, and I've been a big fan of a lot of their alumni. Takuro Itoh, the boy who wowed everyone two years ago as a freshman who could throw 148km/h, is now the real #1-wearing ace and in his last tournament, and so it'll be interesting to see if he'll bring them back to Koshien this year too. He's also a heck of a hitter.

Also, not that anyone's looking, but Saga Kita just won another game today, so they've made it into Best 8. I'm still a fan of the Saga Kita 2007 miracle team, and would love to see their school make it to Koshien again.

I forgot to watch the All-Star game over here, and I dunno whether I'll manage to watch any of the Japanese ones, but the rosters are pretty crazy. Mostly, I'm delighted to see Shintaro Ejiri make it -- he was one of my favorite Fighters for a long time, and it's good to see him succeeding over on the other side of the bay. Also, it would have been nice to see Shota Ishimine make it as a first-year rather than Yuki Saitoh, but I'm biased.

Also, on a non-baseball, but Japanese-related note: if anyone's going to be in San Francisco at the B'z concert on Friday the 22nd, let me know.

Photopost: Japan-US College Tourney, Game 2 -- Cary On

2011-07-08T23:15:00.000-07:00

This is the game that was supposed to happen Monday night but became the morning game of a double-header on Tuesday. Originally, had Game 2 happened as planned in Durham, Game 3 was going to be at 7pm on Tuesday night in Cary, but instead, they put Game 2 at 11am in Cary, and then had Game 3 at 6pm in Durham.

For those wondering, they're really only 20 minutes apart or so. We looked at the weather in the morning on Tuesday and were able to get to the park in Cary fairly easily. The Cary game was at the National Training Complex, which is huge and has four full MLB-scale baseball fields. Undoubtedly, a big reason why this series took place in North Carolina at all is because USA Baseball is based there. I definitely got the impression, from talking to people, that this series was more of a showcasing for the US college players than for anyone scouting the Japanese college players, although the scouts were certainly watching Fujioka and Sugano.

Anyway, it was really hot and sunny, and we found a place to sit on the Japan side, right behind the dugout -- and immediately I ran into my friends from the other game, who said "Good thing you made it! We found out about this game when we got back to our hotel!" and I'm like "So did we!" I also ran into some of the cameramen I sat with for Game 1.

I got a photo with 3 guys from Team USA, who happened to be standing around by the team tent. I felt like, hey, might as well ask, it couldn't hurt, right? It's funny how all the US guys seem to be 6'3", really.

Me with Tyler Naquin, Michael Lorensen, and Erich Weiss.

I went to the bullpen to take pictures of Takahiro Fujioka warming up because he's awesome. As I was taking photos, there was this older guy watching Fujioka throw too. He saw my Chunichi shirt and asked me in Japanese, "You a Kawakami fan?" and I'm like "Yeah, when he was on Chunichi I really liked him. Nomura reminds me of him, you know?" and we got to talking. He asked if I was working at the game and I said no, I was just a big fan, and no, I didn't get to see Kawakami on this trip, though he's still playing in the minors here, etc. He asks if I've watched a lot of college ball and I explain that I loved college ball when I lived in Japan. So he asks if I saw Yuki Saitoh, and I'm like "...well, of course..." and then I admit that I'm a Fighters fan actually, but I start going on about how frustrating the media can be for players like Saitoh, and like they were in the past for Nakata Sho, and Darvish, and so on. And my favorite player was Hichori.

Well, uh, get this... this guy I was talking to was none other than Masao Yamada.

THE NIPPON HAM FIGHTERS GENERAL MANAGER.

Wow, do I talk too much. But, he seemed really amused by me -- and he kept saying "kuwashii!" which is Japanese for "Geez, you know EVERYTHING, don't you?" He gave me his business card, but sadly it doesn't have an email address. Also, he was there scouting with Matt Winters -- after the tourney they were going to go barnstorming through the southern US and hunt for some AAA guys that the Fighters might be interested in bringing over to Japan. He offered to introduce me to Winters, which sadly never happened. Alas.

I did put in my own two cents about how the first time I saw Fujioka was because I had come to a Toyodai game in the hopes of seeing Masahiro Inui pitch, and saw Fujioka (then a sophomore) instead, and have been watching him for the past 3 years and honestly think he's better than Inui. The Fighters drafted Inui in the 4th round this past fall and were really high on him. Yamada laughed and thanked me for my input.

Fujioka finished warming up and I called out, "Fujioka-kun! Ganbatte kudasai!" and he tipped his cap at me with a slight bow.

As the game was getting underway, a small ouendan materialized, too. Some people from the Japanese society at Duke showed up with a real taiko drum (which they said they built here in the USA). A guy in a Hanshin cap brought some blue megaphones, and so we were all yelling encouragement at the Japan team in Japanese. The first time the taiko drum beats happened, the entire Japan team came out of the dugout and looked up like "WTF?!" but they seemed happy about it.

I should also mention that the announcer at this game, while being SLIGHTLY better at the Japanese names than the one in Durham, was still pretty awful. He kept calling Hayata Itoh "Itu". To the point that some other guys in the dugout were yelling "ITU!!!" at him.

So, yeah, there was a game. For the first 6 innings it was a crazy pitcher's duel. Fujioka was amazing, he struck out 9 guys in 6 innings, with 2 hits and 2 walks. I stopped by to chat with Conor, who was sitting out with a radar gun and being all scout-like, and asked what he thought of Fujioka, and he said, "Your boy's pretty good. Nobody's getting solid contact off him at all."

Japan finally got a run ahead for 1-0 in the 6th, when Ryosuke Obuta singled and then Yoshihiro Ikeda hit a triple out to center, scoring Obuta. Daichi Suzuki walked and stole second, but then a pitching change later, Hayata Itoh struck out, and boy was he not happy about that. Nakashima replaced him in right field after that, and it almost looked like Itoh took himself out of the game, really.

Unfortunately, all hell broke loose in the 7th inning. Ficociello doubled, Elder singled to bring him in to tie the game at 1-1. Reynolds also singled, and then the US team orchestrated a delayed double steal -- that is, the Japan team threw to first and got Reynolds in a rundown and then Elder ran home, making it 2-1. Weiss pinch-hit and also singled, and then it was 3-1 and Fujioka came out of the game, which was very sad for me.

Tomoya Mikami replaced him on the mound, except that Mikami had literally been warming up since the 3rd inning or so, in this 95-degree heat. I was pretty sure he'd have nothing left in him by the time he got out there, and I was right -- Lorenzen bunted and got on when Mikami misfielded the ball, and then Fontana hit into a fielder's choice (but Obuta's throw to the plate was wide and so Weiss scored anyway, 4-1). Fontana got himself out in a rundown for the first out of the inning. Yay. Marrero singled, scoring Lorenzen; 5-1. Naquin doubled to left, scoring Marrero, 6-1. Elander singled to center, scoring Naquin, 7-1, and then Lyon pinch-ran for him. That was it for Mikami.

Lefty Yuta Iwasada replaced Mikami on the mound... and got a flyout from Ficociello, who was up yet again. A single from Elder brought Lyon to third but that was it as Reynolds grounded out to third to end the inning.

It was so depressing that I spent the 8th inning up in the small amount of shade the concourse offered, because I was really overheated, a little sunburnt, and quite thirsty. The Yomiuri cameraman I'd been chatting up earlier in the game asked, "You left your scorecard and camera?" and I said, "I can't bear to look at it again." I spent a while talking with him and another guy from Sponichi, which was interesting. (Amusingly, they asked "Have you considered writing about Japanese baseball?" and I felt too lame to say "I'm a semi-retired blogger...")

Anyway, I can tell you for a fact that the USA Baseball Box Score for this game has some errors -- notably, Koji Fukutani replaced Yuta Iwasada on the mound and pitched the 9th inning for Japan. Also, Tomoki Takata pinch-hit for Keisuke Okazaki in the bottom of the 9th as well.

Though, speaking of the 9th, more excitement happened when Dominic Ficociello had a broken bat foul and his BAT went flying into the stands right towards us! I ducked, the bat landed a few rows back. Mike went and retrieved it, and now we have a great souvenir from the game! In the US, college baseball players don't usually play with wooden bats, either, so it's kinda crazy. The bat was split straight down the handle part, there's still some tape on it.

Fukutani gave up another run, and the Japan team managed to score a run in that inning I was ignoring the game, so the USA team won the game 8-2. Whatever.

I took over 1000 photos during this game. A few came out somewhat decently.

First, here's way too many shots of Fujioka:

This was the USA starter Kevin Gausman. He has this ridiculously high leg kick. Conor tells me it's even more ridiculously high than it used to be.

Tomoya Mikami is a pretty tall pitcher from Hosei, so I've seen him quite a bit. He's quite tall for a Japanese guy (190cm), and converted from an infielder to a pitcher his freshman year of college.

Here's lefty Yuta Iwasada, from Yokohama Shokadai.

And here's Koji Fukutani out there on the mound pitching the 9th for Japan (well, the first is in the bullpen). He's Keio's closer, it would have been nice if he was holding a lead...

(he's always had this kinda weird head twist after he throws a pitch...)

Here's Hodaka Yamakawa, the boy who hit that huge homer in Game 1 and was launching them during batting practice, but only managed to hit a long long fly ball during this game...

(Doing his best Batozaki imitation?)

It would have been nice to see Hayata Itoh smile at all during the game, but...

Here he is in the field.

Hitting a fly out, sadly.

And striking out. Not the best day for the boy who is usually super-clutch whenever I see him play.

Hosei's Hiroshi Taki, who had a pretty crappy day at the plate. It seems he got a lot better once I stopped watching him...

Warming up.

At first base.

...this looks cool but in reality he's about to hit a foul. :(

Rissho's catcher Yuta Yoshida, former Sanko captain, etc. I hope I can find him again when I'm back in Japan sometime.

Yuji Kaneko, switch-hitting third baseman from Ritsumeikan. I liked him both in the field and at the plate, but I pretty much never get to see Kansai college ball. Switch-hitters are really rare in Japan for whatever reason.

Waseda's Koki Sasaki. I feel like I've seen him play a lot over the last few years, and yet I'm not really sure I have an opinion on him. Still not sure why Habu wasn't on this team. Either way, I took a bunch of photos of him because my Waseda fan friends wanted some.

(It looks like he's going to score, but no, the ball was caught.)

Toyodai captain and national team captain, shortstop Daichi Suzuki. Got one of two RBIs for Japan in this game.

Catcher Ryutaro Umeno, who tried his hardest at the plate to tag these guys out, but it just wasn't meant to be.

With Fujioka, the starting battery.

Umeno.

Trying to tag out Lorenzen.

Trying to tag out Weiss.

Second baseman Ryosuke Obuta, from Tohoku Fukushi. Scored both of Japan's runs in this game, bizarrely.

(this is him scoring the first run)

Rikkio's captain, Keisuke Okazaki, who went to PL Gakuen HS. Okazaki was coaching first base for Game 1, and finally made it into this game as a pinch-hitter and first baseman to replace Taki, in the 7th inning.

Meiji sophomore Hiroki Nakashima, whose job in this series seems to basically have been platooning with Hayata Itoh and replacing him in right field.

Hosei alum and current manager, Koji Kanemitsu.

The Japan dugout at some point about halfway through the game.

Final depressing score:

Teams shake hands together, before prepping to go back to Durham to play ANOTHER game...

These people brought a taiko drum to the game and were drumming to cheer for the Japanese team:

Mike retrieves the broken bat flung towards us by Ficociello:

And here's what the entire field looked like (since I've mostly just posted zoomed in shots of players):

After the game we drove back to Charlotte. By random chance, we pulled off the highway to refuel in Kannapolis and realized we were right by FIeldcrest Cannon Stadium, so we drove over there and looked around a bit. This is where Game 4 was played... well... more like, this is where the first 3 innings of Game 4 were played, before it was rain delayed for 2 days and continued today in Omaha. (No, really.)

Looks like a nice enough stadium for a Low-A place (it's home of the Kannapolis Intimidators), although I swear it also looked like a converted racetrack to me. I dunno.

Anyway.

One final story here would be that broken bat we got -- we realized that we definitely couldn't take the bat on the plane with us back to Seattle. Maybe as checked luggage, but even so, it might count as a sharp weapon either way.

So we decided to ship it back home.

We tell the car navi system to find us the nearest post office, which it does, about 4 miles away.

Arriving at the post office, we walk in with the bat, grab a long container and some bubble wrap, and go up to the counter to explain that we got the bat at the game, etc, expecting to get some weird looks.

Instead, the guy behind the counter totally freaks out like "MY NEIGHBOR'S A SCOUT FOR THE WHITE SOX! OH MAN I WAS TOTALLY GOING TO GO TO THE GAME!"

He starts showing the bat to all the other employees like "Look what these lucky bastards got at the Team USA game this afternoon."

Anyway, we eventually manage to wrap the thing in bubblewrap and cram it into the shipping tube, fill out the address thingy, etc. In the process of doing that we talked to the counter guy, who mentioned he'd even thought of going to the 4th of July game. We tell him it got rescheduled to later that night, and Mike even gave him his ticket, since we weren't going to use it, we're like "Well, this will get you in for free if you decide you want to go! There'll be fireworks!"

The bat did show up as scheduled on Thursday afternoon. It was much easier to get OUT of the shipping tube than it was to get IN. Now my only problem is that I'm not really sure what to do with it! I've got display boxes for baseballs, but for broken bats? I'll have to figure something out. In the meantime, the cats are really frustrated that they can't fit into the shipping container. I tried to explain to them that it was for bats, not cats, but you know how these things go.

Japan-US College Tourney, Day 2 -- Rained Out

2011-07-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

If you're here looking for info about the game, the short version is: it rained out, and they're doing a doubleheader tomorrow, 11am in Cary, 6pm in Durham.

So, today we arrived at Durham Bulls Athletic Park at 4:30pm, for a 5pm gates opening, for a 6:05pm game. (Why do they open the gates so late? Sigh.) At 4:45pm, it started raining and lightning and thundering.

At 5pm they opened the gates to the stadium. Mike and I went in and found Conor sitting in the covered seating area up behind 1st base, with some of the other scouts that had gotten in early to watch batting practice. "That Yamakawa kid hit a home run over the bull in straightaway left field," he informed me. (There's a bull billboard in left field, and it says "Hit the bull, get a steak. Hit the grass, get a salad.")

Speaking of Yamakawa -- I just read an article saying that he's the 2nd Japanese guy in the history of the Japan-US collegiate tournaments to hit a grand slam against the US -- and even crazier, the first one was Tatsunori Hara, 32 years ago.

Anyway, we sat and waited to see what would happen. In theory, the weather for the evening had said there'd be scattered thunderstorms starting around 8pm, and if we were lucky we hoped maybe the clouds would pass us over.

But, at 6pm, it was raining -- harder than ever.

At 7pm, it was STILL RAINING. And the field was starting to look like one big puddle, at that, so even if the rain stopped, it was unclear how long it'd take to clear the field out. They were showing videos on the screen of things like Baseball Bugs Bunny and such.

Around 7:30pm the rain was still going, though it was letting up a little. The staff really didn't want to have to cancel this game because there were so many people there, it was the 4th of July, they were planning fireworks, etc. They started doing trivia games and such to keep the fans entertained.

I went down to the Japan dugout, since some of the players had poked their heads out to figure out WTF was going on, and I got a photo of a few of them. I also ran into the Japanese lady I'd talked to a bit on Sunday, and so we hung out too, taking photos of stuff and chatting in Japanese. Fujioka poked his head out of the dugout and nodded hello at me and I almost fainted.

Around 8pm the rain had let up almost entirely, and so the Japanese players all came out to right field to jog and warm up. So we went over to watch.

And at this time, over the loudspeaker, they started saying "We hate to do this, but tonight's game has been postponed to tomorrow night. Same time, same place, same game, same fireworks, everything, just tomorrow at 6pm instead of tonight. You can use your same tickets and come back here. Tonight's game has been postponed."

My new Japanese friend started freaking out, since it turns out she speaks almost zero English (her husband does, though), and I translated, and so both of us are like "What are we going to dooooooo?"

Clearly what we decided to do then was hang out by the field and take photos. Some kids were around trying to get the Japanese players to sign stuff, which they did. Well, and some were still practicing, so I kinda translated that for the kids ("They say they'll sign for you after they finish throwing, okay?"), and I chatted with a few of the players as they went by. Taki in particular, I talked to for a bit. I'd sent a birthday card to Kazuki Mishima back in May, and included a Safeco Field postcard for the whole Hosei team, and wondered if it got there, and apparently it did. Whew. I asked whether the guys had been studying English for this trip and he was like "No, we totally suck. English is hard."

I finally got a photo with Yuhei Nakaushiro! So I have gotten a photo with all 5 of the guys I set out to collect when this magazine came out. Hooray?

And we watched the guys tossing. Yoshida promised me a photo but once they got back from the dugout, except then we all got kicked out of the stadium. So the four of us went and stalked the Japan bus and said goodnight to the players as they came out, and I got a few more photos with people.

Oh well, here are a bunch of photos all at once:

The field, it is rainy. The players, they are somewhat enjoying it but not really. The fans, they are clustered in the stands.

"Okazaki, Sasaki, can I take a photo of you guys?"
"Sure. Why do you speak Japanese?"
"Uh, I lived in Tokyo for a few years and used to watch you guys all the time?" [holds up Tokyo Big 6 towel]
"Whoa! Crazy!"

Pitcher pow-wow after the rainout is announced.

Mikami and Fujioka threw a little in the bullpen anyway.

Some players sign for some little kids. (It was actually kinda funny because a kid would say in English, "Can I have your autograph please?" and the Japanese guys would go "...uh...sign?" and they'd be like "Yes, sign!")

Me and Taki :)

"Nakaushiro! Can I get a photo with you?"
"Huh? I gotta go, what do you mean?"
"Just a 2-shot."
"Uh, okay..."

So this was afterwards, catching players on their way to the bus. Here's me with Tomoya Mikami, adding to my Hosei collection.

"Kanemitsu-kantoku! Can I get a photo with you?"
"[double-take] Say what?"
"Uhh... I'm a big Hosei fan and would love to get a photo with you. [shows towel]"
"Well, thank you. Why are you a Hosei fan?"
"I really liked Kagami and became a fan because of him..."
"I see... thank you for cheering for us!"

"Yamakawa-kun! Can I get a photo with you?"
(His response was roughly the Japanese equivalent of "Sure, babe." I really like this kid, he's funny and he can really hit.)

Yuta Yoshida. I told him I'm a huge Nichidai San fan, he seemed surprised but at least slightly less WTF at me, like "Cool, thanks for cheering for them!" (He was Sanko captain a few years back.)

Waved goodbye to the bus, waved goodbye to the Ikedas (at the time I didn't know about the 11am game, just wasn't sure if we could stay for the 6pm game in Durham since we need to fly out of Charlotte early Wednesday morning, so it seemed unlikely we'd see them again).

And then we went off in search of dinner, which ended up being Bojangles. I'd never been there before, but it wasn't bad. We had Cook Out for lunch, too, which had fantastic milkshakes though I didn't think the food was that great. It's funny how North Carolina actually has significant regional food, though!

We may end up going to the game in Cary tomorrow morning if the weather looks promising. Probably not going to stay in Durham for the evening. Fujioka's supposed to pitch the morning game and Sugano the evening, which is also a deciding factor for me :)

Photopost: Japan-US College Tourney, Day 1 -- Battle of Big Innings

2011-07-03T22:45:00.000-07:00

I'm in North Carolina! And as promised, I'm posting about the US-Japan tourney!

I had a pretty great day at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park today, watching the Japanese national collegiate team take on the US national collegiate team. I was so ridiculously happy when I got into the stadium and saw the guys warming up. I was just like "There's Fukutani! And Itoh! And Mikami! And Taki! And Okazaki! And Fujioka! OMG OMG OMG!" I hadn't realized how much I missed watching these guys play. There's only 8 guys on the roster from the Tokyo Big 6 league, and then a few others from Tohto, and then others from all over the place, but still.

I had my big orange Hosei towel, so I got Mikami to come over and chat for a bit, and said hi to Taki too. The guys on the team who know me were all like "Whoa, what are you doing here" but the rest of the guys were like "Why is there this crazy girl cheering for us?" Still, they seemed more amused than anything. I sat with some photographers from Japanese papers, and took photos, and yelled "GANBARE!!" a lot.

Awesomeness happened in the form of Asia Univ's Tomoki Takata throwing me a ball at one point (he was looking for someone to throw it to, I asked for it in Japanese, he threw it to me), and then after the game I got it signed by Hodaka Yamakawa, who is my new "WTF" player, in that I'd never seen this guy before but he blasted a grand slam over the left field "Blue Monster" wall. It was a BIIIIIIG hit.

To be fair, you can read the game log on the USA baseball site, in English even. Or you can check out the box score. What basically happened in this game is that Japan had a huge 5th inning and the US had a huge 7th inning, and the USA eventually won 7-6. My observation is that the Japan relievers spent so damn long warming up, in the 95-degree heat, that maybe they were already kinda tired by the time they got into the game?

In addition to Yamakawa's bat, I was really impressed by the defense of third baseman Yuji Kaneko (from Ritsumeikan) and second baseman Ryosuke Obuta (Tohoku Fukushi). It was also a super treat to finally see Yuhei Nakaushiro, the crazy lefty sidearmer from Kinki Univ, pitch in person. Overall I'm sad that Japan lost, but happy that I got to see everyone play. Yusuke Nomura started, and then was Nakaushiro, and then two batters' worth of "little" Nao Higashihama, and then finishing with Tomoyuki "The man" Sugano.

The announcers were terrible at the Japanese names -- it was REALLY ATROCIOUS. The worst was him calling Higashihama "Hagashima". WTF? When the Japan-US tourney happened in Japan, they got an actual English speaker to do all the announcements.

Oh yeah, after 4 years I finally got a photo with Yusuke Nomura. Now the only one of the 5 left is Nakaushiro. Gotta stalk him tomorrow I suppose. I also got Takahiro Fujioka to sign a photo after the game, and after chatting with him a bit and saying I saw him in the preseason and took a photo together, he was like "OH! YES I REMEMBER YOU!" That was really neat :) When I told him I came here from Seattle, he was like "Isn't that far?" and I'm like "Not as far as Japan!"

I was also really happy to get to spend the day chatting in Japanese with people -- players, fans, photographers, etc. And I got to catch up with an old USSM friend Conor Glassey, who now works for Baseball America and told me some stuff about the USA team, since I babbled at him about the Japan team. (Seriously, how silly is it that I know absolutely nothing about US college ball? The US is huge. Yeah.)

Anyway, photos:

Hosei's Hiroshi Taki.

Takahiro Fujioka!

Keio's awesome Hayata Itoh takes some warmup swings.

Yuhei Nakaushiro joking with Yuji Kaneko.

Yusuke Nomura warms up in the bullpen (Meiji manager Yoshinami is the pitching coach for this team.)

Takahiro Fujioka throwing in the bullpen.

Formerly Nichidai San captain, and now Rissho University catcher Yuta Yoshida.

Hodaka Yamakawa, the kid who BLASTED a grand slam over the left field monster.

Hayata Itoh.

Kaneko taking some warmup swings.

The Durham Bulls mascot, "Wool E Bull".

Taki at bat.

Mark Appel. I've heard this guy is likely to be a pretty high draft pick over here in the US.

Itoh at bat.

Nomura on the mound (I had wandered to the other side for a bit to shoot those other guys batting.)

Ryutaro Umeno (catcher from Fukuoka Univ)

Hosei's Tomoya Mikami!

Waseda's Koki Sasaki diving back to first base.

The four guys high-fiving at the plate after Yamakawa's grand slam.

And a high-five for Nomura too.

Meiji University's Hiroki Nakashima, who came in as a pinch-runner for Itoh.

Nao Higashihama in the bullpen.

Yamakawa at bat.

Yuhei Nakaushiro.

Ryosuke Obuta at second.

Yuta Iwasada (from Yokohama Shokadai).

Tomoyuki Sugano!

Keio's Koji Fukutani (I really hope I get to see him pitch for real tomorrow...)

Final sadface score.

Look, I finally got a photo with Yusuke Nomura even if he looks completely nonplussed about the idea. It only took four years and moving back to the US!

This is the ball I caught from Takata and got signed by Yamakawa :)

Onwards to tomorrow! I'm so happy I get to watch these guys play! Though I feel kinda funny to spend July 4th cheering against Team USA :)

Toyo Wins Again (And I Have An Epiphany)

2011-06-12T00:55:00.000-07:00

A year ago, I was sitting in my house in Akabane liveblogging the finals of the All-Japan collegiate baseball tourney, which was Toyo vs. Tokai, Fujioka vs. Sugano, after seeing Tokai take down Keio the day before.

Just now, Toyo won their second consecutive championship as Takahiro Fujioka pitched yet another championship game gem. He and Keio's Koji Fukutani both went the distance, into extra innings, but then Toyo's Yuya Oda hit a 2-run sayonara homer to win the game 3-1 for Toyo. But now, I'm sitting in a house in the suburbs of Seattle. Nobody was broadcasting this game online that I could find, so I couldn't actually see it.

And it made me realize that I should actually declare that this blog is semi-officially on hold for a while.

I've been back in the US for a few months now, and I've been working for the last month at a software company in San Francisco, commuting down 4 days a week from Seattle. It's been a lot of fun and I'm really enjoying the job a lot and learning a lot. But on the other hand, I've barely been able to follow baseball at all. I've been to a few MLB games -- just hit a Giants-Reds one the other night, and was at Mariners-Yankees a week or two ago, things like that. But I don't really feel like I have much to contribute about those to the blogosphere. I still follow Japanese college baseball religiously, and check the NPB scores and stuff every day, but it's just not the same when I can't be there.

I'm going to try to go to North Carolina for the US-Japan collegiate tourney in 3 weeks. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't disappointed by the current player pool that's going. There's a lot of interesting guys on that list but a lot of my favorites won't be there; Daisuke Takeuchi isn't on the invite list, neither is Kazuki Mishima. (Well, Fukutani, Fujioka, Nomura, and Sugano all are, but...) Tokaidai's catcher Fushimi Torai just turned down his invite because he had a pretty lousy semester batting-wise, and I was looking forward to seeing him again. Keio's Hayata Itoh and Hosei's Hiroshi Taki are on the invite list, but... well, we'll see.

I'm not planning to completely abandon the blog forever; I hope to write about those US-Japan games, and I'm in the early stages of planning a trip back to Japan for sometime in the September-October timeframe. But for the time being, there's no sense in lying to myself about obligations here. What free time I have these days is going towards putting together Puzzle Hunt, which is my big commitment until September 10. I could probably attempt to do some short baseball posts in the interim, but I've never been any good at that. Maybe once my life gets back in order work-wise -- this SF-Seattle commute won't last forever. We'll see.

I really do want to thank everyone for their support over the years. In case it wasn't clear, my four years as "THAT gaijin" at hundreds of baseball games all over Japan was one of the best experiences of my life, EVER. I'm sure I have plenty of adventures in store in the future, they just won't be happening for a while. And I promise this isn't goodbye, just me realizing I shouldn't just trail off into dust without some sort of explanation why. I'll undoubtedly still post here (I've still got a Big 6 roundup draft to finish as well as the Nichidai San stuff) from time to time.

Tokyo Big 6: Week 7, the rest of the wrapup

2011-05-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

As for Week 7, well, it sounds like Todai fought valiantly but fell 2-0 to Rikkio as expected, so Keio has to win Soukeisen for the league championship, which seems likely.

Meiji and Hosei were basically battling for 3rd place, as both went into the weekend with 2 Series Points, meaning they weren't going to catch Keio and probably not Rikkio.

Game 1

Saturday was Hosei's Tomoya Mikami against Meiji's Yusuke Nomura. It was broadcast on Sky A, and the usual suspect rebroadcast it on justin.tv. I watched it about 3 hours after the game actually happened, but kept myself from checking Big 6 scores until I got home, so it was "live" to me, which was fantastic.

The game itself was pretty good, too, for the first half at least. Meiji took first blood in the 2nd inning when Hiroki Nakashima hit a home run into the leftfield bleachers to make it 1-0. Hosei evened that up in the top of the 3rd when Mikami led off with an infield single, he moved up on a sac bunt, and then Kento Tatebe hit a double that scored him, 1-1. Meiji came back in the bottom of the 3rd when Takashi Uemoto led off with a single, stole second, moved to third when captain Ikuhiro Takeda reached base on an error by second baseman Junpei Morimoto (aww), and then Uemoto scored on a single by Hiroaki Shimauchi, 2-1. Hosei evened it up in THEIR top of the 4th inning when freshman Ryosuke Itoh hit a HUGE homer to right field, 2-2.

Itoh, for the record, hit 94 home runs as a high schooler at Shinko Gakuen, and is one of these "golden freshman" types; I saw him play at Koshien, and then when I went to Hosei's ground in the preseason, they were already making it clear he'd be cracking the real lineup ASAP.

Also, Shimauchi got injured running during the May 7th game; as a friend described it, "he ran to 1st base and when he got there, his leg kinda gave out and he stumbled." After the game they saw him going to the hospital in a taxi, and he sat out the rest of the Todai series. But I guess it wasn't too bad, because he played the weekend after that.

Anyway, the tie game didn't last long; in the bottom of the 4th, Yusuke Nomura led off with a single (BOTH pitchers got singles in their first 2 at-bats!), Yosuke Kobayashi bunted him up, he went to 3rd on a single by Masataka Nakamura, and then scored on an RBI single by Takeda. 3-2.

Hosei would never actually score any more for the rest of the game. Mikami only pitched 4 innings before sophomore Hirohisa Umeda took the mound in the 5th. Umeda pitched one decent inning, but then gave up 2 runs in the 6th, hitting Kobayashi with a pitch and walking Nakamura; Uemoto sac bunted them up and then Takeda got two more RBIs on a blooper fly kind of single to the infield which landed behind second base. 5-2. Kazuki Mishima finished out the last 2 innings with 3 strikeouts and no runs, though, so that was good.

Nomura only pitched the first 7 innings, while Takayuki Morita pitched the last 2 for Meiji, and he also got 3 strikeouts and no runs.

Game 2

Amidst a bunch of light rain, Hosei and Meiji met for their second game, with Kazuki Mishima taking the mound for Hosei and Gota Nanba for Meiji. All was normal through 7 innings; Meiji was up 1-0 on an RBI single by Nakamura. Kazuki Funamoto took over to pitch in the top of the 8th, and THEN in the bottom of the 8th, suddenly Hosei surged for 3 runs. Junpei Morimoto singled, and Taki hit a popout, but then Hasegawa got a single to center that put runners at the corners. During Naoki Harada's at-bat, a wild pitch scored Morimoto to make it 1-1, and Harada struck out. It was, of course, at that moment that Ryosuke Itoh hit his second homerun against Meiji, a 2-run shot to right, that scored Hasegawa and him, and made it 3-1. Shogo Shibata and Tomoya Kumabe (!) got the next 3 batters out to end the threat.

But they couldn't account for the WEATHER.

Meiji had 2 on and 2 out in the top of the 9th and the game got called due to rain, with Hosei winning 3-1.

So the series was tied at 1 game each.

Game 3

As mentioned in the short post before this one, Game 3 was where Mikami and Nomura had a rematch against each other. Meiji couldn't do anything against Mikami, amazingly, and Nomura gave up 2 runs in the 7th to Shohei Doi, a 2-RBI single. So Hosei won 2-0, and Nomura didn't get his 6th win of the year, but he DID get his 301th college career strikeout!

It's possible that he could get 6 wins in the spring and get to 30 wins, but kind of unlikely as he's never gotten that many in a semester before.

(BTW, in the time it took me to write up Week 7, Week 8 happened, and Keio did infact win the league! Hooray for Daisuke and Fukutani and Itoh!)

Yusuke Nomura - 300 K's!

2011-05-23T14:24:00.000-07:00

Despite that Nomu-chan always seems to be avoiding me on purpose, I still have a great amount of respect for the kid. Hard to believe I've been watching him pitch for almost 4 years now, since he was a senior at Koryo high school and came within 2 innings of winning Koshien 2007 before running out of steam.

Meiji played their final series against Hosei this past weekend, and lost it under bizarre circumstances (more on that in another post). Nomura pitched and won Saturday, and pitched and lost Monday. But despite losing the game on Monday the 23rd, he struck out 9 Hosei batters, which put him at 68 strikeouts for the semester. He'd had 233 strikeouts before this semester, so it means he ends the season with 301. (Nikkan Sports)

He's averaged around 40-50 strikeouts per semester, so if he continues that in the fall, he'll probably be able to make it into the Big 6 career strikeout records between Mikinori Katoh's 5th-place position at 371 and the 6th-place tie between Noboru Akiyama and Kazuhito Tadano at 334. (From here.)

Tokyo Big 6: Rikkio-Keio?!

2011-05-17T10:33:00.000-07:00

Weeks 5 and 6 saw all kinds of turns that I wasn't expecting. Keio beat Meiji in a 4-game slugfest of a series, which gives them 4 Series Points. Each team has one matchup left to play out, and the standings after Week 6 are...


            G    W   L   T  SP   WP%
1  Keio    11    8   2   1   4   .800
2  Rikkio  12    7   4   1   3   .636
3  Meiji   11    6   4   1   2   .600
4  Hosei   10    4   4   1   2   .444
5  Waseda  11    4   5   1   1   .400
6  Tokyo    9    0   8   1   0   .000

Rikkio kind of lucks out in that their final match is Todai, which is almost a guaranteed Series Point, even against this New And Improved Todai.

Keio's last match, on the other hand, is Soukeisen, against Waseda. But it's against a Waseda that has been sucking it up after leaning on Saitoh, Ohishi, and Fukui for several years, and not developing other players.

Anyway, here's what's up:
If Rikkio loses 1 or more games during Week 7, Keio wins the league championship regardless.

If Rikkio goes 2-0 in Week 7 against Todai, then...

...if Keio wins Soukeisen, they win the league championship (they'll have 5 Series Points as they are the only team to beat Rikkio).

...if Keio goes 1-2 at Soukeisen, there'll be another League Playoff Game between the two of them, just like the one last fall. This is actually a very rare thing and to have it happen 2 semesters in a row would be crazy.

...if Keio goes 0-2 at Soukeisen, Rikkio wins the league.

I doubt Waseda has any shot at all of beating Keio, but who knows.

Also, Junpei Morimoto, the Chukyodai Chukyo pitcher I liked, made his freshman debut for Hosei at... second base? Kinda replacing Chukyodai alum and captain Masashi Nanba? And speaking of other Chukyo->Hosei kids, Kawai Kanji has 4 hits for the season. 4. But they're all extra-base hits -- 3 homers and a double. WTF?

BTW, I started a new job, and it's not only as a programmer/writer, but it's in San Francisco for the next 2 months, which means I'm commuting to the Bay Area from Seattle for now, so I'm probably too busy to write much here, despite that I am still following Japanese baseball as much as possible and going to a few MLB games here and there, though I'm still largely feeling bored when I do.

Tokyo Big 6: Halfway Through

2011-05-04T22:29:00.000-07:00

Well, first, Sanko won the Spring Tourney though it was much closer than anyone would have expected -- it went into extra innings and catcher Takahiro Suzuki ended up hitting a walkoff sayonara grand slam. I'm still trying to finish out my Sanko photopost series, if anyone cares.

But besides that, I ended up spending a bunch of time this weekend hooked on the text updates of the Rikkio-Waseda series, which, wonderfully, Rikkio won. I didn't write about opening weekend here (was too busy moving back to the US), but I stalked Rikkio players after one of the game and managed to catch Masato Komuro, who signed a photo for me and chatted a bit. He's really nice, and I told him I hoped he'd have a good year. Seems that I've cursed him like I did Kagami last spring -- now he has to pitch until his arm falls off because his team needs him. On the one hand, he's having an ace-like season, and got the 2 wins against Waseda, to now be 4-2, 1.63 for the season. On the other hand, he's been pitching like 17 innings per weekend on average.

It's not that I'm cheering for Rikkio in particular. I'm still kind of anti-Waseda out of habit, and besides that, last year everyone had been saying how Ohtake-kantoku was pretty much screwing over the team by only playing seniors, having The Big Three of Saitoh and Fukui and Ohishi pitch all the innings, and ignoring the underclassmen because Ohtake was quitting and didn't have to care about the next generation -- so seeing them lose now is sort of an "I told you so" feeling. And whoa boy are they losing -- if they hadn't beaten Todai (and they DID nearly lose a game to them!) they wouldn't have any Series Points this season.

I think if I was still at Jingu every weekend I'd be cheering largely Hosei-Meiji, but that's just because they've been often playing on the same side of the field, and I know the most players on their teams. I think Keio's going to win the league, though -- they're simply out-batting, out-pitching, and mostly out-fielding their opposition, for the most part.

I think the keys for Keio have been
1) captain Hayata "Clutchy McClutchitude" Itoh pretty much dominating the league with his bat moreso than he ever has before
2) Koji Fukutani being converted into a closer who rocks the 8th and 9th innings even harder than Tatsuya Ohishi did
3) Akihiro Hakumura and Kei Tamura stepping up to essentially be the #2 starter
4) the emergence of Masaki Miyamoto as another bat to be reckoned with

In other interesting things that are largely irrelevant to the standings, Todai's claim that they are going to suck less this season has actually happened, to an extent. Last fall, they had a legitimate former big-leaguer -- 16-year Chunichi Dragons veteran and Meikyukai member Kenichi Yazawa -- come in and act as a batting coach in the offseason for them. Something MUST have helped, because they already in 3 weeks have almost twice as many extra-base hits as they had all season last year, and almost as many hits period, as well as walks. Last season Todai scored 13 runs total; this season they've already scored 14. Small steps, you know?

What struck me most about this is -- well, opening weekend I thought Todai first baseman Yohei Tachi was batting pretty well and even told him so after one of the games. Since then he has continued on this tear of his and, bizarrely, is NUMBER FOUR IN THE LEAGUE IN OPS right now.

No, really:

                        AVG  OBP  SLG     OPS
Hayata Itoh (K)        .522/.613/1.130   1.743
Hiroaki Shimauchi (M)  .632/.682/.842    1.524
Kento Tatebe (H)       .412/.444/.941    1.386
Yohei Tachi (T)        .391/.500/.565    1.065
Naoki Harada (H)       .500/.500/.563    1.063
Yusuke Hasegawa (H)    .308/.500/.462    0.962
Yuji Naka (R)          .412/.432/.500    0.932
Masaki Miyamoto (K)    .304/.429/.478    0.907
Ren Yamasaki (K)       .310/.394/.483    0.877
Takashi Uemoto (M)     .278/.417/.444    0.861

Itoh's just a force to be reckoned with. 31 PA, 23 AB, 12 hits, 2 doubles and 4 homers, and 7 walks, 13 RBI. Nobody wants to pitch to this man.

Tachi, for a Todai guy, though... 28 PA, 23 AB, 9 hits, 4 doubles, and 5 walks. Believe it or not, Tachi is leading Big 6 batters in doubles right now.

Keio's Hayata Itoh, now sporting the captain's #10.

Meiji's Hiroaki Shimauchi during a preseason game.

Todai's Most Improved Bat, Yohei Tachi.

Pitching-wise, I don't have a lot to say so far. I will say that Komuro is clearly pitching more than ANYONE in the league this semester, at his 49.2 innings when the next-most is 27 innings. He also has 4 wins when nobody else has more than 2. This is because he is carrying Rikkio on his back.

What's kind of cool is how Koji Fukutani is doing as a closer. When Tatsuya Ohishi was doing that for Waseda, he posted some ridiculous numbers; always a WHIP below 1, ridiculous K/BF ratios around 30%, just these totally gaudy numbers. Well, I can delightfully report that after 3/5 of the matches this semester, Fukutani is managing to out-Ohishi those numbers.

These are a few stats for this semester so far. I sorted the pitchers with enough innings to count (varies by college, but there were 12 guys) by WHIP. The top 3 are the guys under 1.0. The bottom 2 are just for kicks:


                    IP     BF   H  BBH   K  ER   ERA  WHIP   K/9   BB/9  K/BF   BB/BF
1. Fukutani (K)     16     52   7   1   26   0  0.00  0.50  14.63  0.56  50.0%   1.9%
2. Hakumura (K)     15.1   55   7   4   13   1  0.59  0.72   7.63  2.35  23.6%   7.3%
3. Nomura  (M)      25     94  17   4   28   6  2.16  0.84  10.08  1.44  29.8%   4.3%

6. Komuro (R)       49.2  201  40  16   34   9  1.63  1.13   6.16  2.90  16.9%   7.9%
10. Takeuchi (K)    18     82  24   5   18   8  4.00  1.61   9.00  2.50  22.0%   6.1%

Daisuke got REALLY unlucky in opening weekend, I think -- LOTS of hits off him by the Rikkio batters. However, he didn't give up any home runs, and his strikeouts and walk rates are still fine. If the semesters were only longer here, I'm sure it'd all sort itself out eventually.

But oh MAN, look at Fukutani. He hasn't actually walked a batter yet this semester -- that "1" in the BBH column is from when he hit Hosei's Yusuke Hasegawa with a pitch. He's struck out half the batters he's faced. THAT is NUTS. To be fair, he was aided by an insane opening weekend the way Daisuke got unlucky, but still. Fukutani pitches basically 2 innings of every Keio game, which keeps him in the running to qualify for league titles. It'd be great if he could keep this up and get a bunch of awards and make the national team and so on :)

Akihiro Hakumura high-fiving Koji Fukutani.

Kokoyakyu: Welcome to Koshien, Meet Nichidai San (Part 2)

2011-04-29T23:54:00.000-07:00

Part 2 in a series. See Part 1.

Due to time constraints, I only managed to get through the first 4 batters in the lineup for today's photopost. Sorry.

I started to write an introduction to this post but then found that captain Sho Azegami had clearly written it for me already. This is from page 35 of the spring 2011 Kagayake Koshien no Hoshi magazine, the "Captain's Team Check":

戦力的には、去年のチームと比べ、長打力では少し劣ります。でも、去年になかったタイプの谷口が、足を絡めたプレーをしてくれたり、今年は9人全員で一点を取りにいく野球ができます。 1番の高山が出塁して、谷口が送って自分と横尾がかえす。
そのパターンが秋はうまく機能しての優勝でした。でも、もう少し走塁を絡められたら、ラクな展開で勝てました。冬は、走塁練習にも力を入れています。エースの吉永も成長し、自分が抑えるという気迫であふれています。昨年、なしえなかった優勝に向け、全員１つになって戦います！

(And my translation:)
"If I compare this year's batting to last year's, our power numbers may be a little smaller. But, last year's team also didn't have a speedster type guy like Taniguchi, who has caused our team to play more of a running game. This year our play style is more like, any guy of the 9 in our lineup can score a run at any time. Leadoff man Takayama gets on base, Taniguchi moves him up and then either I or Yokoo bring him in. That was the pattern we used to earn our championship in the fall. But, making our baserunning a bit better, that also helps us win in general. This winter, we put a lot of effort into baserunning practice. And our ace Yoshinaga has also gotten better, his mound presence is amazing. (lit: his self-control and determination is overflowing) So, coming back to the Senbatsu crown we couldn't quite win last spring, this year our team fights together as one to win it!"

He's not kidding about the "winning formula". The top of this lineup is certainly one of the best in Japanese high school baseball, currently.

Leadoff man Shun Takayama
(draftrepo HS meikan)

Takayama lists his favorite baseball player as being the Fighters' Atsunori Inaba, and it's not surprising -- Takayama himself is a very similar player, a guy who can hit for a combination of power and speed from the left side, and has a decent arm and glove in the outfield as well. He became the leadoff man and regular right fielder for Sanko as a sophomore, already standing almost 6 feet tall.

Takayama was my introduction to this Sanko team, as a matter of fact -- I showed up at the Jingu Taikai slightly late, the first time I was seeing them play in person. I found a seat as Takayama was coming to the plate for the second time of the day, and no sooner had I sat down than he was launching a 2-run homer into the right-field bleachers. At least it was an easy at-bat to write in my scorecard.

Koshien no Hoshi mentions that he's the #1 モテる man on the team, meaning popular/well-liked: "Takayama has a lot of fans -- he sure fills out a baseball uniform well!"

Number 2, Speedster Yuta Taniguchi
(mainichi)

Everyone agrees that Taniguchi is not only the fastest runner on the Sanko team, but he very well might be one of the fastest high school baserunners out there in the current field. He's not a particularly flashy player, and hasn't been written up in the draft notes like most of the other regulars on the team have (although check out this draft repo page -- look at stolen bases). But clearly he's been a contributor to the team both in his fielding and his hitting, and apparently he and captain Azegami have worked out together for their entire time at Sanko ("Azegami called out to me when we first joined the team as freshmen, 'Wanna practice together?' Now, two years later, we just always practice together. It's our habit. If team practice was cancelled, we'd probably still go out and run together or something.")

An interesting side story about Taniguchi is that he has one sister 4 years older than him, and she went to Koshien before him with her high school as a team scorekeeper/assistant).

The Heart of the Team: Captain Sho Azegami
(HS meikan draft repo)

I started talking about Azegami, a rare non-catcher captain, in my last post a little. Basically, when I was sitting behind Sanko's dugout at Koshien, from the minute he emerged from the dugout before the game, I immediately saw him and was like "Ah! That's Azegami, the captain." He somehow manages to carry this air of authority; a somewhat serious, almost professional attitude, but at the same time he's shouting at his teammates with a smile on his face like "Come on guys, it's time to PRACTICE! Up and at 'em! RUN RUN RUN! We can't win today if we don't get in a good pregame!" You could see the other guys kinda laugh like "Yessir!" and fall into line around him.

One scout's report calls him "自主練習の量も自他ともに認めるナンバーワン", or "the team's number one guy when it comes to personal training", basically. In other words, the dude works his butt off and inspires others to do the same. Which makes it no wonder he's in sync with Ogura-kantoku and the team slogan of "practice makes perfect".

Azegami tied a Senbatsu record with 6 hits in one game against Kakogawa Kita, and was overall 11-for-16 for a .688/.722/1.000 line for the tourney. So far in the Spring Tourney he's already 6-for-13 with 2 homeruns as well.

What else can I possibly say? He lists math as his weak subject. Guess that means he's not overly concerned with figuring out his exact batting average, though I'm guessing he can certainly count to 6.

The Okawari Wannabe: Cleanup Man Toshitake Yokoo
(HS meikan draft repo)

If you look up the word "akogare"　(憧れ） in a Japanese-English dictionary, the definition it'll probably give you is "yearning", which will sound a little bit weird. The word, when applied to a person, usually actually means "I want to be like them" or "I look up to them".

The first time I heard of Yokoo was from one of my JHS students, who basically used that exact phrase to describe him: 三高の4番横尾はすごい！憧れます！ Even after said JHS student enrolled at a rival baseball high school, when we chatted a bit about Senbatsu and Sanko, he was still like "You saw Sanko? Cool! Did you see Yokoo play? He's the man. I wanna be like him. I'm gonna be a cleanup batter and hit a bazillion homeruns someday just like Yokoo too."

A guy who inspires that in his peers is a little frightening.

Yokoo started playing baseball at a very young age; both his older brother and his father also played. Apparently even as an elementary school student, his father put a lot of pressure on him; supposedly they'd be riding back in the car from his little league practice and his dad would recap the day and berate him for mistakes he made in the game and then make the brothers do more baseball practice at home afterwards as well. Weekday evenings, when his father got home from work, they might also go to a batting cage and practice together as well.

As a result, when Sanko manager Ogura tagged Yokoo as a sophomore and basically said, "You're our cleanup batter. If you don't hit, we don't win. Got that?", Yokoo was already used to such pressure and responded in kind by hitting.

Yokoo's hero is apparently Takeya Nakamura of the Seibu Lions, otherwise known as "Okawari-kun", the man who eats way too much and hits way too many homeruns. As a result, I think Yokoo is already starting to get kinda big, and maybe he'd be better off not continuing that path. Though, in the games I saw him play, he moved just fine over at third base. I wouldn't say he's an astoundingly good fielder (and he got a lot of heat for making a big error at last year's Senbatsu that allowed Konan to win the game) but he's not terrible.

The only thing is, his hitting was kind of on the downturn at this year's Senbatsu. Last year he mashed for a .458/.480/.708 line, and this year was .200/.333/.200 instead. I think I saw 2 of the 3 hits he managed to get. He walked a few times too, but still, the real batter at Senbatsu was Azegami. I read that Yokoo got a slightly heavier bat over the winter to improve his power swing; maybe he's still adjusting to that. In the Tokyo spring tourney he's managed a 5-for-13 average with a homer, although that's against weaker pitching than he faced at Senbatsu.

Amusingly, as a 2nd-year Yokoo wrote his future dream as "major leaguer", but as a 3rd-year, he wrote just "pro ballplayer". Coming down to earth, maybe? He also lists English as his strong subject and math as his weak subject.

(This is proving more difficult to write than I thought it would be, because I keep getting sidetracked reading through Koshien magazines and websites. So, Part 3 will be coming in a day or two. Hopefully by then I can tell you all how Sanko won the Spring taikai...)

Kokoyakyu: Nichidai San (Part 1) - Practice Makes Perfect

2011-04-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

First part in a series, I hope. I've wanted to make a monster Nichidai San post since a month ago when I sat behind their dugout at Senbatsu (or since the Jingu Taikai last fall), but didn't really have time.

Your first question might be, "...what the heck is a Nichidai San? Why do you call it Sanko half the time?"

The full name of the school is 日本大学第三高等学校, or Nihon University Number Three High School, usually shortened to either 日大三 ("Nichidai San") or 三高 ("Sanko", and their school seal is a stylized version of that latter abbreviation, which is also what's on the baseball uniform). The 2-character abbreviation 日大 "Nichidai" is short for 日本大学 "Nihon Daigaku". Many universities in Japan have one or more affiliated high schools, which either end up numbered or named after the type of school or the location the campus is in. For example, "Nodai Niko" (numbered), "Waseda Jitsugyo" (type), "Tokaidai Sagami" (location).

Nihon University is the largest university in Japan (something like 70,000 undergraduates spread among all of their campuses), which kind of makes sense, given that it's kind of "the University of Japan". Though the university's baseball team has produced several solid pro players in recent years (Shuichi Murata, Shohei Tateyama, Mitsuru Manaka, Eiji Ochiai, Hirotoshi Kitagawa, Takumi Nasuno, Naoyuki Shimizu... and that idiot Hisayoshi Chono), in general they actually haven't been THAT great in about... 50 years. Heck, in my 4 years of watching college ball in Japan, Nichidai was only in the top division of the Tohto League for 2 semesters, and promptly fell back out of it.

But bizarrely, the Nichidai high schools are pretty much almost always in Koshien -- you'll rarely see a tournament that does not involve at least one high school with 日大 attached to it, kids wearing uniforms with "NIHON" across their chests. And I've been told that how closely attached they are to the university itself also depends on whether the Nichidai comes first or last in the school's name -- that is, the ones that are Nichidai 1, 2, 3 are the highest, then the ones like Nichidai Tsurugaoka, Nichidai Fujisawa, etc, and then after that, Ogaki Nichidai, Sano Nichidai, Nagasaki Nichidai, etc. What this really means is how much more of a chance a student has of getting into Nichidai itself based on attending a Nichidai high school, really. (Unlike how supposedly with Keio high school, if you manage to graduate, you'll just get into the university automatically.)

Sanko in particular has been a Tokyo high school baseball powerhouse in recent years -- they've consistently managed to end up Best 8 or higher in most regional tournaments for the last decade or so; if they're not representing West Tokyo at Koshien, they're making it awfully hard for someone else to get there. When they do go to Koshien, they're a force to be reckoned with. It was almost unfair in 2010 when the first two teams they faced were 21st Century teams -- schools invited for reasons other than stomping all of their opponents. "Welcome to Koshien. Meet Nichidai San. It won't hurt for more than 9 innings, we promise."

Since 1997, the Sanko team has been under the leadership of this man:

Masayoshi Ogura, born in 1957, went to Nichidai San HS, was an infielder in the baseball club but never made it as a regular. He continued on to Nihon University, but didn't even join the baseball club there, instead working towards becoming a teacher so he could coach high school baseball. After graduating, he became the manager for Kanto Daiichi HS, and took them to several Koshien and Senbatsu tournaments in the mid-80's. Eventually, in 1997, he became manager at Nichidai San, which was his life's goal, and he's been there since. In that time they've been to Koshien 10 times and compiled a 19-10 W/L record, winning it all in summer 2001 (behind Kazuki Kondoh, who now pitches for Orix).

One of Ogura's slogans as a baseball coach is 練習はうそをつかない, meaning loosely "Practice makes perfect". Other things he teaches as a coach and social studies teacher are for self-restraint and to have a caring heart; that is, to put others before yourself (you can go see his lectures on the subject if you want to, in mid-June). One of his comments about this 2011 team is that they were just an unusually solid unit as a team, working together very well, and not only that, they'd built a solid 1-9 lineup where all of the batters were strong, behind a real ace in Yoshinaga. Which is definitely what I saw last fall and what drew me to this team in particular. No weak links. A well-oiled machine. Welcome to Koshien, meet Nichidai San.

Every year in the Koshien magazines, they ask the players various questions, like their favorite food, favorite baseball player, future dream, etc. Most of the answers are predictable; a lot of "pro baseball player" for future dream, some AKB48 member as favorite celebrity, etc. But two of those categories are always also "person I most respect" and "favorite word or phrase". You can actually kind of guess how united a team is and how much they follow their manager by how they answer these questions. The 2010 Nichidai San team had 10 out of 18 players put Ogura as the person they most respected, and 4 put "練習はうそをつかない" as their "favorite phrase". With 2011's team, FIFTEEN of them have Ogura as their "person I most respect". And 10/18 have "練習はうそをつかない" as their favorite phrase.

In recent years, Sanko's team captains have mostly been catchers. In 2006 it was Shuhei Ikenaga (incidentally my favorite Meiji University player, a super-likeable bespectacled catcher), in 2007 it was catcher Yohei Kurosaki, now at Meisei University. In 2008 they took a break and had an outfielder, Kenta Nakashima (now at Nihon Taiiku University). That didn't work so well, so back to a catcher captain in 2009 with Yuta Yoshida (now at Rissho Univ). 2010's team had catcher Kazuki Ohtsuka as their captain (who just entered Nihon University).

Oddly, despite that catcher Takahiro Suzuki seems like total captain material, the captain is centerfielder Sho Azegami. Who is even MORE captain-like:

(Suzuki and Yokoo are the co-captains, actually. Suzuki describes Azegami as being "a natural leader type with a booming voice in the dugout that you can't help but follow." and Yokoo adds, "The three of us work together to make sure the team runs smoothly. So far we haven't had any disagreements.")

It doesn't hurt that Azegami is one hell of a hitter, in addition to being one hell of a leader. He hit well as a sophomore, continued it with a 5-for-11 run in the Jingu Taikai, tied a Senbatsu record when he went 6-for-6 in one of the games this spring, and has continued his assault in the Tokyo Spring Tournament now.

Speaking of which, the final game of the Tokyo Spring Tournament (tourney brackets) is on Sunday -- May 1st -- at Komazawa Stadium.

And said final game pits Nichidai San against Kosei Gakuen HS... whose campus is right by the Salvation Army headquarters out in Suginami. (I only know that because I was out there donating stuff from my house before I left Japan, bizarrely.)

However, as far as I can tell, Kosei hasn't won a game against Sanko for at least the last 4 years. I hope I'm not jinxing anything by pointing that out.

Hopefully I'll get the second half of this post up tomorrow as a Friday Foto, before the final game starts.

Tokyo Big 6 University League Spring 2011 Baseball Card Set

2011-04-26T00:33:00.001-07:00

I guess I'm kinda sniping NPB Card Guy here, but I got this set 2 weeks ago, right before Opening Day.

I have to admit that I'm overjoyed this set exists at all, as people were really iffy on whether Tokyo Big 6 merchandise would exist at all after Yuki Saitoh graduated, and several players even told me last winter that they were fairly sure there wouldn't be anything this year. Bizarrely, however, that is not the case at all, and you can get a whole variety of goods at Jingu and from Mizuno's shop. (It's even spaced out around Jingu almost like a treasure hunt -- one stall sells towels, another sells t-shirts, another sells cellphone straps... and there's no overlap, so you have to look around.) The only thing that seems to have actually been discontinued is Nikkan Sports's college version of the "ai" magazine series, College Base Heroes. Which is a SHAME, because it was AWESOME.

Anyway, this is the first Tokyo Big 6 set in three years to not have Yuki Saitoh in it at all. Hooray? (Thanks to my sniped card friend for the correction.)

What they seem to be making a big deal of in this set is "Get Nomura and Itoh's cards before they get drafted... and by the way we've put in insert cards of a whole bunch of NPB stars when they were in Tokyo Big 6!" Even BBM's official page only seems to show the alumni insert cards.

As before, I'd still be happier if they did 9 players per team instead of 5 per team and insert cards, but I guess that's what they think sells. (I kind of felt in the past that they did this because they don't want to waste 9 cards on Todai's team, though they could have easily added Katori, Utsumi, and maybe Hiraizumi and Yamakoshi to this set to make 9, and then other teams would get some more players that really deserve cards, like Hosei and Meiji's captains Nanba and Takeda, for a start, as well as guys like Meiji's Shimauchi and Uemoto, Rikkio's Naga and other Hayato Saitoh, and much as I hate to admit it, Waseda's Matsumoto.)

Card list (the number is the card number in the set, plus school year and position, and * denotes team captain)

Waseda:
1. Kensuke Ohno (4, P)
2. Daisuke Ichimaru (4, C)
3. Yuya Watanabe (4, IF)
4. Shota Sugiyama (3, IF)
5. *Shohei Habu (4, OF)
6. Waseda Team

Keio:
7. Daisuke Takeuchi (3, P)
8. Koji Fukutani (3, P)
9. *Hayata Itoh (4, OF)
10. Ren Yamasaki (3, IF)
11. Ryuta Iba (4, C)
12. Keio Team

Hosei:
13. Tomoya Mikami (4, P)
14. Kazuki Mishima (3, P)
15. Yusuke Hasegawa (4, IF)
16. Hiroshi Taki (3, IF)
17. Kanji Kawai (2, IF)
18. Hosei Team

Meiji:
19. Yusuke Nomura (4, P)
20. Kenji Kawabe (4, C)
21. Toshiki Abe (4, IF)
22. Yosuke Kobayashi (4, IF)
23. Masataka Nakamura (4, OF)
24. Meiji Team

Rikkio:
25. Hayato Saitoh (4, P)
26. Kenya Okabe (3, P)
27. Masato Komuro (3, P)
28. *Keisuke Okazaki (4, IF)
29. Koichiro Matsumoto (3, IF)
30. Rikkio Team

Tokyo:
31. Shota Suzuki (2, P)
32. Atsushi Tanaka (4, C)
33. *Shuhei Iwasaki (4, IF)
34. Yohei Tachi (3, IF)
35. Hisanari Takayama (4, OF)
36. Todai Team

Insert Cards:
(It seems that you get them paired by university. I got 2 Waseda cards. Dave got 2 Keio cards. Another friend of mine got the 2 Rikkio cards.)

"Heroes" (current student cards)
SP01: Shohei Habu (W)
SP02: Hayata Itoh (K)
SP03: Kazuki Mishima (H)
SP04: Yusuke Nomura (M)
SP05: Keisuke Okazaki (R)
SP06: Shuhei Iwasaki (T)

"Legends" (NPB alumni cards, so I'll list where they're from and where they are)
SP07: Tsuyoshi Wada (W) (Hawks)
SP08: Yoshinobu Takahashi (K) (Giants)
SP09: Atsunori Inaba (H) (Fighters)
SP10: Kenshin Kawakami (M) (MLB Braves AA)
SP11: Daisuke Hayakawa (R) (Baystars)
SP12: Takahiro Matsuka (T) (Fighters)

And here's a few photos of my set:

Front of the box. The pictures are a very weird combination of alumni and current players; 3 cards on the left are alumni but 3 on the right are current, and the 6 guys pictured are Wada, Yoshinobu, Inaba, Nomura, Okazaki, and Iwasaki.

Inside the box -- this is from the November 3rd playoff game, where Waseda and Keio were tied for the final record after Keio won Soukeisen and forced a playoff game for the first time in 50 years.

These are the insert cards in my box, the Waseda set of Wada and Habu.

I picked out my favorite card from each team: Rikkio's Saitoh, Keio's Fukutani, Waseda's Ichimaru, Hosei's Kawai, Meiji's Kawabe, and Todai's Iwasaki.

There are others I like -- actually I like all of the Keio cards and the Rikkio ones aren't bad either. They did a pretty good job with the photography in this set, IMO.

I hope it sells well enough that they still make an autumn set and continue to make these in general. It's funny, I stopped collecting NPB cards in general after the 2008 season except for an occasional box set here and there and of course the Fighters team sets, but I've always gotten the Big 6 cards because they're special to me, almost like having a beloved favorite set of minor-leaguer cards, really.

Two Weeks In

2011-04-24T13:37:00.000-07:00

Well, who on earth would have expected this kind of start...


Central League
                  GP   W   L   T   GB       HR
1     Yakult      11   6   3   2   -        10 
2     Hiroshima   12   6   4   2   .5        4
3     Yomiuri      8   4   3   1   .5        6
4     Hanshin     11   5   5   1   .5        4
5     Yokohama    11   4   6   1   1        15
6     Chunichi     9   2   6   1   1         5

Pacific League
                  GP   W   L   T   GB       HR
1     Softbank    11   7   3   1   -         9
2     Nippon Ham  11   7   4   0   .5       11
3     Rakuten     12   6   6   0   1.5       7
4     Lotte       11   5   6   0   .5        6
5     Seibu       11   4   7   0   1        11
6     Orix        12   4   7   1   0         6

Crazier still: the top batter in the CL right now is Yakult's elder statesman Shinya Miyamoto with a .436 average, and the PL's top batter is Seibu rookie (he played a few games at ichi-gun last year but) Hideto Asamura with a .450. WTF? Asamura was a year behind Sho Nakata at Osaka Toin; maybe he can get in some good trash-talking.

The home run numbers are a little easier to figure out: Sledge had that 3-HR game and has 6 total on the season now, and Brett Harper has 3, so that's where most of Yokohama's gaudy total comes from. Hatakeyama (5) and Balentien (3) make up most of Yakult's. Similarly over in Pacific-Land, Okawari-kun is leading the HR total with 6, accounting for half of Seibu's, and the Fighters have gotten 4, 3, and 2 out of Hoffpauir, Itoi, and Koyano respectively.

I'm guessing that Yakult's doing well because I moved away! I guess we'll see how things continue. I've watched a few of their games over the internet because they're at a decent time for here in Seattle (day games in Japan start at 9pm for me here) and there's a guy on justin.tv who's a big Swallows fan and broadcasts them all. So I saw Shohei Tateyama pitch a gem against the Dragons the other day, and then last night saw Tatsuyoshi Masubuchi face off against the Carp and Yuya Fukui. (Fukui, now that he's no longer at Waseda, is someone I'd like to see succeed, especially since he turned down the Giants in the draft back in 2005 and then got his first pro victory against them last week.) So Fukui came out of the game with the Carp down 0-2 to Yakult, and then Masubuchi ran into a roadblock and suddenly loaded the bases and then BAM, next thing you knew Tracy and Kurihara had hit the Carp up to 3-2, and Fukui would get the win if they won, except then Yakult's Hatakeyama decided to hit a 2-run homer and make it 4-3, with the Swallows eventually winning 8-3.

I've joked for ages that Hatakeyama sucks whenever I'm at the stadium watching him and is awesome otherwise, so he'll probably have a monster year, it seems. On the other hand, Yasushi Iihara got taken off the active roster a few days ago and is now playing in ni-gun alongside Miyade, making me really wish it was still just a bike ride away to their minor-league facilities.

As an aside, the guy who pinch-hit for Fukui was none other than my former favorite Baystar Takuro Ishii, who apparently played a full game the night before and went 3-for-3 with a walk and a sac bunt. He walked in this game too and is thus still 1.000 for the season with an OBP of 1.000 as well. Takuro turns 41 this summer and it's nice to see him still have some success down there in Hiroshima.

I couldn't sleep the other night and caught a Fighters game against the Eagles at the Stadium Formerly Known As Skymark. Though even from the start of the game I was like "Yagi doesn't look so good out there", and he even gave up an oshidashi run by hitting Toshiya Nakashima with a pitch. Leave it to former golden rookie Sho Nakata to tie the game up, though, before they eventually lost on a sayonara home run by Randy Ruiz.

Just as I feared, Yuki Saitoh won his first two starts for the Fighters, so his "Golden Rookie" status is only escalating more and more by the day. Would you believe that when I went looking for baseball cards before I left Tokyo, they were already selling his Rookie Edition card for 1000 yen? This is the first time in years that I didn't buy the Fighters RE set.

I suspect it'll take a few years and hopefully some hype dying down before I can accept him. (I made the mistake of re-watching the Waseda Jitsugyo vs. Nichidai San high school West Tokyo finals from 2006 the other night, a nailbiter that Saitoh won in 11 innings; I wonder how different things might be had Sanko won that game and gone to Koshien instead?)

On another note, I am happy that Ryota Imanari is sticking with the top team -- I was hoping that the team would get to a point where him and Shota Ohno were the team's regular catchers, but so far Ohno's doing the majority of the work behind the plate. We'll see, I guess. Tsuruoka's going to be out for a while, so the other two really have a shot to prove themselves.

I've been following Tokyo Big 6 but haven't gotten a chance to actually watch the back games yet, so haven't written much. The most interesting thing so far, IMO, is Keio's decision to convert Koji Fukutani into a closer role, sort of along the lines of what Waseda did with Tatsuya Ohishi. I think it's a great idea since Fukutani is actually a very Ohishi-like player, and this way he can get even more gaudy strikeout ratios and still wow people with his ability to hit 96 mph on the radar gun. Hopefully both him and Daisuke will make it to the Japan-USA college tourney this summer!

(Well, also interesting was the Battle of the Koryo Aces yesterday, as Koryo 2007, Meiji's Yusuke Nomura, took the mound and won against Koryo 2010, Waseda's Kohei Arihara. I suppose you could say that the Keio-Hosei game was between two former Chukyodai Chukyo teammates who are both captains of their respective college teams now, Keio's Hayata Itoh and Hosei's Masashi Nanba. Nanba was team captain when they were both in high school, but Itoh has unquestionably had the much more successful college career...)

A Photopost About An MLB Game For a Change -- Mariners vs. Tigers, Matinee Madness

2011-04-20T23:10:00.000-07:00

In a measure of solidarity to my friends in Tokyo who can only go to afternoon games, I also went to an afternoon game today at Safeco Field.

(Just kidding. Actually, I went to it because it happened to be convenient. But, for the record, as I write this post, I'm watching the Swallows-Dragons game over the internet, which is happening in the afternoon in Tokyo, and a bunch of my friends are there, and I can't tell you how wholly homesick I am for Jingu.)

Anyway, I got there about an hour and a half early, which gave me a lot of time to just look around. I'm amazed by "The Pen", the new bullpen area, mostly in that they have such wacky food now (a creperie? REALLY?) and they've taken down the screen between players and fans at the bullpen itself, so you're just that much closer to the guys warming up or hanging out in there. I was surprised that despite the "no autographs" sign, several fans got autographs from Aardsma and Pineda out there, and probably others. I do have to wonder whether anyone considers it dangerous not to have a barrier between fans and players -- I suppose they're operating on the Reasonable Person Principle, and if anyone DOES try to throw something at an opposing pitcher or something, there'll be a huge smackdown? Who knows.

I'm also amazed by how they've still managed to raise the prices of food even more around Safeco. It's like... $15 as a "combo" for a hotdog, popcorn, and soda? Really? I think that'd still only run you like $8 in Japan without a "discount".

So in the pre-game time, I watched the Tigers take BP, I watched Pineda throw in the bullpen, I got my ticket signed by Phil Coke and Brandon Inge (he's so delightfully dorky!), and then I watched Rick Porcello and Erik Bedard do their pre-game bullpens as well.

One surprising thing that happened was another fan stopped me in the bullpen like "Hey, were you allowed to bring in your dSLR? I was under the impression we can't anymore -- they say any camera with switchable lenses..." and I'm like "I have no clue. I haven't really been around here much in the last few years; the policy used to just be 'don't piss off the fans around you with your big clicky camera, or stick your big lens in their faces'..." So we talked for a bit and it sounds like basically, it's possible I wasn't supposed to have it, but since I didn't piss anyone off and this was a low-attendance afternoon game (there were apparently 13,339 people there), I guess I got away with it. I didn't really take many photos during the game, anyway, just beforehand, for the most part. Though the idea of not being able to bring my big camera makes me pretty sad.

Also, this entire bullpen thing makes me wonder: does anyone know where Brandon Buckley is now? The old A's bullpen catcher from a few years ago? He was a riot.

We got to see Carlos Peguero's first MLB at-bat in this game. Unfortunately, as I realized later, the reason why is because he was called up to replace Justin Smoak, who is on bereavement leave since his father just died of lung cancer yesterday. There was a moment of silence before the game today for him. I know from personal experience that having your dad die of lung cancer really truly sucks, and so my heart goes out to Justin and his family. It's not an easy thing to deal with by any means, even when you're prepared for it.

This game was pretty boring overall, to be honest, though. I think that part of it is just that I don't know what to do during MLB games anymore, since there's no organized cheering, so I just keep score and watch. Erik Bedard started for the Mariners and kind of sucked (LOTS of walks, plus giving up a homerun in the 2nd AB of the game). Rick Porcello started for Detroit and did not suck. I was already intrigued by Porcello as being a young up-and-coming star type of player (the Tigers seem to always have a few of those around), and so he didn't disappoint, at least.

Ryan Raburn hit a homer off Bedard as mentioned, to make it 1-0, and in the 3rd inning Austin Jackson walked and was batted in by Miguel Cabrera to make it 2-0. The Mariners halved that lead in the bottom of the 3rd when Jack Wilson singled and moved up on a groundout, and then Ichiro singled to right to bring Wilson in (and made it to 3rd base himself on a throwing error from right field), 2-1. Raburn walked in the 5th and came in on a Brennan Boesch single, 3-1.

Actually, the odd thing about the 5th inning was that it was the Chone Figgins Blooper Reel. I'm still not sure how he didn't get charged with any errors given that he did things like drop grounders, not throw the ball, etc. As if the shoddy fielding wasn't enough, the booing around me definitely hammered in that I wasn't in Japan anymore.

David Pauley pitched a fine final 4 innings after Bedard, though, aside from a few wild pitches.

Jose Valverde came in to close out the game in the bottom of the 9th and the most improbable thing ever happened: Adam Kennedy (!) hit a home run off of him, a neat little 354-foot shot into right field. 3-2. But that's pretty much all the Mariners got -- well, Michael Saunders hit a double, but everyone else that faced Valverde, including a pinch-hitting Milton Bradley (!?) struck out.

I still don't quite get how people think this is more exciting than Japanese baseball, but that's neither here nor there. You know what else was ridiculous? I saw a little boy get a baseball from a ball girl, which he came back up and showed off to his family like he was the hottest thing on earth for getting it. And then the ball girls changed in the 5th inning, and would you believe it, that same little boy went up there and got a SECOND ball from the other ball girl, edging out a bunch of other little kids who wanted them. How selfish is that? I realize that all's fair in love and ballhawking, but seriously, WTF? Half of me wonders if the kid decided to do it or if his parents told him to.

I stopped in at the team store after the game and bought an Ichiro birthday card that I'm going to send to my Hosei birthday doppleganger Kazuki Mishima, and tell him he better come play at the Japan-USA collegiate tourney this summer because I miss him and everyone else so much.

Anyway, photos...

Michael Pineda

David Aardsma, who I thought was supposed to be in Tacoma. Apparently not...

Erik Bedard

Rick Porcello

Thanks to commenters for pointing out that this is Tom Wilhelmsen. I'd actually read about him a little but just didn't know the face yet... I don't know the Mariners bullpen very well anymore now that they don't have cool former Fighters players.

More bullpen guys.

Brandon Inge signing for people.

My ticket. Whee.

Seriously, these prices! I was amazed when I asked a vendor walking by how much it was for a soft pretzel and he told me $4.75. Really? Shishkaberries are apparently up to $7 or $8 now, too? I'd give anything for a 1000-yen bento at this point.

Raburn's Tale of the Tape.

Peguero's "First MLB at-bat!"

Kennedy's Tale of the Tape.

Ichiro at 3rd base.

Jose Valverde.

Final score.

Well, the Swallows beat the Dragons 2-0 as Shohei Tateyama pitched a complete-game win because HE IS THE MAN! Apparently the Tsubamegun guys were up at the top of section D, but I didn't see them on TV. It's nice that I can watch some NPB games during the evening here, since they're going on during the daytime there. I'm annoyed, however, that the Pacific League TV thingy still won't let me pay them money so that I can watch games over their service.

I've also been following my normal college ball and high school ball circuits and keep meaning to write some posts about those; maybe I'll get to those soon. I had a whopping Nichidai San post in the works and the Spring Taikai finals are this coming weekend too.

Signing off from Japan

2011-04-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

Hopefully I'll be back in the US without any problems, in about 17 hours, but I have to admit to being kind of nervous about this trip due to the recent earthquakes and all.

EDIT> Made it here okay. Heading to Pittsburgh on Thursday. Good times. Anyone got any good software-related job leads for me in Seattle? I'm a rusty programmer and decent tech writer. :)

Friday Foto: Takahiro Fujioka

2011-04-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

I'm the happiest girl in the world. I've now managed to get photos with 3 out of the 5 college seniors on the front cover of this semester's Shube college baseball magazine. (The other two being Sugano and Itoh. I doubt I'll ever meet Nakaushiro, and Nomura hates me.)

No, seriously, so Takahiro Fujioka is a tall lefty senior at Toyo University this year. And I've been a pretty big fan of his for a few years. I still remember the first time I saw him pitch, he was a sophomore, I was hoping to see junior lefty Masahiro Inui, I got Fujioka instead, and was like "...this guy is ninety times BETTER than Inui..." He pitched Toyo to the All-Japan victory last summer, too.

And well, I went to Hosei's field again on Thursday for their preseason game against Toyo. I hoped Fujioka would start, and I was delighted when he did, though I felt slightly guilty since I was ostensibly rooting for Hosei, yet taking a bazillion pictures of the opponents' lefty starter yet again (like I did for Shimabukuro when Chuo was there).

Toyo beat Hosei 4-2. Hosei starter Kazuki Mishima, who I also like a lot, had a pretty rough start, though I'm not really sure what exactly was wrong; he didn't look that different than I remember him. There were a whole bunch of scouts there watching Fujioka though, so maybe Mishima was also nervous, who knows.

So, some photos:

Fujioka in action.

Hosei starter Kazuki Mishima.

Ryoto Yoshikoshi finished out the game for Hosei.

Takuya Uchiyama (4th year, Urawa Gakuin, #18)

Junki Fujita (3rd year, Hamada, #15)

Kosuke Suzuki (4th year, Toyodai Ushiku, #16)

Shinko Gakuen's Ryosuke Itoh.

Here's Itoh sliding into third base after walloping a ball into the left-field wall. I thought it was a home run but apparently not.

Hideharu Satoh. The last time I saw him, he was wearing #9 for Teikyo HS and was their team captain at Koshien in 2009.

Yusuke Hasegawa getting tagged out at the plate.

This is probably the best photo I got of Daichi Suzuki, the Toyo captain, the shortstop on the left.

Catcher Shotaro Oka. Formerly from Nichidai San!

Hosei captain Masashi Nanba.

Crowd of people with radar guns and whatnot.

Final score.

Final bow between both teams.

And a bonus thing that I thought was cool:

This is that nice scoreboard, from the back. Can you see a little gold plaque on it? Let me zoom in for a second...

Yes -- the money for that scoreboard was donated to the club from Kazuhito Futagami and Hisashi Takeuchi. How cool is that?

I really enjoyed my day out at the Hosei ground this time! And after the game I hung out with a friend outside the Toyo side bullpen until Fujioka came out; in the meantime we ended up chatting with a bunch of Hosei players and a few of the Toyo players as well. Good times!

Charity Games, April 2-3, Swallows vs. Carp

2011-04-07T20:05:00.000-07:00

Epic weekend at Jingu, but I haven't had any time to write about it. So here are some photos with a little bit of text context.

Saturday

I showed up at 11, and made the mistake of going into the stadium first rather than meeting Kozo outside. So he stayed in section D while I went to do the donation line thing by myself. He'd said there was a huge line at 11am, but by the time I got there, there was pretty much no line, and just some players standing at tables. They had it set up such that a few of the Swallows cheer girls were holding out the donation boxes, and after that were some players, so you put money in the box and then shook hands with some players.

Yasushi Iihara wasn't out there when I went, so I basically saw Oshimoto and picked his line. It was him, Hashimoto, and Carp player rep Ishihara. So I shook their hands and said "Ganbatte kudasai!" to all three of them. Oshi and Hashi are former Fighters so it was kind of funny to me.

(Shortly afterwards they condensed down to 2 lines with more players. Ishikawa and Kyuko moved from the other table to the one I'd been at. Doh! And on my way out, I saw the coaches all showing up -- a few people were like "Hey that's Shiroishi! I want to go shake hands with him!")

There are a bunch of new cheers this year, so the ouendan spent some time before the game teaching them. Iihara, Hamanaka, Kawabata, Hatakeyama, they have new ones, and of course there's one for new guy Balentien. There's also one for manager Ogawa (apparently similar to the one he had in his playing days).

(Teaching Hamanaka's cheer.)

Also, the ouendan held up these signs several times during the game. It says "Our hearts are one, good luck Tohoku, Japan", basically (I guess it's part of the "Ganbare Nihon" slogan stuff).

There were no trumpets or drums, but there was still plenty of singing. And of course it wouldn't be Jingu without the umbrella dancing. Here we are in the middle of the 7th inning, singing Tokyo Ondo, without any trumpets or loudspeaker music or dancing girls on the field.

The Swallows won the game 3-0 on the Kawabata sac fly, Hamanaka solo homer, and an error throwing to 3rd in the 8th inning that allowed Miwa to score. Tateyama pitched well.

Final score.

Our group at the top of section D.

After the game, rather than the "we won" cheering, there was a yell exchange between both sides, although we hadn't really been warned about it in advance. It mostly degenerated into the entire outfield yelling "NIPPON!" like the soccer cheer.

Kozo and Ben and Mac and I walked to Yoyogi Park to just see what the hanami (cherry-blossom viewing parties, basically people drinking under sakura trees) scene was like, and to get a nice walk. As you can see from this picture, there are plenty of cherry blossoms in bloom, and also plenty of people hanging out under them. Though it's true that maybe there aren't as many people as in past years -- usually you can't move at all during this season, but not this time, we were able to walk through the park just fine.

BTW, if you want a cool hat like mine, go talk to Christopher Pellegrini. :)

Actually, a (Japanese) guy heard us talking in English outside Jingu and was like "do you guys do the Tsubamegun blog? I want one of those caps." He spoke surprisingly good English, I'm used to people staring at our group of English-speakers in a combination of awe/disgust, but he just wanted to say hi.

We also got stopped by several random people in the park like "YEAH! GO SWALLOWS!" or whatnot. One girl even high-fived us all in the subway station afterwards.

Sunday

Sunday, I met up with Kozo by the train station and we walked to Jingu together. We went to do the earthquake relief donation thing first -- there was a huge line since it was just starting at 11am! But I saw that Yasushi Iihara was out there, and I was wearing my Iihara jersey, so I wanted to be in his line. We waited... we walked... we waited... we walked... and just as we were getting towards the donation area, we see these two white guys with cameras and they yell out to me "Hey, we're from NBC. Can we talk to you a bit?" and I'm like "Sure, can you catch me AFTER the donation line?"

We go through the line. I steer us towards the table that turns out to just be Yasushi and the mascot Tsubakuro. Fortunately it turns out Kozo really wanted to shake hands with Tsubakuro and I really wanted to shake hands with Yasushi so we both got what we wanted. :) I said "Ganbatte kudasai!" and smiled. We didn't plan well so I don't have a photo of me shaking hands with Yasushi, but I do have Kozo with Tsubakuro...

And THEN the NBC guys caught us. They mostly wanted to talk to me until I'm like "You really ought to talk to Kozo too, he also speaks English."

Mostly they asked things like, "Why are you here today? What do you think of all of the donation stuff? What do you think of the earthquake and the way things are now?" Me being me I just babbled all this stuff about how much I love Japanese baseball and go to a whole ton of games and how I think that the donation thing is EXACTLY what they should be doing -- bringing people together, lifting up spirits, collecting money to help the earthquake victims, etc. I babble a lot and sound like an idiot when I'm under pressure like that. Kozo, on the other hand, with his years of debate and speech practice, sounded really good and eloquent. (Take that, foreign press -- the gaijin is a moron but her Japanese friend that you never would have noticed is the well-spoken one!) He pointed out that I probably gave the reporters a lot of good information, even if I sounded like a big big dork.

Me being interviewed.

Kozo being interviewed.

We have no clue if either of us were actually on the news, though. The guy who interviewed us was Lee Cowan, and he said he was with NBC Nightly News. He also said that he'd been in Japan for 3 weeks covering the earthquake stuff and that I was the happiest person he'd talked to -- mostly because they'd been up north, I guess. I told him I was just happy to be back at a game, to see my friends again and to watch baseball and to help the earthquake and all. It turned out their crew had never actually been to a Japanese baseball game, so we were like "We'll be at the top of section D in the outfield with some other English-speaking friends if you want to come chat with us later!" But they were kinda iffy because it was unclear they'd be able to actually bring their equipment into the park.

And for the record, they must have raised a fortune this weekend -- it was PACKED! I think the whole "get to shake hands with baseball players" thing really motivates people to go give money, certainly.

See how packed it was?

These are two boards that were signed by all the Swallows players, that will be sent up to Tohoku as a "we are supporting you" gesture, I believe.

Then we went into the park, sat down, hung out for a while, because most of the people we know weren't there yet. I went to get lunch and ended up finding the new Pizza-La, but since I hate Pizza-La got some butadon from the place next to it, which was really good.

The new Pizza-La. I suppose this means Pellegrini no longer has to list his home address with them as "Jingu Stadium, Gate 19".

Oh yeah, and I bought an Aoki cellphone strap and shitajiki. I figure that well, he's likely to jump to the MLB next year so it was my last chance, even though I'm not paticularly a fan of his or anything.

After a while, we got a decent group of friends there. This time I actually went down to practice with the ouendan for the new songs but still couldn't get the hang of all of them.

Also I saw this while people were singing:

I guess this is the virtual trumpet in lieu of the real ones...

Yuya Fukui started for the Carp, which was exciting since I saw him play so much with Waseda. Kyohei Muranaka started for the Swallows. The game was kinda just average until basically the 4th inning when the Swallows blew it wide open with Wladimir Balentien hitting a 3-run homer. He also hit another homer later on. So, the Swallows won 6-1 eventually.

It was mostly just fun to be there with friends and cheering and watching baseball!

Umbrellas!

Final score.

And here's a bonus video...

This is on Sunday -- the cheer exchange between the Swallows and Carp fans, rather than our usual postgame "we won" kinds of cheering and singing. On Saturday we didn't know it was happening but on Sunday the ouendan leaders explained it to everyone, so I filmed it instead of participating because I'm a dork like that.

First we'd yell "GANBARE GANBARE TOHOKU!" and then the Carp side would yell Ganbare Nippon, then both sides would yell a Nippon cheer together, and then we'd yell Ganbare Carp and they'd yell Ganbare Swallows. It worked out pretty well -- a nice show of solidarity how even though we're two separate baseball cheering groups we're still united in a love for baseball and a desire to help the folks in the north.

It was quite a weekend. It's been quite a trip, really :)

Jingu Picnic Boxes!

2011-04-05T17:51:00.000-07:00

I went to Jingu today for the Tohto League games -- saw Yosuke Shimabukuro's college debut. It was a lot like Yuki Saitoh's, though with several thousand less people. But a TON of people flocked to the bullpen to see him warm up:

But anyway -- I took a ton of photos today, I do want to put them up, but I'm going to dinner shortly, so instead I'm just going to put these up of the new Jingu picnic boxes, which I was able to walk around and look at during the first game (wasn't allowed to go in them though, there was a big "DO NOT ENTER" type of chain across each one):

(These are intended for 5 people, it seems)

(This is what they mean by 2-person and 3-person picnic boxes)

Not a bad view, really.

And the fronts are so cute!

Random "Quick" Notes

2011-04-03T19:27:00.000-07:00

Tokaidai Sagami won Senbatsu. I'm pretty sad about that. I really thought Sanko would go all the way... and when Kyukoku beat them yesterday, I decided to put my faith in Kyukoku to win, since I liked their team (read: I liked their pitcher Miyoshi and catcher/captain Takajo) second-best overall. Oh well.

I went to the Carp-Swallows charity games at Jingu on Saturday and Sunday. The Swallows won both games. Shohei Tateyama got the win on Saturday and Kyohei Muranaka on Sunday. Wladimir Balentien hit two homeruns on Sunday. Yuya Fukui took the loss for Hiroshima. Before both games I donated 1000 yen; on Saturday I shook hands with Oshimoto, Hashimoto, and the Carp's Ishihara, and on Sunday with Yasushi Iihara (!!) and with Tsubakuro.

Also, Kozo and I were interviewed by NBC after said donation line. Kozo is a much more eloquent speaker than I am, and my guess is if either of us make it onto TV it'll be him. The guy who interviewed us was Lee Cowan, and he said that I was "the happiest person we've talked to in 3 weeks in Japan". I gushed about how much I love Japanese baseball and how I thought that these charity games were EXACTLY what the NPB should do -- lift people's spirits and bring baseball friends together as well as raise money to help the earthquake victims. I also invited him and his crew to come visit us during the game, but they apparently weren't likely to be allowed to film it anyway. Kozo spoke after me and since he's a debate and public speaking expert, he sounded really, really good. So everyone lucks out in that NBC picked me out because I'm a white girl, but then they managed to get Kozo to speak, which they never would have if he hadn't been with me. Look for us on TV!

BTW, since I haven't had time to write about all of the games I've been going to here -- quite frankly, I'm only in Japan until April 12 and want to spend as much time as possible LIVING life here instead of WRITING about it -- here's my game tally so far:

March 20: Baystars vs. Lions ni-gun, Yokosuka Stadium
March 24: Odate Houmei vs. Tenri, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 24: Yokohama vs. Hasami, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 24: Kanazawa vs. Kakogawa Kita, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 25: Nichidai San vs. Meitoku Gijuku, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 25: Tigers vs. Buffaloes ni-gun, Naruohama Stadium
March 26: Chiben Wakayama vs. Sado, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 26: Sogo Gijutsu vs. Riseisha, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 26: Kokugakuin Kugayama vs. Kyushu Gakuin, Koshien Stadium, Senbatsu
March 29: Fighters vs. Marines ni-gun, Lotte Urawa Stadium
March 30: Hosei University vs. Chuo University, Hosei Stadium
March 31: Swallows vs. Lions ni-gun, Yakult Toda Stadium
April 1: Meiji University vs. Tokai University, Shimaoka-Utsumi Ballpark
April 2: Swallows vs. Carp, Jingu, charity game
April 3: Swallows vs. Carp, Jingu, charity game

Pretty much since the first few days that were spent on my JHS's graduation, the rest of my trip has pretty much been spent on baseball, karaoke, walking, and eating. I also visited the Yakyu Inari shrine on the 19th, and Nagoya Kyujo (not the Dome) on the 27th.

I'll be hitting a few more games this week, of the ni-gun and college variety. Yay?

Speaking of the college variety, it seems that Shimabukuro is going to start on the 5th for Chuo, the first freshmen they've had as an opening day pitcher in 48 years, supposedly.

For the record, too, I've donated a whole ton of money to earthquake relief at these games -- basically my pledge has been that any game I go to where they have a donation box, I will put in 1,000 yen. The fun part has been when it also involved like, shaking hands with Swallows players, or being like "Hattori! I choose you!" at the Marines game, and so on.

In general, I've been ridiculously happy to be in Japan this trip, and it's making me wonder if my decision to move back to the US is the right one or not. I still think I need some perspective on all this, though.

Friday Foto: Tomoyuki Sugano

2011-04-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

This guy is going to get drafted this fall. There's just no way he won't. He's not only amazingly good, and can hit 97mph, but he's also Tatsunori Hara's nephew.

I went to the Meiji University baseball grounds today for a preseason game between Meiji and Tokai, and Sugano pitched the last 2 innings and retired every batter he faced, with 2 strikeouts. Unlike the Hosei-Chuo game the other day where I didn't get to meet Shimabukuro, this time I pretty much went down to the Tokai dugout and with another lady we beckoned Sugano to pretty-please come sign stuff for us, and he was gracious and polite, if a little bit like "...I've got to go really soon, sorry". But I was able to get a photo with him, so I was really happy about that!

Yusuke Nomura ignored me yet again, I think he just hates me. But I got to chat with a bunch of my other favorite Meiji boys, so that was good. Got signatures from Uemoto, Morita, Kumabe, and Ueda, and gave a bag of easter candy to captain Takeda. I told them that I was only going to be in Japan until the 12th, so I won't be able to see any of their league games. But they told me that there's a chance that the Big 6 League is going to try to hold 3 games per day on opening weekend -- so the games would start at like 8:30am, and it'd be Waseda-Todai, Keio-Rikkio, and Meiji-Hosei. That way, they can cancel a weekend later on and let the Yakult Swallows use Jingu for day games.

(Supposedly, if this happens, it'll be decided on April 4th. Which is why Meiji and Hosei are kind of trying to prepare to be ready to play on the 9th even though they're currently not scheduled for it yet.)

So, maybe I will get to see them play for real. Who knows.

And in super-pre-gossip, Kumabe told me that he's going to "work" at Honda Kumamoto next year! Lucky him for getting his job search out of the way early on, and for being level-headed enough to realize he's not going pro any time soon.

Also, for the record, Tokai won today's game 6-4. Meiji's Toshiki Abe hit two triples, though, which was exciting, and Tokai's Torai Fushimi, the cleanup batter and clearly the post-Koike starting catcher for Team Japan, hit two doubles, including a ground-rule one that bounced out of the field and that nobody could find. Fushimi is really good, and it was really a treat to see Tokai's team play.

Photopost: Hosei-Chuo Preaseason Game, or OMG YOSUKE SHIMABUKURO!

2011-03-30T18:28:00.000-07:00

It's Senbatsu time, so what did I end up doing today? I ended up going to a college preseason game and seeing a fantastic former high school pitcher. :)

It was actually entirely by accident -- I knew Hosei was playing Chuo today, I'd called to confirm the game was on, and then I got really lost trying to get to the Hosei baseball field because both the train line I wanted to take wasn't running due to blackouts, and then once I did get there, I couldn't figure out how the hell to actually get into the ground itself. (Beyond baseball, I also saw the football and soccer and some other teams practicing as well, from walking around the entire sports ground.)

Showed up in the 3rd inning, ran into both my scorekeeping buddy Suda and my retired-actress buddy Hanako Tokachi... so I ended up sitting in the front row with Suda for the entire game and we kept score together and he told me about the other preseason games. Of course, umm... we were in front of the entire Hosei baseball club that were in the stands (the rest were on the field or in the dugout). I heard one of the guys talking about me from a few rows back like "Oh, she comes to a lot of our games at Jingu, she writes Japanese really well and always keeps score and takes photos... but I thought she was a Kagami fan..."

And Kazuki Mishima (3rd-year pitcher) was sitting in the row right behind me, so when I came in I said "Long time no see!" and he was like "Whoa! Hi!"

Anyway, the really really really big deal about the game was the starting pitcher for Chuo University...

...YOSUKE FREAKING SHIMABUKURO!!! The boy who won Spring AND Summer Koshien last year!

He's only a freshman -- he hasn't even started college classes yet! But he's already practicing with the team and I guess they figured since Hosei's theoretically one of the stronger teams they're playing in the preseason, might as well have him pitch against them. He's SO GOOD! He still has that ridiculous tornado motion that makes him look like a lefty Nomo. Here he was facing college juniors and seniors and just mowed through them.

He pitched 7 innings, allowed exactly 4 runners (3 hits and one error), and struck out 6, including striking out the entire side at one point. It was really neat seeing him!

Hosei's pitcher were Ryoto "Yoshiko" Yoshikoshi for 6 innings and Kazuki Funamoto for the last 3. Funamoto is also a tall righty from Toin Gakuen who wears #19 now, but I don't think he's going to be the next Kagami for me or anything. And it's not like Yoshiko and Funamoto were bad or anything -- Chuo infact only won the game 2-0. Personally, besides Shimabukuro, the Chuo player I was most impressed with was a sophomore named Junji Kageyama, batting 9th and playing right field. He has LEGS. In his 4 plate appearances, I saw him hit a triple, then get a bunt single up the left line, then get on base on a fielder's choice and a single and steal second both times. Super runner, super bat. He's also from Toin Gakuen, for the record.

Oh, and the Chuo player I was most amused by was the boy wearing uniform number 28. He's a kid from Iwakuni named Takahiro Tsuchiya. Which doesn't seem special at all unless I tell you that the kanji for his name is 二十八貴大. Yes, his last name is the number 28, and he wears #28. Cool, huh?

Anyway, some photos. Mostly of Shimabukuro but not all. :)

And for a few that aren't of Shimabukuro....

Ryoto Yoshikoshi, starter for Hosei. I'm guessing he'll get a decent amount of time in league games this year...

Kazuki Funamoto, the new wearer of Hosei #19. But can he possibly wear it as majestically as Kagami did?

Ryosuke Itoh, freshman from Shinko Gakuen HS. (I saw him play at Senbatsu last year.) I am mostly including this photo because it amused me how you could see his name written on his belt strap.

Seiya Inoue being a big stout 3rd baseman.

Yohei Watanabe, the guy who finished the last 2 innings for Chuo.

Masashi Nanba, the Hosei captain.

Kageyama. This dude can run. I was quite impressed with him.

A dive back to the bag at first base.

Teams line up to bow to each other afterwards.

Hosei field... I tried to get the big "HOSEI" into the shot but it was impossible.

The scoreboard. Sadly I didn't get the final score! Whoops!

Me, because this represents yet another new stadium in Japan that I saw a game at!

After the game I hung out a bit; the Chuo players all did come out past the stands but Shimabukuro had already hit the figurative showers apparently since he only pitched 7 innings, maybe they didn't want him to be mobbed (a la Yuki Saitoh in the past). So I didn't get to meet him, unfortunately.

Instead I waited for the Hosei players' meeting to be over, and when it was, the players filtered out; some that recognized me nodded hello, and then Eiji Egashira came up to me with a big smile like "Hey! You're here! Remember me?" and I'm like "Dude! I went to Saga Kita this winter!!" and we got into a conversation about that for a while. He told me there was also some other stuff from the 2007 Koshien team that I didn't get to see because it was all either in the school or on the field ("I was in Saga when you were there... next time tell me and I'll show you around!") He's a very nice boy, I enjoyed talking to him for a few minutes. I had some photos to give Mishima and Yoshikoshi among others, so when Mishima came out I handed him the photos and apologized that I never got around to making him a photo book ("It's ok. These are really good. You're like a pro photographer or something!") And I gave a box of Seattle chocolates to him and Egashira (I think they're roomates now though I might be wrong) and told them to share with their teammates.

Unfortunately I kinda wanted to get Masashi Nanba's autograph, since I never did and he's the new captain. But he was still in meetings and stuff, and everyone was putting things away, like the batting nets and so on. Kota Imamura, one of the co-captains, also saw me and had a huge smile like "Hey, long time! Thanks for coming to our game!" and I told him "I hope you kick ass this season but I won't be here for it!"

So I dunno, I left and went home after that. It was nice though, a year or two ago I felt like the players only talked to me because I was with my Hosei alum friends, but today I was there by myself and they still took a second to chat, so that was neat! Maybe they were all surprised that I showed up despite Kagami having graduated :)

I Met Shuhei Fujiya! And Other Stories -- Fighters vs. Marines @ Lotte Urawa

2011-03-30T01:19:00.000-07:00

So, today was meeting up with the Shinozawas for a Fighters vs. Marines minor-league game up at Lotte Urawa. I used to go to Lotte Urawa a ton in 2008 when I lived in Saitama because it was an easy bike ride from my place, and went a few times in 2009, and after I thought that I picked up all those damn ticks or whatever in the middle of that summer, never went back. Working a normal 9-5 job kind of meant no free weekday afternoons, and Urawa gets stupid crowded on weekends because it's free admission and there are only 3 benches per side for seating.

Either way, it was long time no see for the stadium and for the Fighters and Marines and for my friends as well. Tomoko actually showed up early to save seats for everyone; I got there at 11:30 and she'd fortunately already put out stuff for 5-6 people in the front row. (Kon-chan was also supposed to be coming.) I basically just sat there for an hour and a half waiting for the game to begin, for the most part; didn't really have anything else to do, and was watching the practices anyway, trying to spot new players' faces. Took photos, etc.

The Shinozawas were actually both late so I felt kinda bad that we'd taken up so much space, but they did show up. I gave everyone Easter bunnies as omiyage and they were like "This is too cute to eat!"

The Fighters won the game 4-1; the only Marines run came in on a solo homer by Kei Hosoya. Fighters starter Keisaku Itokazu was kinda shaky and the win ended up actually going to Yodai Enoshita, who came in to pitch the 6th inning and struck out the side, and then the Fighters went up while he was still the pitcher of record. Enoshita's one of my favorites of the new draft class, so that's fine with me.

Aaaaaaanyway, after the game, I had two goals basically:

1) stalk Shuhei Fujiya
2) stalk Shota Koike

and vaguely 3) stalk Masaru Saitoh

And I was successful on all three!!

What happened is, the majority of Marines players lined up with donation boxes for earthquake relief -- this is a normal thing now for games. But as I was standing outside with my friends trying to figure out who was in there, I realized that the tall Marines pitcher walking out was Shuhei Fujiya! Fujiya actually lived in California for most of his life and the Marines drafted him out of USC (the Padres actually drafted him too last year but he didn't sign with them) so I approached him and said, "Fujiya-senshu, sign kudasai? Can I have your autograph please?" and he did a double-take, looked at me, and replied in English, "Sure, no problem," and I got out a shikishi and a marker and he signed it. I was like "I've read about you for months but this is my first time to see you, thank you so much". He ended up signing for a few other people too... so I asked after that, "Can I get a photo with you?" and he said sure, and so Shinozawa K took this:

He's so tall!

I asked, "How do you like it here so far, anyway?" and he said with a half-laugh, "It's pretty... DIFFERENT here." I asked if he liked chocolate and he said yeah, so I gave him the remaining two easter bunnies I had :) I should have probably introduced myself and explained who I was, but I wasn't really thinking straight, I guess.

But still! It was cool that I actually spotted him and got to talk to him a little since I'd been so intrigued by him these last few months! No idea if I'll get to stalk him again or not this trip, we'll see.

After that, my friends and I lined up to give money to the earthquake victims. Shinozawa J and Tomoko both had lots of 100-yen coins so they basically just were putting coins in various players' boxes and stuff, but I had no coins so I was like "Okay, I'm gonna put 1000 yen in someone's box. Whose box?" I looked at the players and was like "Dare... saa, Hattori-kun!" and put my 1000-yen note in Yasutaka Hattori's box, because I was (am?) a fan of his. He laughed and said thanks, as did the other players standing next to him. Maybe I'm a little weird, but I claim gaijin rights on weirdness!

And I also am making a point of putting 1000 yen in a donation box at every baseball game I go to, as I said I would. (It's the best way I can think of to donate to earthquake relief -- I want to encourage them to continue doing this stuff, to have charity games and so on.)

So after a few minutes of the donation-box parade, Shingo Ono made a speech thanking everyone, and then all the players went back into the clubhouse.

Bizarrely, the Marines mascots were actually out to help with the donation stuff too (it makes sense, they're not doing anything with the top-league team so they might as well come to the minor-league game and entertain people and help for the collection cause). So... I got my photo with Rine-chan. She patted the Fighters bear mascot keychain on my bag and I'm like "Gomen!!" But we took a cute picture anyway:

Marines players started filtering out of the stadium then. Almost every player did get stopped by some kids or some people for autographs and whatnot. I saw Shota Koike try to escape and so I pretty much bolted after him and caught up with him out on the street, where some cute girls had cornered him for a photo together. Ha. Anyway, I had a photo of him that I'd taken when he was still at Aoyama Gakuin University and so I asked him politely to sign it and also to sign a shikishi, and I told him that I was a big fan of his when he was in college and I hoped he'd do really well, and he looked me straight in the eye and smiled and said thanks. I wish I coulda gotten a photo with him too, but all my friends were elsewhere.

Various other players came out. Fighters players too... a lot of the guys were actually in street clothes and were just going to drive home themselves rather than taking the team bus. It was funny because I still recognize a lot of them so, if you didn't know better, you'd wonder why I was saying "otsukaresama" to these various good-looking guys walking by! A few of them got a few people asking for autographs, though most of them didn't stop. Takahiro Imanami was surprisingly gracious and signed for a huge group of people though, I even saw him smiling, I guess he's changed a little over the last few years. Enoshita signed for a few people, but I was too far down to get to him. The younger boys, Nishikawa and Taniguchi, pretty much darted out, sadly.

BUT! I got a photo with Masaru Saitoh!

He was the 6th-round draft pick by the Fighters this fall, a lefty from the Sega Sammy corporate team, but he went to Shutoku HS, where one of my JHS kids is going next year, so I've been cheering for them. So I got a photo with him and then a few minutes later got him to sign a shikishi and I told him how I cheer for Shutoku's team and their alumni and he looked kinda surprised but laughed and thanked me. He seems like a really nice guy, I saw him give a baseball to some kids before the game, and players totally aren't supposed to do that.

I really wanted to meet him, so I'm happy I could. He was Shutoku's ace when they were at Senbatsu in 2005. And he was one year ahead of my friend Ogura's son, apparently, so they were in the Shutoku baseball club together. (I think he was also one year ahead of Naoki Satoh, one of the Hosei ballclub manager boys who graduated this past year...)

I probably could have tried for some more autographs, but I didn't want to push my already-fantastic luck.

Oh, so the amusing thing was, Tomoko wanted to wait for the umpires to come out. She and Shinozawa J spent the entire game talking about how hot the 2nd-base umpire was. No joke. Both the 1st- and 2nd- base umpires were really really young guys, like 24-25 years old. I thought the 1st-base umpire was pretty cute, couldn't really see the 2nd-base one. But... we waited a while, and all the players were gone, even Shinya Tsuruoka (who left by taxi), and Takumi Kohbe, who pretty much ran by like "no not signing today sorry everyone" though one little boy bolted after him anyway. And so the umpires didn't seem to be coming out, so we left.

(This post somehow never got posted back in March when I wrote it, so if you're wondering why it's showing up in your RSS feed now, that's why.)

Photopost: Senbatsu, Day 2!

2011-03-24T23:51:00.000-07:00

Got to Koshien a little too late -- 8:30am. Ended up in the 2nd row instead of the first row, behind the 1st base dugout. Doh. But I have a new lens that I bought last night (still the same cheap 70-300 zoom, but at least it doesn't have chips and scratches and dirt like my old one did).

They've really sped up the pacing, so you barely have time to do anything between games anymore. I did manage to buy souvenirs and donate money to earthquake relief before the first game, but between games, all I had time to do was go to the bathroom, pretty much. It's like, they sing the winner's school song, then it's OFF the field for you, ON for the next two teams, very short pre-game warmup, and next game!

First game was Tenri, a Nara powerhouse, vs. Odate Homei, an Akita newcomer. Homei, as a matter of fact, were pictured with their baseball team posing in a huge snowfall, in the Senbatsu magazine. So, it was an expectation that Tenri would win. And they did. The funny thing in that game was that Tenri's #11 pitcher, the lefty Nakatani, was pretty good, while their #1 "ace" righty Nishiguchi was terrible (he threw the last 2 innings when it pretty much didn't matter).

The second game was Yokohama vs. Hasami. Tatsuya Yamauchi started for Yokohama. He's a lefty freshman-upcoming-sophomore (this time of year is so annoying to refer to years by). I saw him pitch last summer, and was psyched to see him again since it sounded like he'd just gotten better in the fall and spring. Except, apparently, not so much... he gave up 2 runs in the first inning, both oshidashi runs where he walked in or hit by pitch in the run. And Yokohama never really recovered from that. Hasami's starter was a tall sturdy boy named Ryoma Matsuda who also batted cleanup (this is usually a BAD sign), and he basically pitched a whole game and somehow Yokohama's batters just never managed to capitalize on the chances they had. (I think Matsuda's strategy was to walk captain/cleanup batter Kensuke Kondoh, that worked out well for him.) So, if you consider that Tenri never wins when I see them the first upset of the day, then Yokohama losing to Hasami was certainly the second.

What was crazy about Game 2 for me was that I inadvertantly ended up sitting with Yokohama right-fielder Tomo Otosaka's family. If you don't know who Otosaka is, this is him...

Yeah, a half-Japanese kid -- father's American. I actually am not sure what his English name romanizes as (乙坂・ルーセロ・智・ニコラス - "Nicholas Lucero"?). They've been calling him "Yokohama's Ichiro" because he steals ninety bazillion bases. (It's true. He stole two in today's game even.) I'd seen him in Kagayake Koshien no Hoshi magazine, and from afar at last summer's Kanagawa taikai, but that was it.

Anyway, his entire (Japanese) family had come down from Fukui Prefecture, so his grandma was next to me, a high-school-aged cousin was next to her, and an aunt was next to her, and various other family members were in other nearby rows. They were all at Koshien for the first time ever, but BOY were they psyched. I think the cousin girl didn't even really understand the game very well, but she kept yelling "TOMO-CHAN! GANBATTE!!!" at the top of her lungs.

I kinda regret not asking more questions about him while they were there, but I'm never quite sure how much is or isn't rude to ask. Cousin said something like "Tomo's dad is from Kansas. I heard he might be here today but we don't really know." And Grandma showed me a family photo from a while back, and also pointed out where some other family members were sitting ("there's my son over there, he's a high school teacher...") and so on. She told me how Tomo's older brother is studying abroad in England right now and wants to be an interpreter. And I guess she felt bad that I wasn't eating anything, because she even gave me an onigiri (rice ball with nori) when the rest of them were eating lunch!

And despite Yokohama losing the game, Otosaka's family was remarkably chipper. I think they were mostly just very psyched to be at Koshien and to have a relative of theirs on the field. They were like "oh well, that's too bad that first pitcher gave up so many walks and runs. Everyone tried their best, it's too bad they lost. We're gonna go try to catch up with Tomo-chan." I joked, "See you at summer Koshien!" and they laughed.

Game 3 was Kanazawa vs. Kakogawa. Kanazawa had a boy I'd heard of quite a bit already named Yoshinao Kamata, who could supposedly hit 150km/h on the radar gun. Well... he CAN infact do that! His pitching speed was basically pro speed, like in the mid-140's on just about every pitch. He struck out a bazillion guys over the first few innings. And then... well... Kakogawa's pitcher Inoue, while not as fast and not as much flair, managed to outpitch him, because, quite frankly, I don't think Kanazawa's team can actually hit or field. So once Kakogawa had a few points on them, it just kinda fell apart from there. I think Kanazawa was the favored team in this match because of the flashier, more famous pitcher, but well, this is a team sport, see, and one guy can't do it all. Still, I was totally in love with Kamata for the first few innings, and I expect to see great things out of him in the future, assuming he can get onto a good college/shakaijin team. Kanazawa always has these awesome pitchers and this crappy team behind them for some reason.

Anyway, if you want full logs/commentary for these games, you should look at Edwin's Koshien blog, because he wrote them all up (I even had to look at his writeups a few times to figure out things like WTF WAS WITH THE KAKOGAWA BASERUNNING IN THE 7TH AND 8TH INNINGS). Me, I was sitting behind the dugout with a camera, so clearly what I've got to offer you all is photos.

I didn't have time to really tailor this set; I took over 1000 photos today so I just kinda picked out ones I like. They're Game-2-heavy because Yokohama is Yokohama. They've been churning out pro players left and right since the Matsuzaka heyday, after all.

Game 1

Tenri's Nakatani, the lefty pitcher. He was pretty good.

Komei's starter Saitoh, a little lefty kid.

I just like this photo of Tatsuki Kameda jumping.

Tenri's "ace" Nishiguchi. I am not sure why he is wearing #1 when he doesn't seem like that great a pitcher, although he LOOKS like he should be.

Game 2

Naoki Date

Hasami captain Yudai Yamaguchi

Hasami pitcher Ryoma Matsuda batting

...and Matsuda pitching

Yokohama lefty Tatsuya Yamauchi, who had a rough first inning

Yokohama captain and cleanup and catcher Kensuke Kondoh, who was pretty solid (here he is tagging out yet another runner at the plate)

Yokohama's righty pitcher Yuya Yanagi

View of the final score from behind the Yokohama dugout.

Game 3

Kanazawa's fireballer Yoshinao Kamata

I didn't catch him getting 150 km/h, but here's a 149

Kakogawa's starter Maito Inoue, who had a much more solid team behind him

"Guys, uh, look, you know that, uh, baseball thing? You're supposed to hit it with a bat when you're at the plate. And get it with your glove and throw it to the proper place when you're in the field. Uhh... guys?"

Photopost: Seibu vs. Baystars 1.5-gun

2011-03-23T23:23:00.000-07:00

So, last Sunday, March 20, I decided I was going to go to a ni-gun game of some sort. The easy option would have been the Marines-Swallows at Lotte Urawa, which is an hour from me by bicycle, or 25 minutes from me by train and walking. The "hard" option would be Yokosuka Stadium for the Baystars-Lions, which is more like 1.5-2 hours from me by train and walking. However, I'd heard that the Baystars were getting practice time for their ichi-gun players in the ni-gun games, so I could see Hichori! Plus I'd never seen a game at Yokosuka before, plus I was kinda hoping to meet Takayuki Makka and Taketora Anzai again and give them some Seattle omiyage because of how nice they were to me back in January. (Unfortunately, I didn't, so it's unlikely I will at all, but it's the thought that counts, maybe?)

Anyway, there's really kind of 2 parts to this photopost. The first is more of interest to people who are all about the earthquake and the charity things people are doing to help, so I'll cover that.

Before the game, there was a table set up outside the stadium. The Searex mascot Reck, who has apparently kept his job despite the Searex ceasing to exist as a moniker, was out at the table, along with a few staff who had the donation boxes. I bought my ticket to the game for 1000 yen and then went up and put 1000 yen into their donation box. I received a Reck postcard that was basically a cute "Come cheer for the ni-gun team in 2011!" as well as a "Play for Nippon" business card which may or may not be a typo. But the back of the card says "This is a receipt that you donated money to help the Tohoku earthquake victims," and also says "Bring this card to Yokohama Stadium and get a 300 yen discount off your game ticket."

The Yokohama Baystars are clearly DOING IT RIGHT.

Here's the donation table out front.

Me with Reck!

A whiteboard with the starting lineups, as well as information about which ni-gun games are being moved from night games to day games to conserve power. (They didn't actually have the lineups on the scoreboard, maybe also to conserve power?)

So that was before the game.

During the game, I'm not making this up, one of the women I was sitting with tagged another one of her friends who's a huge Takayuki Makka fan (even moreso than I am now), and was like "I just read Daisuke Miura's blog and he is going to be at the Sotetsu Yokohama Station from 2:30pm collecting donations along with a bunch of other players and look there's Makka and Ejiri and...!!!!!" So two of the other women looked up the train info and said "We can get there in about 29 minutes! Let's run!"

It was basically a bunch of guys who weren't going to be playing in the ni-gun game, and since there's no ichi-gun games or anything yet, they basically worked out in the morning and then went to collect donations in the afternoon.

(I think every day since then Miura's posted a "Here's where I'll be today collecting donations and here's the other Baystars players I've managed to drag with me. Come say hi and give money to charity!")

After the game, the ENTIRE BAYSTARS TEAM came out with donation boxes and were swarmed by the 1500 or so fans who were there! The players also had those "Play for Japan" business cards so the more popular players got TOTALLY swamped by people wanting to throw money into their box in order to get a card from that particular player, not that there is anything different about any of the cards. Players weren't signing things or taking photos or anything, just basically saying "Please help out with a donation," or saying thank you and whatnot to people who did put in donations; I saw some people shake hands, but that was about it.

Hichori was clearly not only the most popular but he was also the most engaging with people; I think the two biggest swarms of people basically were going for Hichori and for Shuichi Murata, who yes, had played in the game that afternoon. Some of the lesser-known players looked kinda sad that nobody was coming up to them. Keijiro Matsumoto looked distinctly almost like "WTF am I doing here," although Takeshi Hosoyamada was standing next to him with his usual easygoing smile like "Thank you for your help!" to everyone. (I later commented on this to a Waseda friend of mine, who said "Keijiro can be shy. I don't think he realizes that he comes off as so standoffish. I'll go complain to his brother.")

And Hichori even made a speech to address the crowd and thank everyone, reiterating how important it is for everyone to band together in a tough time and help each other out.

Team members being swamped by fans.

Shuichi Murata in the middle (I believe the other two are Shinji Niinuma and Yoshiyuki Kuwahara)

Hichori!

Hichori makes a speech to the crowd and the press.

As for the game itself... well... these were the starting lineups:


Seibu                 Yokohama
-----                 --------
Asamura, 1B           Watanabe Naoto, 2B
Kumashiro, CF         Ishikawa, SS
Akiyama, RF           Kinjoh, LF
Gotoh, DH             Murata, 3B
Abe, 3B               Yoshimura, LF
Kurose, 2B            Ikki, DH
Sakata, LF            Hichori, CF
Takeno, C             Tsutsugoh, 1B
Hayashizaki, SS       Takeyama, C
                
Nakazaki, P           Ohka, P

Notice that the Baystars lineup is pretty much completely ichi-gun players, but the Seibu one is clearly ni-gun? Heck, 3 of those Lions players (Akiyama, Hayashizaki, Kumashiro) were just drafted last fall.

To be fair, by the 5th inning the Baystars team out there was mostly ni-gun, but still.

The amusing thing, really, is that the Baystars still lost.

The first batter of the game, Hideto Asamura, singled off of Tomokazu Ohka, was bunted up, advanced on a groundout, and then scored on a double by Taketoshi Gotoh, to make it 1-0. Then in the 5th inning Tatsuya Takeno led off with a double, was bunted up by Ryo Hayashizaki, and scored on a single by Asamura, to make it 2-0. (Though Asamura was subsequently and amusingly picked off first.)

Lefty Yuta Nakazaki started for the Lions and pitched 5 decent innings, and then Ryohei Fujiwara and Tomoki Hoshino and Yosuke Okamoto held the Baystars scoreless for the next 3 innings, so it was still 2-0 going into the bottom of the 9th. Tetsuya Iwasaki took the mound for Seibu. He has a BIZARRE motion, I'm not sure I ever remember seeing him pitch in person before. But basically he has a hitch in his motion where he kinda crouches and kicks out backwards before stretching forwards. Kinda like this:

Anyway, so Yuta Naitoh grounded out, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh struck out. People packed up their stuff to go home, but Shingo Takeyama singled to right. Kazuya Fujita then grounded to first... except... the ball went right through Asamura into right field for an error! Takeyama made it to third and Fujita ended up on 2nd. And then Junya Ohhara, who the people around me were cheering "J! J! J!" for -- there were two Ohhara's drafted this fall, the other being pitcher Shinji, so they've apparently been nicknamed "S" and "J" -- anyway, "J" hit a clean double to left, scoring Takeyama and Fujita to make it 2-2. Iwasaki intentionally walked Keijiro Matsumoto after that, and struck out Shotaro Ide to end the inning.

We thought there'd be no extra innings thanks to the recent rulings, but it seems that they went ahead with it anyway (after all, Yokosuka stadium uses like ZERO power). So, there was extra innings. Yataro Sakamoto took the mound for the Lions. Shoma Satoh took the mound for the Baystars. (After 7 innings of Ohka, Takehiro Fukuda and Shun Yamaguchi each threw an inning.) And the 10th inning was scoreless.

Suguru Matsuyama, another former Fighter, and alum of Yokohama Shokodai HS, and a pretty nice kid as well, took the mound for the top of the 11th, and immediately gave up 4 hits in a row to Akiyama, Gotoh, Takuya Hara, and Kurose, and that was the game pretty much and the Lions won the game 4-2.

Here's some photos. They kinda suck, probably because I was way in the back and because my lens has a lot of crap in it. I ended up replacing it tonight with another cheap zoom lens. Who knows if it'll help.

Yuki Yoshimura

Tatsuya Takeno

Lions starter Yuta Nakazaki

Hichori!

Baystars starter Tomokazu Ohka

Shogo Akiyama, from Hachinohe University

Masahiro Abe can hit

Shuichi Murata can hit

Ryo Hayashizaki can bunt

Keijiro Matsumoto can pout

Tomoki Hoshino can be left-handed

Shingo Takeyama can accidentally foul a ball into his own head

"J" Ohhara can throw a bat

Takehiro Fukuda can throw a ball

Shun Yamaguchi

Shoma Satoh

Yataro Sakamoto

Final score.

Also...

Yokosuka Stadium

My "tourist shot" so I can collect this stadium too

This one is kinda hard to explain but basically, whenever pitching coach Takeo Kawamura came out to the mound, this one dude a few rows ahead of us would yell "KAWAMURA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" really loud. Kawamura is a former Baystars player and was pretty popular. And so these two guys were waving these huge fans out in the stands and yelling "KAWAMURA!!!!!!!! NICE COACHING!!!!!" every time there was a pitching change. It was amusing, I guess. The guy also started yelling a lot of the players' names too. "TAKEYAMA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Anyway.

This game was crazy for me because I showed up by myself, the stadium was pretty full, so I ended up taking a seat on the Seibu side. But due to the way the stadium is with the fences, I kept climbing to the back of the stands to go take photos of stuff going on on the field. After an inning or so I walked over to the Baystars side anyway, so I could take photos of right-handed batters (and Nakazaki the lefty pitcher) from the proper side.

I was hanging out in back on the Baystars side when a lady comes up to me like "Hey! Do you remember me?" I didn't. But I'm figuring... well... she had to be someone from that infamous day at Baystars Kyujo, so despite that no, I did not recognize her face, I said "Yeah! I met you at Baystars Kyujo in January?" and she said "Yeah! The day that we all met Kagami! You were so happy!"

So she invited me to come sit with her. Her group was in a FANTASTIC set of seats with a great view of the field for taking photos. Plus they kept calling out to random friends of theirs who walked by like "This is that girl we told you about, the big Kagami fan! She came BACK to Japan! Isn't that amazing?"

I guess sometimes the stupid things I do end up having some positive repercussions after all.

Yes, I'm in Japan

2011-03-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

Sorry for lack of posts here. I've been doing stuff but didn't know if I should just write stuff here even if it's not coherent. Let me at least start by saying that yes, the bigger earthquakes are kind of scary when they happen although it's rather infrequent, and people are concerned about radiation although I don't think it's really THAT bad, and the power problem has been a little weird although I myself have not experienced any blackouts. But overall I have been enjoying my trip to Japan quite a lot. Getting to see my JHS kids graduate was worth the entire trouble of coming here; everything else is just gravy. I'm currently planning to try to stay until April 11 or 12.

Baseball in general here has been kind of annoying in that a lot of games have been cancelled, so my usual way of doing things has been changed quite a bit. I was most devastated when the Big 6 league cancelled their industrial league 3-day tourney. As of right now, opening day for the Central League should be Mar 29, Pacific League on April 12, and minor-league games are already going on, probably because they don't use a lot of power. I still believe that the NPB should be doing their best to hold games and collect donations for the earthquake. One of the worst things about this time is that a lot of businesses are closed and/or cutting down due to power, which means a LOT of people are out of work. I know a lot of people depend on baseball games for their part-time jobs, so I worry that the lack of games is yet another economic hit here.

Anyway, I went to the Yakyu Inari shrine on Saturday and to a Seibu-Baystars ni-gun game on Sunday. I'm heading to Osaka today for Days 2-4 of Senbatsu. If you read this blog and live in Osaka drop me a line :) I'll also be coming back to Tokyo through Nagoya.

Maybe I'll try to put up some photos tonight if I have time while hanging out in Osaka.

Again, I apologize. You know, I'm coming up on 6 years of this blog, and it's clear I've gotten kind of burned out on it.

Baseball after the Quake

2011-03-14T13:01:00.001-07:00

My opinion, in a word: Yes.

Teams have cancelled most of, if not all, of their preseason games, although teams are still playing practice games to stay in shape for opening day. (I guess the idea is that if there are no fans there, it conserves power and reduces the risk of danger to fans in earthquake-shaken stands.)

And some players (Darvish being one that gets quoted a lot) say things like, "How can we even think about playing baseball at a time like this?"

But here's the thing. If you're not going to play baseball, what are you going to do? How exactly are you justifying not playing? Baseball brings distraction and entertainment to millions of people. It brings groups of people together in a way that a lot of other things do not. Not starting the season on time is going to disrupt social ties in some pretty big ways -- and this at a time where people need to get together with friends and family and just be glad to be alive and to be together, right?

And moreso, if you're not going to play baseball, then you should be spending your time trying to help the quake victims, right? But how exactly are you going to do that? Going to the worst of the ravaged areas is NOT the right thing for tons of people to do -- reading Daisuke Wakabayashi's twitter convinced me of that much. (Forwarded from Simon, who also works at the WSJ.) There are organizations and trained rescue workers and such who'll be doing that, and what we've been hearing all along is, "If you want to help... donate."

So. NPB, that's exactly what you need to do here.

Donate.

The Giants and Tigers played a preseason game at Gifu Nagarakawa Stadium yesterday and put out donation boxes and supposedly collected over a million yen for earthquake relief! From only 14,000 fans or so! The flags were at half-mast, and there was a 30-second moment of silence for the lives lost in the quake. But clearly, people want to see baseball and to be together and help others at a time like this.

Seriously. Donate a portion of the proceeds from each game to the earthquake. Or have donation boxes at the gates. Get efforts together to have places to donate clothes, food, etc at each game. Offer a 100 yen ticket discount for people who bring a can of food to donate to the earthquake. Have the JRC set up blood donation booths outside the stadium, or even inside the stadium.

What to do about Rakuten's team and the stadium, I'm not entirely sure. Opening Weekend was supposed to be up there between the Marines and Eagles, so maybe those would have to be moved elsewhere. But other than that, I think that really, the best way for players to help the earthquake victims is to play ball and raise money for them.

(BTW... I'm supposed to fly to Japan tomorrow. I'm still kind of planning to, though I know it might be kind of crazy.)

Earthquake off the coast of Miyagi

2011-03-11T00:16:00.000-08:00

Being reported anywhere from 7.9 to 8.8 magnitude.

I've been watching the Japanese TV feed over justin.tv, thanks to Ken for the link. It's pretty crazy. I'm really glad I'm not there... and really worried for my friends.

(Well, though, I'm GOING back to Japan in 5 days... and staying at my old house... hopefully it hasn't collapsed... I've been in Seattle for 2 months, I'm in the process of moving back to the US.)

I was going to make a post about the Kamagaya Festival that's going to take place on March 12 -- which is tomorrow in Japan -- but since Chiba prefecture got hit pretty hard by the earthquake (an oil refinery exploded, some power plans are down, and most of the coastline is flooded) I have no idea whether they're still planning to hold it.
EDIT> Kamagaya cancelled everything for the weekend -- the festival is completely cancelled as are the games on Saturday and Sunday.

Either way, if you read my blog and you are in Japan, please let me know that you are okay and if there's anything I can do to help.

EDIT> Jason Coskrey was at Yokohama when the earthquake hit.

All open-sen games are cancelled on Saturday.

I've managed to get in touch with most of my friends in Japan; most are shaken but not hurt (literally).

Still not sure if I'll be able to actually LAND THERE on Wednesday though...

Takeuchi Times Two

2011-03-05T00:04:00.000-08:00

I was reading the winter Kagayake Koshien no Hoshi magazine while on a recent trip, and while going through the Chukyodai Chukyo page, trying to memorize Junpei Morimoto's face so I can stalk him in the Hosei preseason, noticed that a 3rd-year pitcher/1B named Hirotaka Takeuchi (竹内啓貴) was going to be entering Keio this year. And in his comments, he said how "I learned so much from my older brother, I owe my baseball success to him."

Wait... a Chukyodai kid, going to Keio, named Takeuchi, talking about his older brother... my first thought was, is he Daisuke's brother? (Upcoming 3rd year Keio pitcher Daisuke Takeuchi also is from Chukyodai Chukyo HS, graduated the year before they won Koshien, sadly). From the photo in the Koshien magazine, I thought he bore a vague resemblance to my current favorite Keio lefty.

But, no. Hirotaka's older brother is actually ANOTHER Chukyodai Chukyo baseball club alum named Hiroaki　(啓明), who was on the Chukyodai team that made it all the way to the Best 8 in the 2004 summer Koshien tournament. Hirotaka was in 6th grade at the time and watched his brother on TV and decided he wanted to someday play at Koshien too. So Hiroaki, who is now in grad school studying sports medicine at Tsukuba University in Ibaraki and coaching Mito Daiichi's baseball team, came down to Koshien to watch his little brother play in Senbatsu 2010. It's a nice story, really, the Japanese press loves stuff like this.

Also, someone else has scanned a bunch of the stuff from that Koshien no Hoshi, the Chukyo Story is the 2nd picture there. And the next entry mentions how Hirotaka got into Keio, too.

The notes on Hirotaka that I've seen mostly read as follows:
中京大中京背番号10竹内啓貴、AOで環境情報学部に合格。
野球部入部志望のAO入試は11人受験して4人合格とのこと。（中日スポーツ）

竹内は去年の夏も優勝メンバーとしてベンチ入りしていた。
今年春選抜も野手としてレギュラーだったが夏は控え投手。
堂上弟や慶大4年山口尚記と同じ名古屋北シニア出身。

Basically, he passed the entrance exam for Keio, and apparently of the 11 who applied early as hopefuls for the baseball team, only 4 managed to actually pass the exam. (Keio doesn't have a "sports recommendation" entrance exam, but I think there are various reasons they'll let people apply early decision, and sports is one of them.) They mention he was on the roster for the team that won Koshien, played as a regular this past year, and his little league team was Nagoya Kita Senior, the same team that both Donoue brothers (Naomichi and Takehiro, both currently Chunichi Dragons players) and Naoki Yamaguchi (graduating from Keio this month) played on.

And, no relation to Daisuke. But I'm betting that I'm not the only person who wondered!

(For the record, Koji Fukutani, upcoming 3rd-year righty ace, was also an Aichi kid who aced the Keio entrance exam. He's also really nice and really smart (and wrote a Keio team blog entry recently, thanking the past and present baseball team faculty advisors and marvelling in that they're both professors from the department of science. I'm really psyched that I'll get to be in Japan for a bit of the college preseason, even though I won't be around for the actual season -- I think Keio will do really well this year, though.)

Oh! And just as an aside, since I haven't been writing much, but this was really cool to find out about -- Shogo Shashiki, graduating this month from Meiji, is going to be playing for the Ishikawa Million Stars in the Hokushinetsu Baseball Challenge League this year! That's really great for him, they've been a very strong team, have had guys drafted into the NPB every year of their existence, and it appears former Washington Nationals minor-leaguer and Komadai Tomakomai HS grad Naoya Washiya is also staying with them for this year as well. Shashiki had told me he hoped to play in the US this year, and even did come to the US in the fall with Yoshihiro Doi to try out for some major league scouts, but I guess nobody picked him up. A shame, but I think the Ishikawa team will be a good experience for him, and he'll be close enough to his hometown Osaka that his family can come see him, too. (He was one year ahead of Sho Nakata at Osaka Toin, they used to bat 3rd and 4th in the lineup.)

And while I'm at it... Dave over at Japanese Baseball Cards notes that he thinks there is a Big 6 Card Set this year after all, despite the lack of Saitoh. I guess BBM changed their minds, since a bunch of players had told me they were told there wouldn't be another set. Good for BBM if so, and good for the players too! (This is one case where I'd be overjoyed to be completely wrong.) I noticed that on the page from Discount Niki that Dave linked, that the set says "Featuring this year's draft candidates Yusuke Nomura and Hayata Itoh! Get your insert cards of famous Big 6 alumni like Kenshin Kawakami, Yoshinobu Takahashi, and Atsunori Inaba! 2 insert cards per box!" So, we'll see. It may not come out in time for me to actually get a copy while I'm in Japan, but so what?

Oh, so yeah, I'll be in Japan from March 16 until April 8th or so (it's still undecided; I have to be back in Seattle by April 12, but don't have my return ticket yet), by the way. I won't be there for most of the rest of the year, though, so if you want to go to a game with me, act now :) I am planning to go to Senbatsu if at all possible, as well as a bunch of preseason college games and early season pro games...

RIP Wally Yonamine, 1925-2011

2011-03-01T17:58:00.000-08:00

Wally Yonamine, the first Japanese-American to play baseball in Japan after World War 2, died of complications from cancer on Monday. He was 85.

Two years ago, I was fortunate enough to go to a book reading/signing at the Tokyo American Club, when Rob Fitts's Wally Yonamine biography came out. Rob and Wally were a two-man show, with Rob playing the straight man and answering questions about the book, and reading a scene from the book, and Wally sitting there with a big smile on his face, entertaining the crowd with stories about his life.

Wally told many stories that day, about dealing with the grim postwar Japan, about bringing his American football and baseball play style to Japanese baseball, about Hiroshima Carp fans lying in front of the bus and throwing things at him in the outfield, and about a foggy game at Koshien where he faked catching a fly to centerfield that really bounced off the fence, and so on. All of these stories are in the book, but getting to hear them straight from the man himself made them that much more real and amusing.

I feel really lucky that I got to meet him, even if only for a few minutes that afternoon. He was a Japanese Baseball Hall of Famer but also just a real class guy; by the sheer number of people gathered at the Tokyo American Club that day, he clearly had a very full life with a huge circle of family and friends, both in Tokyo and back in Hawaii. I felt a little bit nervous as a complete stranger (I think many of the people there knew Wally through his family or his church, and it was my first time meeting Rob, too) but when I went up to ask him to sign my book and told him how much I enjoyed his speech, he was very friendly and kind.

Wally making a point in one of his stories.

Rob's on the left, Wally's on the right, I'm in the back!

I never reviewed the Yonamine biography here because I got sidetracked from the blog that winter when my father died of cancer. Now I feel really bad about that. Really, if you want to know more about Wally, and certainly if you want to know more about the 1950's era of baseball in Japan, I recommend reading the book. There were some typoes in the first edition that I think were fixed for a second printing, because other than that, it's a pretty solid account of the 1950's Giants, the 1970's Dragons, and the state of postwar Japan, as well as Hawaii in those days. There really aren't nearly enough accounts in English of Japanese baseball, especially historical; this and Rob's other book Remembering Japanese Baseball are both a good read both for stories about Wally and stories about the era.

It's never easy to be a foreigner in the world of Japanese baseball, but certainly, it's nowhere near as difficult as it must have been right after the war, so you have to respect and admire him for what he accomplished, and for being who he was and enabling so many other foreigners to play baseball in Japan, and bringing the two worlds closer together.

You can also read a few other obituaries of Yonamine here, here, here.

Tokyo Big 6 Spring Camp / Preseason Games

2011-02-08T20:39:00.001-08:00

Last spring, Rikkio, Meiji, AND Waseda all did spring camps in the US, representing fully half of the Tokyo Big 6.

This year, now that I'm in the US, NOBODY is coming to the US for spring camp. Go figure.

The official Big 6 site some of the spring information up:

Spring Camps:


           Camp                                  Regional Preseason
Rikkio:    3/8 - 3/19: Saito City, Miyazaki      3/1 - 3/8: Tokai Region
Waseda:    2/28 - 3/2: Urasoe City, Okinawa
Keio:      2/28 - 3/15: Ishigaki City, Okinawa   3/15 - 3/21: Tokai Region
Meiji:     2/16 - 2/24: Numazu City, Shizuoka    2/27 - 3/10: Kyushu, Kansai, Tokai 　
Hosei:     2/20 - 3/2: Kamogawa City, Chiba      3/2 - 3/4: Kisarazu (Chiba)
Tokyo:     3/9 - 3/20: Miyazaki City, Miyazaki

(The Tokai region is kind of the part of Japan between Osaka and Tokyo, so like, Nagoya and Shizuoka and such.)

And here's the entire Big 6 preseason game schedule, in Japanese. All the games are either at the colleges' home fields or at the opponents' home fields, with the exception of the 3-day industrial league exhibition at Jingu, which appears to be from March 31 (thurs) to April 2nd (sat).

I'm guessing that Opening Weekend is still April 10/11, since only Meiji and Hosei still have preseason games going on until then; they were 3rd and 4th place last fall so they don't have league games until the 2nd week of the season anyway (the opening matchups will be Todai-Waseda and Rikkio-Keio). I still doubt I'll be able to stay in Japan that long during my March trip.

Patrick pointed out that the biannual USA-Japan collegiate match is going to be in North Carolina over July 4, apparently, so I'll hopefully be able to go to a game or two of that, and I'm pretty sure a few of the Big 6 boys will make the national squad (like Meiji's Nomura and Keio's Itoh and hopefully Hosei's Taki), so I'll get to stalk them there.

And speaking of Big 6 players that I used to stalk, here's a funny article about the Baystars ni-gun squad showing up in Okinawa, for their spring camp. Kisho Kagami's mom is from there (from the Tomigusuku area, it seems) and has a bunch of sisters and a whole bunch of her family still live there, so about 11 of his family members showed up at the Naha airport to greet him with signs and t-shirts and all. The Baystars will play against the Carp in July in Naha, so his family hopes he'll be at ichi-gun then and plans to have a big family cheering section for him, an "itoko-kai" (or "Cousin Clan" basically).

As for Kagami, he said, "It was REALLY embarrassing," and laughed, "but I'm glad that my grandparents and family members were so happy. I'll have to do my best because they came to support me [and so they can in the future]."

Baseball Shrine?

2011-02-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

No, not exactly. But I recently learned about a shrine in the northern reaches of Saitama called the 箭弓稲荷神社, or Yakyu Inari Jinja.

Now, on its own, there shouldn't be anything special in particular about a shrine to the Shinto god Inari -- there are MANY Inari shrines all over the country. You can usually spot them because they have bright orange torii, and often statues of foxes.

But this one in particular, being as the name of the area is "Yakyucho" -- yes, the kanji is different, 箭弓 vs the 野球 that means baseball -- apparently, over the years, it has become a vaguely popular place for pro players to go pray for success before the season, and especially the Seibu Lions because it's in Saitama prefecture.

(Of course, I actually read about it on the Rikkio baseball team's blog -- their team is also based out of Saitama, on the Niiza campus. They posted some photos from going there and the bat-and-plate-shaped ema, or wooden prayer boards.)

But anyway, the reason this place is even cooler is that in recent years, to embrace the fact that the city's name is a homonym for the word baseball, they sell baseball bat luck charms (mamori), and bat and plate prayer boards (ema). That's REALLY neat!

There's a shrine in Kyoto called the Shiramine Jingu, which is sort of known as a soccer shrine because the god there happens to be the god of an ancient Japanese "kickball" game of sorts, so lots of pro soccer players go there to pray, and so a bunch of my JHS students went there and told me about it. But at the time we didn't know of any baseball-related shrines. So now I do!

I'll be back in Japan for a week or two in March, and I'm going to see if I can get up to this Yakyu Jinja while I'm there, because I think it'd be really cool.

And in the meantime, I recommend reading the Tokyo Big 6 2011 blogs in general. You can learn all kinds of interesting things like how Keio's captain Hayata Itoh, aka Clutchy McClutchitude, knows Pi to 115 places. Or you can read Hosei's spastic manager Yokoyama's ramblings about Facebook and Twitter (there are many). Or you can get a lesson in Toyama regional dialect from Todai's Yohei Tachi. Or... actually, I was remiss in my updating about it, but back in December, the Meiji team posted about how third-year baseball club member Tama died in a car accident. That was pretty sad.

Mariners Fanfest 2011

2011-01-31T09:16:00.000-08:00

I've been back in the US for almost two weeks now, and I'm still somewhat shell-shocked. Every morning I still wake up and want to hop on a train somewhere and see interesting things and eat delicious things and listen to people speaking in Japanese, but the reality is that here in the Seattle suburbs, the best I can do is to walk a mile to Safeway. Bleh.

Anyway, Mike (the boyfriend) and Jason (a friend who was crazy enough to go with me to Fanfest 2007) and I headed down to Safeco Field yesterday to take in the sights. The only thing is, Fanfest doesn't really change all that much from year to year, so most of the stuff there, we'd already done before. But it was Mike's first time so we did some of it again for his sake.

When I originally looked at the schedule, I thought it'd be cool to get into Dan Wilson's autograph session and have him sign my glove since I already had Jamie Moyer sign it several years ago, but when we arrived around noon, they still had 1:30 session vouchers, but Dan The Man's session was gone. With a choice of "Miguel Olivo and Brandon League / Michael Pineda and Kyle Seager / Jason Vargas" as the possible ones we could get, we ended up opting for... nobody. Maybe in retrospect I should have pushed for going to Jason Vargas's autograph session, but eh. Dan Wilson's Dugout Dialogue was at 1pm, and at 1:30 they had Jay Buhner and Bret Boone, and at 2pm they had Felix, so we figured we'd probably want to go listen to some of those instead, which is exactly what we did.

So first we listened to Rick Rizzs with Dan Wilson, and then Rick with Jay Buhner and Bret Boone. Those were actually pretty entertaining. Dan Wilson is still the Nicest Guy Ever, and most of the "questions" for him were actually from 40-something-year-old women in the stands wanting to say "I love you and you were my favorite Mariners player and I'm going to share a memory I have of you" rather than actual questions, although some people asked some good stuff, like "What's your favorite team prank that ever happened?" and he started telling the story about Griffey putting a cow in Lou Piniella's office during spring training one year, and he had another story about a rookie regifting a team member's wedding present a year later, as part of "tell us about Kangaroo Court". Someone asked who his favorite guys to catch were and he started with Randy Johnson but said how later on he always loved catching Jamie Moyer because it was so interesting AND because his hand wouldn't hurt nearly as much afterwards ("Jamie couldn't get anyone out with his fastball, not even you, Rick.") I thought about asking about what it was like for Dan to return to college after retiring from baseball -- he mentioned at the beginning that he'd moved his family to Minnesota to finish out his degree at the University of Minnesota, but didn't talk much about it. Some people asked if Dan was interested in coaching the Mariners and he said that he was getting his coaching skills honed by coaching his kid's softball team, so a 12-year-old kid asked, "Uh, so I play softball... do you have any advice for me?"

Then there was Bone and Boone... neither of them appear to have changed at all since last we saw them, by which I mean Buhner was entertaining and Boone was actually looking so bored on the stage that he yawned a few times, so their session was dominated by Buhner, which was probably for the best. He recounted stories of the 1995 team of course, ("'Forget' the Wild Card, we're taking the AL West? Oh, that's the PG-13 version, Rick!") and some memories of the Kingdome in general, and someone brought up the time some chick in Boston jumped onto the field to give him a hug and he told stories about that... just various stuff, but it was pretty funny overall.

We actually skipped out after that, before the Felix Hernandez session... I wanted to take a few photos of Felix but we had other things to accomplish and I didn't want to be rude and leave DURING the session. We did listen to it since they broadcast the dialogues on the big board and over the PA system. Felix's English is really good now, I remember the first time I saw him at a Fanfest, he had an interpreter, so that's great too.

We got photos with the Moose, though they turned out pretty crappy. Then we went to play catch in the outfield; I'd even brought my glove for that, and they also have gloves you can borrow for it anyway. Turns out they only give you 3 minutes to play, though, which kind of sucks; I'm more used to getting 45 minutes or so on the outfield turf at the Seibu Dome or wherever. Still, that was something new and different to do, since I'd never played catch on a GRASS outfield in a real stadium before...

Then we ran the bases (or walked) and took photos in the dugout. After that I ended up talking in Japanese to some people filming a show for NHK; I overheard this lady on camera talking in Japanese about how "at the American fan fests, you can run on the field and do so many activities and there are sign-kais and talkshows and everything!" So I asked what show it was for, though it sounds like it's some sort of special program, not one of the regular MLB ones. That was surreal. At least I was wearing my 野球道　t-shirt so it lent some cred to my "I lived in Tokyo for several years, I'm a Fighters fan" story.

We wandered indoors after that because it was so cold out, and saw the clubhouse and locker room and the Dave Niehaus tribute and the history exhibit, and then got in an elevator and found out they'd let us go into the press box, so we went there, and... that was about it, everything started closing down a little before 4pm. I hadn't actually been in the press box before, so that was cool, and obviously the Niehaus exhibit was new, but other than that almost everything there was stuff we'd seen before.

I guess it was a fun day, but I'm still not all that psyched about watching MLB games again. We'll see what happens.

Rick Rizzs and Dan Wilson.

Dan Wilson.

The Bone and Boone panel.

Jay Buhner tells it like it is.

Bret Boone looks bored.

Lots of people had Thin Mints boxes wandering around... and apparently here was the cookie booth that was the source.

I found a Yunker ad! In English! Neat. (Ichiro's on most of their ads in Japan.)

Getting ready to play catch in the outfield.

Jason's chasing down a ball in the right field corner just like he's Ichiro.

There was this huge "MY OH MY" chalked in piles of sand in the infield dirt... here's one of the MYs. I'm standing on second base at the time but you can't tell.

In the dugout.

Outside the dugout.

Here's that chick from NHK doing the Japanese TV program.

If any of my readers have a clue who she is, let me know.

The Dave Niehaus Tribute in the Diamond Club.

More Niehaus.

I kid you not, when we went into the clubhouse, I asked if it was okay to take pictures of everything, and the guy at the door told me, "Yeah, go ahead. In fact, when you go through that door right there, you can take photos of Felix Hernandez's Cy Young Award-winning socks in the locker on the left."

The mailboxes for players in the locker room. That really full box on the lower left belongs to Milton Bradley. Wonder if it's because people are pissed off at him or what.

The clubhouse computers. There's a paper on the right explaining how they can get onto the clubhouse wireless as well, although when I tried to connect with my wifi-enabled cellphone, it didn't work :)

Weight room.

Part of the "History of Baseball in the Northwest" exhibit.

You could color in outlines of players and possibly get your coloring up on the big board during a game, apparently. I didn't take part in this.

But here's the rest of the press dining room. It is not that impressive.

Press room.

Someday, I would like to be sitting in this seat for real work, not just at a fan fest.

Nice view you get from there, too.

You know, I still haven't put up photos from Yakult's fanfest that I went to this fall, have I? Maybe I should go do a retro fanfest post or two.

The Craziest Day Ever, or Takayuki Makka Saves The Day

2011-01-19T00:42:00.001-08:00

What a day. I'm still having a little trouble believing that it actually happened.

Well, let me start from the beginning.

I woke up at 6:30am on Sunday and went back to Baystars Kyujo, their minor-league and practice stadium, for Rookie Training. It was my last chance to try to meet rookie pitcher Kisho Kagami and ask him to sign the special jersey I'd had made with his name and number on it. I'd be leaving Japan on Tuesday; I'm actually in Seattle as I write up this post.

I'd been told that if I showed up by 10am, it'd be possible to talk to some of the rookies and maybe bug them for a signature. That was patently incorrect. When I arrived at 9:50am, the rookies were nowhere in sight and various other players were jogging on the field. And rather than gathering near the bullpen, as they had been on Thursday, this time the fans were all standing by the outfield wall. One lady comes up to me and says, "Oh! It's you! From the other day! The Kagami fan! You came back!"

I ask her what's going on, and she's like "Oh, you can't talk to the rookies now... but they're going to jog by here in about 10 minutes. You should hold up your uniform and yell good morning to Kagami so he notices you, then maybe you can tag him later."

So we do that. The rookies jog around the field twice, passing us twice. She helps me hold up the jersey and we both yell "Kagami-kun, ganbatte kudasai!" The first time, he looks over with a look that can best be described as "WTF?"

The second time, I hide behind the jersey because I'm embarrassed, but I help yell. Another fan tells me, "He was smiling as he came by this time... the player next to him was also pointing at you as they went by."

Hmm.

Then the rookies all gather together to do rookie practice... as far away from fans as humanly possible. No, seriously. They basically do their workouts in left field. Fans are allowed to stand behind the fence in right field, or be up in the stands behind home plate, or can stand outside the 3rd-base bullpen. That's it. You can't see left field unless you're in the stands or in the outfield, in which case you are VERY far away from the players.

On the other hand, a bunch of Baystars players, almost all pitchers I believe, also gathered... to play soccer! That was really funny. Kenjiro Tanaka set up some orange cones to be goalposts and by the time their game got underway they had around 10 players out there. Atori Ohta, Yataro Sakamoto, Kentaro Takasaki, Daisuke Hayakawa, Kota Kobayashi, Takayuki Shinohara, and one or two others I couldn't figure out who they were.

I realize it's hard to imagine the layout if you haven't been to this stadium before, so here's a (crappy MSpaint) diagram of the Google Maps satellite image:

The blue lines are where fans were allowed to be, outside the right field fence, and along the 3rd-base line (behind fences and netting or up high in bleachers behind home plate). The red square is where the players set up their soccer game, relatively close to us. And the green dots are where the rookies were doing most of their training, in left field. The green lines are the bullpen.

Here's kind of what it looked like from afar -- the rookies doing some weird stretches/jogging warmups by the training building in LF.

Around this time another lady standing there with a camera came up and introduced herself to me -- turns out she's a friend of Kobayashi's and she used to see me at Jingu a lot because she's also a big Kagami fan. Her name's Yuka and I completely do not ever remember meeting her at Jingu, which makes me feel kind of bad. She even gave me a photo that she'd taken of me and Kobayashi from the final Hosei game this past fall. She apparently lives near Toin Gakuen HS and cheers for their baseball players.

So I ended up sticking with her for most of the day. It was her first time at Baystars Kyujo and she liked talking about Kagami, so we got along okay.

Anyway, we watched soccer for like half an hour. It was really funny. Some of the players are clearly better at it than others; Kenjiro Tanaka is really good ("It's because he's from Shizuoka," Yuka said, "Oh right, Tokoha Kikuchikawa?" I replied.) and so was Atori Ohta, but Teikyo HS also has a strong soccer program in addition to baseball. Some players were clearly just kind of playing for fun and/or to keep warm and/or to look cool in front of the fans. There were a few times where we'd all either be yelling "nice goal!!" or "OH MY GOD BE CAREFUL DON'T GET INJURED!!!"

Atori Ohta (from Teikyo).

Kenjiro Tanaka (from Tokoha Kikuchikawa).

Yataro Sakamoto (formerly Yakult and Fighters) joins the fray.

Daisuke Hayakawa (formerly Lotte) making a big kick.

Kota Kobayashi and Kenjiro Tanaka.

Atori Ohta and Kentaro Takasaki.

Akiyoshi "Hossha" Toyoshima... lefty pitcher released by the Fighters this off-season, is now going to be a batting practice pitcher for Yokohama. He's only 21 years old -- infact Sunday was his birthday! So the other young players just acted like he was one of them, basically.

Takayuki Shinohara (from the Hawks) as goalkeeper.

(and a little bit of video I took. Yataro Sakamoto kicks a goal but Atori Ohta makes the save!)

Then there was bullpen time for the rookies! I went over to see Kota Suda (JFE East, but formerly Waseda) and Kagami pitch, throwing to rookie catchers Tsuruoka and Matsushita. Matsushita, I mentioned before in my pre-draft catchers roundup; he went to Kansai Gaidai and supposedly speaks fluent English from having lived in London for several years as a kid.

Kota Suda. The last time I saw him this close up was the fall of 2008, he was wearing a Waseda uniform, and I was still somewhat surprised he wasn't drafted. (Now he joins his classmates Hosoyamada and Keijiro with the Baystars, I guess.)

Kisho Kagami, the entire reason I went to Yokosuka in the first place.

Rookie catchers Ichiro Matsushita and Kenjiro Tsuruoka.

Matsushita supposedly speaks really good English, but of course I wasn't able to get anywhere near him to actually find out... to be fair, I suppose if I was a lot more outgoing and didn't mind having a lot of people staring at me and thinking I was obnoxious, I could have called out to him in the bullpen, but just like with Kagami, it's just really hard to yell out to one player when there's a whole group of 9 of them there and they are ostensibly "working" at their job, and I hate to be a loud obnoxious gaijin since there's such a ridiculous stereotype here.

Just because you're a pro player doesn't mean you get out of smoothing the grounds out afterwards.

Okay, so that was all well and good and exciting and takes us up until around 11:30am... the rookies all disappeared at that point and went indoors, ostensibly to eat lunch, or to get out of the cold for a bit, it's not really clear what.

I went up into the stands to sit with some of the other fans and watch the other players still playing soccer or running around or whatever.

Eventually the older players settle into a game where Daisuke Hayakawa and one of the other guys hit fly balls to the outfield and the other players have to chase down the fly balls. The rookies came back outside a little while later and started doing some more exercising and some throwing in left field again, once more far away from everyone.

Hayakawa hitting a fly ball out.

The rookies finishing up and coming in.

See... around 12:30pm the rookies just headed indoors, never to return. I guess it was just like Thursday. They might have had some indoor training to do or whatever, but they never did come out to talk to the fans or anything, which actually surprised many people -- Saturday was a day off from training and Sunday is one of the few days most normal people have off from work and can come to the stadium to watch training, so a lot of people expected the rookies to come out and talk a little and sign stuff. Apparently they'd done that on the first day of training, on Saturday the 8th or whenever it was.

On the other hand, the non-rookie players were still all running around shagging flies and playing catch and whatnot. They eventually gathered up all their stuff around 1pm, bowed to the fans in the stands, and ran off the field, done training for the day.

I was already starting to freak out a little like "...you mean practice is over for the day and we had absolutely no chance whatsoever at all to talk to players?"

One fan told me, "Well, you can go wait by the entrance to the stadium and hope some of them come out to go to convenience stores or shopping or whatever... or if you wait by the parking lot you'll sometimes see players coming out to their cars and can call out to them then..."

"I have to be home by 4pm to get a delivery, I can't just stay here all day. Plus it's so cold!" It was seriously around 6 degrees Celsius out (low 40's), which actually wasn't so bad in the sun but was pretty brutal in the shade or when the wind was blowing.

Atori Ohta decided to come out and throw about 30-40 pitches in the bullpen. I like Atori a lot (no, really) so that was at least a nice distraction for a while. He's fun to watch throw, and actually, he kind of resembles Kagami. It's kind of crazy that he's already got 3 years pro experience and is still a year younger than Kagami and this year's college grads, though...

Atori threw for a while and then just basically ended practice and also disappeared inside.

And then a groundskeeper came out and started hosing down the bullpen and taking in the leftover equipment and stuff. Which seemed pretty ominous. Yuka asked him whether practice was over for the day, and he basically said straight out, "They're not going to be coming back out on the field today, no. That's why I'm cleaning up. Sorry. You should probably go home."

Well.

That sucked.

One of the other women who was out there by the bullpen was like, "Oh, how terrible for you, it's such a shame that you came all the way out here twice and still couldn't meet Kagami... it's all about timing you know... maybe if you had been able to get his attention when the rookies were still out there... can you come back another day? Or come to spring camp in Okinawa?"

"I can't," I said, feeling pretty hopeless, "I'm going back to the US on Tuesday and I won't be back in Japan until mid-March. I can't even stay much longer today because it takes me almost 2 hours to get home and I have a delivery coming after 4pm."

"Wow, that sucks. What about in March?"

"I'll only be here for a week or two then, and anyway, by March, I'm hoping he'll already with the ichi-gun team. I'm really afraid that basically there's no day but today, for me. I really failed today. Big failure." 大失敗。

And well, I couldn't help it, I started crying. It was really brutally cold and I was already kind of depressed that this would be my last baseball-related thing I was doing in Japan before leaving, not to mention being depressed about leaving Japan in general. (It's such a catch-22. I can't leave, and yet I can't stay.) And I mean, I'd basically wasted 6 hours coming there on Thursday, and another 8 hours today, time that I should have spent packing suitcases, and was really really cold and really really sad, and had absolutely nothing to show for it.

Everyone was telling me "don't cry, don't cry", as we went from the infield bullpen area towards the outfield and to start walking back to the train station. Yuka also had to get home by a certain time so she had already planned on leaving around 1:30-2pm to begin with.

If you look at the map above, I drew a little yellow smiley face near the outfield gate. That's where the next part of this story takes place.

See, practice was over, but we saw a whole bunch of fans still hanging out there by the gate... around two players. I couldn't tell who they were at first, and I was still all red-eyed from crying, so I hung back a little. The two players turned out to be Takayuki Makka and Taketora Anzai, both 2nd-year pitchers, both pretty young, both very tall.

Takayuki Makka.

I listened to them talking for a while. Taketora is very quiet and a little bit shy; Makka was even riding him for not having a girlfriend and for being so uptight around fans. Makka is ridiculously outgoing and funny, he was telling jokes and laughing with fans, and saying how Taketora should be leveraging his uniform number of 48 to get some kind of tie-in with the AKB48 girls since they're so cute. It was almost like watching a manzai comedy duo. Taketora mostly just kind of smiled and nodded and talked a little.

Even though there was a crowd around them, occasionally people would go up and ask for signatures, so once my eyes had dried up some, I got out some of my shikishi (those Japanese autograph boards) and got Makka and Taketora to sign them... as I said to Yuka, "Well, they're not Kagami, but I mean, I came all the way here, I might as well bug some baseball players... y'know?" and she said "Yeah, these two seem like really nice young guys, even if Makka is a bit crazy." And so I said "I wonder if I could get a photo with them? But they seem happy talking to everyone."

Well.

Yuka finally asks one of the women gathered around the two players whether it'd be ok to take a photo, so the woman's like "oh, that poor American girl, she didn't get to meet Kagami, right?" So SHE actually asks Makka and Taketora on my behalf if I can take a photo with them, because I'm leaving Japan soon and all. And they say sure, of course.

OMG these two are really TALL. You know that I'm 5'7" or so and that I often end up getting photos with Japanese players who are barely taller than I am!

But, it's right before taking the photo that the craziest thing happens.

I have a little stuffed Fighters BB mascot bear hanging off of my bag, you can even see it in that photo. While I'm lining up to stand with Makka and Taketora, he looks at my bag, sees the Fighters bear, and is like "Oi, what's this? You a Yuki Saitoh fan or something?" 「お～い、これ。斎藤のファン？」

"No!" I say. I pull my Baystars Kagami jersey out of my bag. "I'm a Kisho Kagami fan dammit!"

"Whoa! That's crazy! You had this made?" says Makka.

We take a photo together. I thank them and try to explain, but start stuttering (this happens to me sometimes in Japanese when I'm either very excited about something or very stressed about something, and at this point I was both). Fortunately, pretty much every fan there that day knew my story, because I'd either met them on Thursday, met them that morning, or they'd been like "What the hell is the white girl doing here?" to each other, so it got spread that way. Even earlier that day when I stepped down from the stands at one point, one of the little boys saw me and was first surprised like "Oh!" and then in English, "Hello, Kagami fan!"

So the rest of the fans step in and explain. "She's going back to the US on Tuesday... she was a big Kagami fan when he was at Hosei... she used to cheer for the Baystars a few years ago... she promised to come back and cheer for Hichori later this year since he came from the Fighters... but she got this uniform made right after the uniform numbers were announced so that it'd be ready for rookie training, and she really wanted to meet Kagami and get his signature on it before she goes back to the US... but the rookies haven't been coming out... she came on Thursday too, all the way from the north part of Tokyo, but didn't get to meet him then either... isn't it a shame?"

Makka and Taketora look at each other. Makka says, "Want us to go see if we can get Kagami to sign this for you?"

My jaw drops. "What? Really?"

"Yeah. The rookies should still be doing some kind of indoors training right now, maybe weight training or some other stuff like that. It shouldn't be too hard to bug him for a second."

"You'd really do that? Oh my god thank you."

Taketora takes the uniform and my marker. "Where do you want it signed?"

"Uhh... under the uniform number, I guess? On the back?" I gesture.

He smiles and says something to the effect of "We can't really make any guarantees but we'll see what we can do. Be back soon."

And I'm just about ready to faint. All of the other fans are also like "OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE THEY'RE GOING TO DO THAT?"

So we wait.

About 3-4 minutes later, we see three people walking across the field...

Let me zoom in on that a second:

Makka. Taketora. And KAGAMI!

Yes, Kagami himself actually came out with the uniform to give it back to me. All the fans just went crazy like "OH MY GOD HE ACTUALLY CAME OUT HIMSELF TO DELIVER IT, WHAT AN AMAZINGLY NICE GUY!"

I'm about ready to faint by this point anyway. I'm not sure what the appropriate reaction would have been but he comes out and hands the uniform back to me and kind of nods to me in a gesture I can best describe as "Yes, I remember you. Yes, I appreciate you being crazy enough to get this uniform made, and I know you're a huge fan of mine, but OMG WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" I mean, he didn't seem angry exactly, but I mean, he wasn't smiling either.

So I just bow like "I'm so sorry to bother you like this! Sorry! Thank you so much!" And he's just kind of like "Hey, it's no problem." I said "I'm going back to the US on Tuesday so there was no day but today. I'm really hoping that by the time I'm back in March, you'll be with the ichi-gun team." And he kind of nodded.

A whole bunch of fans then swarmed the fence who ALSO wanted autographs, and formed a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge line.

Bizarrely, a lot of the other fans had been out at Baystars Kyujo fairly often but hadn't had a chance to meet Kagami either. There'd been a short signing time after practice the very first day, but other than that, most of the only time people had really met most of the rookies had been when the fans were standing out there just loitering by the stadium gate and various rookies came out to go shopping or whatever. (Which is really kind of stalkerish.)

So, I felt really bad for causing him trouble and making him come all the way out of the indoor training to stand in the cold and get stuck signing stuff for everyone (and Kagami being the way he is, he stood there and signed for every single person who asked, just like he used to do in college, when his entire team would have already gone home and he'd still be stuck there outside Jingu talking to fans and signing things).

I got him to sign the front of my uniform too (people were like "shouldn't you get it signed there too? And wouldn't it be nice to see him sign something in front of you?" to which I was like "I don't want to be a bother," but Kagami himself was nice enough about it).

But I still felt like crying afterwards. I was happy, but really felt kind of bad and embarrassed for causing such a thing.

I thanked Makka and Taketora profusely and told them they were really awesome. And then Yuka and I walked to the train station.

Another female friend of mine (one of my college ball friends) later basically told me that I should stop feeling so terrible and realize that I did a really great thing for many people.

She said that I did a great thing for Kagami, because I provided an opportunity for him to get to interact with the fans a bit, and because the fans could talk to him a little and get to know him a little, and see what a great guy he was for coming all the way out there to sign something for this crazy gaijin fan, they will become bigger fans of his. (This kind of interaction is really important in Japan, see, and often you'll see players with huge fan followings which have non-Japanese people scratching their head like "Why does such a mediocre player have so many damn fans?" but then you find out that the guy is a really nice dude who's always out running and stretching and training at the stadium even on off-days, and always talks to fans and signs stuff and takes pictures with kids and bows to the field and to the ouendan and is just a Quintessential Good Guy.) So she said that I raised Kagami's value in the eyes of the fans, and maybe even hopefully in the eyes of his coaches, since the Baystars ni-gun manager Shirai is big on the "fan service is important" aspect of being a ballplayer.

She said that I did a good thing for Makka, because now everyone's going to be telling stories about what a great guy he is too. So his value also goes up in the eyes of the fans -- and the fact that now I, and she too, wants to support him for being a Good Guy, also means a lot.

And she said that I also did a good thing for the fans, since a lot of them really DID want to meet Kagami and/or get his signature, but of course none of them on their own were able to call out to him... so I also gave all of them a good eperience as well. And since it was such a long and cold day and a Sunday at that, and half of the universe (no, really, 11000 people) was out at Kamagaya for Yu-Matsuri as they were calling the Fighters rookie unveiling, it meant that we also had a really amazing thing happen at Baystars Kyujo, so I made the day special for a lot of people.

I still feel kind of bad -- I mean, being a gaijin in Japan often has its pluses and minuses. Sometimes crazy things like this will happen, and I don't know whether it happened because I'm a gaijin or it happened just because of the circumstances. So I worry a little about people thinking "Sheesh, he only came out because this crazy gaijin was here," and of course I also worry like "is he embarrassed that he has this crazy gaijin stalking him?"

But whatever. This may be the last time I ever actually meet Kisho Kagami in person. So I should probably be happy that it happened at all, really. "It's always a little sad when they leave Jingu, but they'll always be ours in our hearts," said one of my other friends.

(And it looks like he's changed his signature from the full "Kagami Kisho" he used to write out in college to just a scrawled version of "Kisho", basically.)

And in some ways, isn't this kind of amazing? I dunno, but I'm not sure I could ever imagine this kind of thing happening in the US. The fan-player interaction in Japan is just really cool. I'm already thinking I should get Makka and Taketora some sort of gift while I'm here in Seattle; I figure they're pretty young and still likely to be in ni-gun when I visit in March.

So, that was my crazy Sunday at Baystars Kyujo.

Thank you for reading.

Friday Foto: Kiyoshi Yamanaka, and Abu-san

2011-01-14T23:42:00.000-08:00

The Big 6 Bleacher Bum gang threw me a going-away party at the Abu-san izakaya in Yotsuya tonight. The restaurant is named after Abu-san, a baseball manga written by Shinji Mizushima. (The title character in it, Yasutake Kageura, is the only manga character in Japan to have a number retired in their honor.) It's pretty much completely full of baseball memorabilia and photographs, and there's always something baseball-related showing on the big-screen TV, and the patrons and staff are pretty much always big baseball fans who come there to eat and drink and chat with likeminded folks.

As such, baseball players actually come to the restaurant as well sometimes, which is probably how the place came to be completely full of memorabilia in the first place.

While we were there tonight, the rumor floated around our table that there was a Lotte coach sitting at a table near us, though nobody has any clue who it is. One of my friends tells me where the supposed coach is sitting and tells me to turn around surreptitiously and look when I have a chance.

I do, and I realize it's Kiyoshi Yamanaka!

Everyone's like "Are you sure?" and I get out my cellphone, where I have various photos of me with players and such, and show them this photo from the 2009 season, when Yamanaka was still a minor-league bullpen coach for the Fighters. I used to actually say hi to him fairly often outside the Kamagaya minor-league facility, since he was buddies with Ojisan and was a fairly friendly and funny guy.

Our group all says, "You really ought to show him that photo and see if you can take a new one with him! I bet he'll be happy!"

I was a little too shy to do that myself, so when Yamanaka's group was leaving, one of the people in our group basically went ahead and called out to him on my behalf, like "Hey, will you take a photo with our friend? She's leaving Japan next week."

We take the photo, and I'm like "Do you remember me? I used to talk to you at Kamagaya a few years ago when you were a Fighters coach."

"Oh!" he said, "Yeah, I thought I'd seen you before..."

"I was really sad when you went to Lotte as a coach, but, CONGRATULATIONS on the championship this year!"

My friend was elbowing me like "Show him the photo from Kamagaya!" so I did. And he laughed, probably because he was making the exact same thumbs-up pose back then too.

So, that was surreal.

Here's another shot of the Abu-san restaurant that I took a few weeks ago:

It's really quite full of stuff. I always seem to spend one-third of my time there eating/drinking, one-third of my time talking, and the rest of the time staring at everything on the walls. They even have the name plate that was actually used in a scoreboard for Koji Akiyama (not sure what stadium... Heiwadai?):

Pretty cool.

And yeah, I'm leaving Japan on the 18th and moving back to Seattle. Very sad. You would never believe how many pounds of baseball magazines I'm trying to take back with me.

On the other hand, as part of my going-away gifts tonight I received both an Abu-san plate signed by Johnny Kuroki, and a pink baseball signed by my favorite Keio catcher Masahiro Nagasaki. That was pretty cool. My friends wrote me a card and also got the staff to sign it, including Makoto Ashikawa (an actor who works there as a waiter as his "day job") and Yoshida-kun, a waiter who used to play baseball at Horikoshi HS, though he was a few years ahead of Hisashi Iwakuma and a few years behind Hirokazu Ibata.

How To Get To Baystars Kyujo

2011-01-13T19:25:00.000-08:00

(This is not actually where the Baystars minor league team plays the majority of their games, but they do play the Futures games here and they have practice days and some games against industrial league and whatnot -- also this is where the player dorms are.)

I went here to try to tag Kagami, but it turned out I was way too late, I arrived around 1pm and the practice was 10am-12pm. Oops. I saw a few players, but the rookies had returned to the dorm. I'm going back on Sunday (skipping the Fighters thing, I think... it's just going to be a madhouse).

Anyway, here's the map on the Baystars site. They suggest either JR Taura station or Keikyu Anjinzuka station. I am going to endorse Anjinzuka just because it takes a lot longer for me to get to Taura. Not that I can get there in under 90 minutes from my station anyway, but still.

Also, Taura involves walking through tunnels, but Anjinzuka doesn't.

Coming from Anjinzuka:

They have this map outside the station. It's pretty accurate.

Start up the street with the Koban on your right.

You'll see this crosswalk a (long) block or so up. You'll need to cross it -- and have to be on the right side of the street for it, too. You can see the stadium once you're on top of the crosswalk.

Go over the JR railroad tracks. (Call this picture "JR Railroad Tracks" for the Taura directions.)

Continue up the street. There is a swimming pool on your right.

Hooray! You're there! BUT.. DON'T GO IN HERE.
This is actually the kankeisha entrance, for players and staff. I went in by accident and realized pretty quickly that I was in the WRONG FREAKING PLACE. Oops.

Instead, keep going up the block, past the nursery school.

You'll see two gates like this. Go in the right side, towards the stands and dugout and all. The left will put you in kankeisha area, or worse, in the military base thingy or whatever the next-door building is.

From Taura Station:

Exit the south exit of the station. It should put you on a road that looks like this. Turn LEFT at this intersection.

About a block up you'll see a short tunnel. Go through it.

When you get out, you see about one more block of walking before you go into another tunnel...

This one is LONG and dark. I did not like walking through it, plus bikes kept having to stop to go past me.

When you get out of the second tunnel, you'll have about a block to walk before you get to that big blue sign with arrows. Turn left there, for "Nagaura Port".

At this point you're at the same place as "JR Railroad Tracks" in the Anjinzuka directions, so just continue up that road and don't go in the wrong entrance.

The stadium itself is not so exciting. There are some bleachers behind home plate and a few benches on the side and that's pretty much it. And you're not supposed to actually go in towards the players' dorms or the inner buildings or anything, so if you're there to stalk players, hopefully you'll see some of them coming out to the parking lot.

I still haven't been to Yokosuka Stadium, oddly -- I've been to Sagamihara a few times but never managed to get to the Searex actual home turf. Whoops.

Things I have!

2011-01-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

I have a new Baystars jersey!

Well, technically, I got this new Baystars jersey on November 7th, the week after the draft. But now it is in the form that I want it to be:

(If you can't read Japanese, the name is "Kagami Kisho". If you don't know why I spent 3000 yen getting his name and number put on a jersey, you should read back all posts on this blog labelled "Hosei".)

For the record, I got my jersey done at the Sports Authority near where I live in Akabane. I also got my Ryota Imanari jersey done there two years ago. As you can see, the Imanari jersey is signed at the bottom... I need to get that done to the Kagami jersey ASAP too!

As it is, the Baystars site finally put up their information on rookie training at Yokosuka Stadium, and even do say "Please come support us!", so I think I'll go down there later this week. Their off days are the 11th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, if you are thinking of going. (I'm only here until the 18th.)

I'm also thinking of going to try to stalk Tatsuya Ohishi since I couldn't do that for his time at Waseda. The Lions rookie training schedule has them off on the 11th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, and 27th, if you're curious.

I wish I could go stalk Shuhei Fujiya at Lotte Urawa but there just probably won't be time. Maybe in the spring. I know they're training up there, and I even have a friend who wants to stalk Shota Ishimine, but, timing.

I'll be at Kamagaya on the 16th for the unveiling of the new rookies there. I hear it's going to be insane, but my connections (read: Ojisan) should make it possible for me to get in regardless. I'm a little depressed about Saitoh-mania, to be honest... and here I'm just hoping to meet Masaru Saitoh, or Masahiro Inui or Yodai Enoshita or Haruki Nishikawa. It's bizarre, but I saw almost all of the Fighters draft picks play as amateurs.

Anyway.. this post is called "Things I have", so I wanted to mention something else.

I came back from my trip to Kyushu over the weekend, spending about 22-23 hours on local trains over the course of 2 days. I stopped along the way in illustrious places like Fukuyama (where I failed to see Taishi Ota.. no, just kidding) and Wakayama City (where I failed to see Tama the Stationmaster Cat because it turns out she doesn't "work" on Sundays, sheesh) and at the Osaka Dome, where I happened to be there the day after the Buffaloes unveiled their new uniform design.

(I'll post a few more pictures of the Buffaloes store and display soon, if you happen to check back.)

To be honest, the Buffaloes new design was not so intriguing to me, as they only had t-shirts with the logo on it, sweatshirts, towels, and cellphone straps. If they'd had t-shirts with player names/numbers I might have gone for one, either T-Okada or Ohbiki or someone. But, alas.

So instead, I got one of the T-Okada Home Run King foldout thingies they made. This is actually a pretty cool little contraption:

From the outside it almost just looks like an oversized baseball card.

But then you unfold it...

And it is a big series of photos of each of his home runs for the season! Except... you might notice it only goes up to 32... and he had 33 home runs...

...because the back side is a huge poster of home run 33.

Pretty neat, huh?

Friday Foto: Saga Kita HS

2011-01-07T23:43:00.000-08:00

The last few days, I've been on a trip around Kyushu, trying to "collect" the rest of the prefectures of Japan that I haven't visited. (In this case, I needed Tottori, Shimane, Oita, Miyazaki, Kagoshima, Kumamoto, and Saga. I also spent time in Hyogo, Okayama, Yamaguchi, and Fukuoka prefectures on the way, but they weren't new.)

Almost all of the prefectures of Japan that I've visited, I've done something baseball-related, but some of these others, there's not so much to do, so I end up finding other things to see like castles or other historical sites.

Well, with the loop of Kyushu I was doing, my last prefecture to pick up was Saga. I'd actually been THROUGH Saga before, while taking a train to Nagasaki, but my rule for this prefecture-collecting is that I have to actually exit train stations and set foot in the prefecture and do SOMETHING there to count it as visited. Even just stopping for an hour and having lunch a block away from the station counts, as far as I'm concerned. But just changing trains somewhere or riding through a prefecture does not.

So today, after going around Kumamoto Castle in the morning, we took the train to Saga City, and walked the mile and a half or whatever it was from the station to Saga Kita High School.

See, I moved to Japan on August 4, 2007. Koshien started on August 8, 2007. The very first game was at 10:30am on that day... and it was Saga Kita vs. Fukui Shogyo. I watched it on TV while people were fixing a window pane at my apartment, mostly just being completely psyched that I was in Japan and could just turn on the TV and watch Koshien! Saga Kita won that first game, and their pair of pitchers intrigued me. A week or so later I found myself watching them play a morning game against Ujiyamada Shogyo, after they had fought to a 4-4 tie a few days before while I was at work. They won that too.

Sunday, August 19, I specifically stayed home to watch Saga Kita play Teikyo. Teikyo I knew well already because it was where Hichori went, and also, in 2006 I watched Koshien over the internet from the USA, and saw Teikyo play the most ridiculous game EVER against Chiben Wakayama. So, this was going to be a good game... and amazingly, Saga Kita pulled out a 4-3 win in 13 innings, which they kind of really didn't deserve, but at that moment I was convinced they were going all the way.

Wednesday, August 22. I snuck out of my job at GEOS for an "extended lunch break". And Saga Kita won 5-4 in a ridiculous dramatic comeback, with Yusuke Nomura throwing a one-hitter for Koryo into the 8th inning and just running out of steam. When I see Nomura's face now, it still sometimes gives me flashbacks to standing in that Yamada Denki watching on the big screen TV, as Soejima's grand slam decided the game. My thought at that moment was "I really admire that Nomura kid, but Saga Kita has the right idea using two kings instead of one ace."

At any rate, since that Koshien, whenever anyone says Saga to me, I just think of Saga Kita HS. So I figured it'd be the most fitting way for me to pick up my last prefecture that isn't Okinawa (which shouldn't count anyway since I can't take a train there. Damn you, Okinawa).

The embarrassing thing is, there are a lot of students at Saga Kita, and even though there's no school today officially, a lot of them were around there anyway for various other things like club activities and extra winter classes. And the baseball team was actually out on the field having practice today as well. Yikes! So it was kind of crazy, all these kids going by staring at me and my friend like "What the hell are two gaijin doing all the way out here?"

Taking pictures at the school gate, apparently.

When you approach the school from the road, you see the baseball field before anything else.

Here's the baseball team clubhouse. They have a memorial to the 2007 baseball club, with all the members listed, not just the 18 who were on the Koshien roster. I thought that was pretty cool.

A few of the players saw us looking in and kind of pointed like "hey, there's two gaijin watching us", and I nodded in greeting at one of the boys and he smiled and nodded back at me, but I didn't go try to talk to anyone, it was a little weird. I have a feeling that 2-3 years ago they might have gotten random tourists often, but maybe now, not so much. So I felt a little bit stalkerish watching them practicing... even a kid throwing in the bullpen, I really wanted to take a photo, but he was staring right at me. Kind of weird. I guess I should have asked. On the other hand, we really only had about 15 minutes to spend there anyway before having to run back to the station and hop another train to meet up with our friend in Tobata, so.

Either way, now I've been to Saga prefecture and to Saga Kita HS. Hooray? I guess if I manage to meet up with Egashira-kun (who played right field on that Kitako Miracle Team and now goes to Hosei) again, I'll have a funny story to tell him, if nothing else.

Something else funny: we bought drinks in the train station convenience store on the way out of town, and the cashier who rang my stuff up was named Soejima, same as the kid who hit that grand slam in the Koshien final. I almost thought of asking her if she was related, but figured it'd just sound WAY too freaky.