Photopost etc: Eri Yoshida pitches in San Rafael!

When I was about 5 years old, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said I wanted to be a pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies. My mom told me that girls couldn't become baseball players, and I cried for like a week.

Well, last Friday, July 6th, I went up to San Rafael again to watch the Pacifics. The difference this time was that it was actually to watch the Maui Na Koa Ikaika team... because Eri Yoshida was starting for them! I figured I just HAD to go up there if she would be pitching so close to home, after reading about her for so long.

I thought the game was at 7pm, left work right after our company meeting, hit the road around 5:45pm, got to San Rafael around 6:20pm... and was very surprised that the stadium wasn't particularly crowded. Then I found out that the game was at 7:30. However, this worked in my favor because I got a GREAT seat, I was in the "Dugout Club" again at a table RIGHT against the field. To my left was a lady who modelled in Japan like 30 years ago and the rest of my table was a Japanese family, the father was from Nagoya, the mother from Shizuoka, and the kids born and grew up in California. But they spent the whole game speaking Japanese anyway, which was amusing because it took them a bit to realize I was fluent and could understand/speak with them. (I started explaining the intricacies of independent league baseball in Japanese...) The mother kept up a stream of very motherly babbling the entire game, including "Why are there no cheering sections or big scoreboards here?" about the atmosphere, and "She looks like a junior high school student!" about Eri Yoshida herself.

I spent the pre-game wandering around the stadium a bit, to get food and look around and take photos. I noticed Tsuboi wasn't in the lineup again, and asked a staff guy, who thought he'd been released! OH NO! But then I ran into the team trainer, a Japanese guy who kinda serves as a translator for Tsuboi as well, while he was talking to someone in Japanese, so I just sort of butted in on their conversation for a second to ask what was up with Tsuboi, and he's like "Oh yeah, you were here a few weeks ago in a Fighters hat, right? Tsuboi injured his shoulder... we'll see what happens but..." The three of us talked about Eri Yoshida a bit, and THEN Trainer-san told me something VERY interesting, namely "There's another Japanese pitcher on the Maui team here, this is his first day, he's a lefty, former pro yakyu guy with the Seibu Lions... they're supposed to have him pitch after Eri-chan because so many Japanese people are here tonight..." and my brain suddenly clicks and I'm like "WAIT A MINUTE, IS IT YOSHIHIRO DOI?!" and he's like "Maybe?" I'd heard that Doi was looking to catch on with another team over here after getting cut from the Orioles, so it certainly would make sense.

(Also, from blog reader Ken: Tsuboi out for 10-14 days with a sprained shoulder, apparently. Since the team had a week off, I guess it works out well for him, and I hope he gets back into the lineup soon since I'd like to see him play again.)

Anyway, eventually the game happened. And around 1500 people were there. For a stadium that seats 800 people officially. They had bleachers set up behind the dugout area, and standing-room only arrangements. The local papers apparently wrote about Eri Yoshida so a bazillion people came out to see her pitch. By the time I went to take photos of her warming up in the bullpen, it was almost impossible to actually walk back there, because there were so many people in a space not intended for so many people.

Of course, the sad part is, she had a kind of bad outing - only 3 innings, 5 walks, 1 strikeout (and the 3rd strike was dropped so the runner advanced, I was all like "what do you call that in Japanese, nige... nige... furinige?") and a hit batter, so she was taken out in the 4th inning after walking in a run. Bizarrely it seems she was only charged with 1 earned run out of the 5 she gave up. After she came out, Steve Boggs hit a 3-run homer that cleared all of her runners.

Still, it was pretty cool to watch a 20-YEAR-OLD JAPANESE GIRL throwing pitches and having BIG AMERICAN DUDES SWING AND MISS.

The other cool thing is that Yoshihiro Doi DID pitch 2 innings! He gave up a run but he also got a strikeout or two and looked pretty good. After he finished his innings and walked by us to go to the bullpen, I called out to him in Japanese, "Hey Doi, good job, nice pitching!"　(お疲れ様！） and he looked over surprised but then smiled like "Huh? Oh, thanks!"　（ああ、どうも！） And the people around me were all like "Holy shit! Do you know him?" and so I explained how I'd seen him pitch for years in Japan and this was his first game for Maui and so on.

The Pacifics won the game 7-3. Box score here.

After the game I went over with the Japanese family I'd been sitting with, to try to get a photo/signature from Eri Yoshida. Despite having a somewhat bad start, she stayed after the game and signed for pretty much everybody who asked! It was really nice of her. Although I really wanted to talk to her a lot more and tell her how much I admire her, since I wanted to be a major league pitcher when I was a little kid, there were so many people around that I just got a photo and an autograph and wished her a hearty ganbare and moved on.

However, while she was being mobbed, nobody was talking to Doi, so I came over and chatted with him for about 10 minutes. I asked him about how he'd ended up there, and yeah, he'd signed a few weeks ago but had to wait for paperwork to start actually playing, and was a little nervous because he hadn't pitched in front of live batting for a few months. (I told him he did fine, of course. He told me my Japanese was really good and asked why I was able to speak so well.) I explained that I was a Fighters fan but of course had seen him pitch with Seibu many many times, and that I used to live in Saitama, so we got into a long conversation about Saitama. Bizarrely, I used to live really close to where he grew up, when I lived in Kawaguchi. We were talking about riding our bicycles over the Warabi track crossing, which is a somewhat obnoxious high bridge; he used to ride that every day to go to Kasukabe Kyoei HS; I used to ride it once or twice a month to go watch baseball at Lotte Urawa or Yakult Toda stadiums. Again, I was having such a strange moment of "I can't believe I'm standing here talking to Yoshihiro Doi about living in Saitama." I'm pretty sure this qualifies as a "only happens to Deanna" kind of moment.

Also, blog reader Eric came up and said hi as well, while we were in the group of people waiting to talk to Eri Yoshida. Since I'm kind of "retired" from this blogging stuff and not in a country where a white girl stands out as much anymore, I'm not used to getting recognized, so that was kind of cool.

The only downside was, getting the game timing wrong and some crazy roadwork on the way home meant that I nearly had a big Zipcar failure. I think it all worked out okay, though, and now I've got a better idea to overestimate on future runs up to San Rafael.

Anyway, click here for my entire photo set from the day, or here are a few highlights:


Eri Yoshida warming up in the bullpen.


Eri Yoshida warming up in the bullpen.


Eri Yoshida on the mound.  Look at the knuckles!


Eri on the mound with 2B Gered Mochizuki in the background.


Pacifics starter Brian Gump. Brian also blogs about baseball and has some amusing things to say about his time with the Pacifics.



Eri coming off the mound with catcher Logan Kanamu.



Doi on the mound for the Ikaika.


How cool is this!! Despite it being an away game and her having a somewhat bad outing, Eri Yoshida stayed after the game and signed autographs and took photos with people for quite a while! So I was lucky enough to get a photo with her. She complimented my t-shirt :)


I also asked Doi if I could get a photo with him since we were talking for a while, but I'd only brought the one shikishi.  Honestly, I like photos more than autographs anyway :)


So anyway, I'm about a week behind on blogging games, but yesterday I saw the Tacoma Rainiers vs. the Colorado Springs Sky Sox when I was back up in the Seattle area, and I got to catch up with Brian Sweeney and Luis Jimenez a bit, so hopefully I'll write something about that game and put up pictures before too long :)

Photopost: Tomochika Tsuboi and the San Rafael Pacifics

So a week or two ago (June 23rd to be precise), Edwin was in town for a J-Pop concert, and I thought it'd be fun for us to go do some kind of baseball game. The most interesting option that weekend was not, in my opinion, the Giants-A's game, or any of the possible semi-local minor-league stuff, but instead, I got a Zipcar and did the 30-minute drive up to San Rafael to check out the San Rafael Pacifics, a team in the independent North American Baseball League.

The REAL reason for this, though, was that I'd heard from Patrick and others that former Fighter Tomochika Tsuboi was playing for the Pacifics and I HAD to check it out. Tsuboi fandom goes back for me longer than just about any Japanese baseball player, and infact was the first Japanese player t-shirt I ever owned. He was batting second and playing right field for the Fighters in the first game I ever saw in Japan, and even finished that year out at .330, second to Ogasawara.

So you better believe that if Tsuboi was playing this close to home, I HAD to check it out at some point.

Having absolutely no idea what to expect, we showed up, found parking, and sprung for the "Dugout Club" seats for $22 (you can kinda see the chart here). See, the seating is mostly just an infield bleachers around home plate, the dugouts are below that, and so this "Dugout Club" is actually along the baseline from the dugout out to the base. The nice thing about it is that there are all of these tables there, so we essentially got there, found a table right along the field, and then put down our stuff, cameras, scorecards, signboards... yes, I even brought along my Tsuboi sign that I made like 4 years ago in Japan.

After the players finished their warmups and were walking back to the dugout, I held up the sign and yelled "TSUBOI-SAN!!!"  He looked over and started laughing and called over to me in Japanese, basically, "Why on earth do you have that??" and I called back, "Because I'm a Fighters fan!!"

Yeah.

The staff had told me before the game that it was okay to go on the field AFTER the game and talk to players, so I figured I'd just leave it until then.

Edwin, taking advantage of the not-gouging food prices, had pizza and chili, and I had a hot dog, and the table really was pretty awesome for that.  We had wristbands that let us go in and out of the dugout club area, and the food trailer was literally behind us.  Only problem is that bathrooms were outside the stadium and were actually just port-a-potties.  It reminded me of minor-league parks in Japan, except those generally have nicer bathrooms.

As for the game itself, it was the San Rafael Pacifics vs. the Hawaii Stars.  Tsuboi was once again batting second and playing left field!  The starter for the Pacifics was a righty named Matt Durkin, who's from San Jose and spent some time in the Mets organization, and the starter for the stars was a sidearming lefty named Dallas Mahan who's basically an indie league journeyman (literally something like 10 years in the indies after spending a short time in the Mariners organization, he's almost as old as me!)

Everything was fairly normal for a minor-league atmosphere for the first few innings -- decent play but nothing spectacular, a few miscues here and there, a lot of gimmicks like a burrito-eating contest and a dizzy bat race against the team mascot, Sir Francis the Drake, a large green duck wearing bloomers and a cape.

Then the bottom of the 6th hit, and the Pacifics just ripped open the Stars, basically.  Mahan got taken out of the game with the score at 3-2 Pacifics and a runner on second... and Steve Detwiler immediately hit a home run off reliever Cortney Arruda to make it 5-2, and then a few walks and ANOTHER homer by Johnny Woodard later it was 8-2, and then 5 hits and a hit-by-pitch later it was 11-2, which is what the final score eventually was, after a 9-run inning.  You can see a boxscore here.

And sure enough after the game we went on the field, and I got to talk to Tsuboi for around 10 minutes!  He doesn't speak English, apparently, so he was actually pretty happy to just chat with me for a while in Japanese.  But he said that he's having a really fun time in the USA playing baseball anyway, just that it's a little bit of a pain that there's not very much in Japanese out in San Rafael and all.  I asked if he'd been to things like the San Francisco Japantown (he asked where I live and I said SF, and he's like "So around 40 minutes by car?") and he said yeah, but it's far.

Amusingly I was wearing my really old Fighters #7 t-shirt, he asked "who's that?  Itoi?" and I'm like "No, dude, it's YOU!" and took off my jacket so he could see.  I told him I'd been a Fighters fan for almost 10 years, and that I first saw him so long ago, and we reminisced about it ("Yeah... Ide, Tsuboi, Ogasawara, remember those days?")  I helped Edwin talk a bit too, mostly a little about Koshien and all, and PL Gakuen, and watching the games over the internet and the time differences and all.  Mostly, though, I kind of can't believe that I WAS TALKING TO TSUBOI!  I mean, he was a veritable All-Star back in his day!  And I used to cheer for him with the Fighters for years! He even went through my Fighters cheerboard book like "Hichori... Kensuke... Inaba... natsukashii!"

Pretty awesome.  I told him I'd try to come back sometime again.  Edwin and I both got signatures and pictures with him, he really was super-nice to us.

Here's a few photos from the day:


Starting lineup for the Pacifics, posted outside the stadium.


Me with Sir Francis the Drake.


The team lining up for the national anthem.


Pacifics starter Matt Durkin.


Tsuboi running in from left field.


Stars starter Dallas Mahan.


Tsuboi at bat.


Tsuboi at first base.


And here's an awesome picture of me with Tsuboi!  How cool is that?

You can see the whole photo set here.

Bizarrely, I should be going back up to San Rafael tonight (July 6) -- guess who's coming to pitch?  None other than Eri Yoshida and the Maui Na Koa Ikaika!  That should be pretty awesome too!  Wonder if I'll get to meet her or not.

Friday Foto: Hideki Irabu

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.