Marinerds, etc.: 2016

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Ten years and two days later, the Fighters win it all again!

(pictures from the Fighters website)

And unlike in 2006 when I was able to slack off quite a bit for a week or two of work and stay up all night, now I work at Google and have way too much going on to actually watch any significant part of the Japan Series. I did catch the 5th and 6th games of this year's PL Second Stage playoffs, because they were at 2pm Japan which is 10pm here, and they were also aired on Pacific League TV. But the Japan Series games were all at 6:30pm in Japan, which is 2:30am here, and the reliable streams seemed to hop around every day.

I was at the Seibu Dome on Sept 27-28 for the adventures of clinching the Pacific League though, and should write that up sometime. But everything else I've had to experience from the US during my precious waking hours.

Those final playoff games were a doozy -- Game 5, on Oct 15th, happened right after a Meiji-Waseda game where Yuya Yanagi got 19 strikeouts in 12 innings in his last weekend before the draft, and so I switched over to the Fighters, and then the Hawks kept hitting home runs and chipping away at Takanashi, and eventually won the game 5-2, with my highlights being getting to see Kagiya and Hakumura pitch a few innings.

Game 6, unlike game 5, had the Hawks go up 4-0 in one inning instead of in 4 innings, pretty much beating up rookie starter Takayuki Katoh. But Anthony Bass came in and pitched four scoreless innings to hold off the Hawks while the Fighters waited for Tadashi Settsu to lose his curveball and start giving up runs. Kensuke Tanaka hadn't really hit at all in the playoffs so he was benched in favor of Kenshi Sugiya who not only fielded well but also hit the Fighters second RBI (the first was a Sho Nakata solo homer). In the 4th inning, with the bases loaded, Hiromi Oka pinch-hit for Shota Ohno, which seemed like a weird move, but then he hit a double to center which scored the tying runs, and the Fighters went up 5-4 immediately after on a squeeze bunt by Takuya Nakashima, which was kind of ironically perfect as the Hawks had ruined our night on Sept 27th by going up 3-2 on the Marines on a squeeze play.

The rest of Game 6 belonged to Shohei Ohtani, who not only hit a double in the 5th inning and scored on the Kensuke Kondoh hit that brought the game to 7-4, but, also, Ohtani impossibly came into the game to close it out pitching in the 9th inning. And almost every pitch he threw was over 160 km/h, including two of them hitting 165 km/h, which is a new speed record in Japan. (I'm not even sure why the Fighters keep making new merch every time he does this. I haven't bought any because duh.)

There was a week off between the playoffs and the Japan Series, during which the draft happened. The only real update there is that Fighters' 6th-round pick Yujiro Yamaguchi has said he's not going to join the team because he's pissed at getting picked lower than 4th. Whether or not you believe him on that being the real reason, or whether or not you think this is broken or not, please respect my right to call him a dumbass and be annoyed at him. Thanks. That's all I really feel like saying on the subject. It's kind of silly, though, that since 2000 there have been 5 normal-round picks to turn down their teams, and 3/5 have been Fighters, and 2/5 have been goddamn Hisayoshi Chono.

Anyway. Did I mention that the Fighters won the Japan Series?

I really truly honestly didn't get to see or follow most of the games. The first two were in Hiroshima, and the Fighters lost both of them 5-1 -- this was bizarre enough that on Sunday morning when I woke up and looked at the score I had to make sure I had loaded the right page, but no, it really was Ohtani vs. Kris Johnson in the first game and Masui vs. Yusuke Nomura in the second.

Johnson, by the way, won the Sawamura award this year, first time a foreigner had won it since Gene Bacque in 1964. I feel like this along with Balentien's home run record a few years ago is kind of showing that NPB, and maybe Japan as a whole, may be slightly more accepting of foreigners than before. Not really much, but just a tiny tiny tiny bit. And every tiny tiny bit helps.

(Now, to be honest, this was the first year EVER in the past decade that there weren't a few scattered racist morons that treated me like a dumb foreigner at Fighters games. But that's also because I became pretty famous after spring training in Arizona. So instead of getting "Oh... where are you from? Oh, do you like Fighters?" in broken bad English from people in the stands, I got a lot of "OMG YOU'RE THE GIRL FROM ARIZONA WHO WAS ON TV ALL THE TIME!")

The Fighters went back to Sapporo for Games 3-5, and won all of them! Game 3 involved a walkoff RBI hit by Ohtani in the 10th inning to win it 4-3, and Game 4 involved a huge Brandon Laird go-ahead 2-run homer to win it 3-1, and Game 5 involved, amazingly, a walkoff grand slam by Haruki Nishikawa, the second in Japan Series history (the first being the Swallows' Toru Sugiura in Game 1 of the 1992 Japan Series). It should also be noted that Takayuki Katoh only gave up 1 run in the first inning but also got pulled pretty quickly to let Luis Mendoza hold up the fort for most of the game.

Now here's the thing: the home team had won all of the first 5 games, and we were going back to Hiroshima, so I wasn't feeling all too good about that. The first Japan Series I ever followed was 2003 when the Hawks and Tigers faced off and the home team won every game in that series as well.

However, this year was different!

I actually watched the first 4 innings of Game 6 -- not because I wanted to be awake, but because I was having some acid reflux issues combined with failing to swallow an antacid pill properly, and so I was way too uncomfortable to sleep and having esophageal spasms. So, I found a site streaming the game, although it was very choppy, and watched as the Fighters went up 1-0 in the first inning on a Haruki Nishikawa triple and an infield blooping hit by Hiromi Oka. And I also watched as the Carp went up 2-1 in the second inning on a wild pitch by Masui and an error by Brandon Laird.

Note: Game 6 was Masui vs Nomura, which people seemed confused about, ie, why leave aces Kuroda and Ohtani until Game 7? But I think it was a solid move on both sides. (And I feel a little bit bad that my job since 2007 Koshien seems to be watching Yusuke Nomura lose really important games.)

Anyway, there were more Haruki triples and hits and the Fighters went up 4-2 in the top of the 4th, and Kuriyama pulled Masui super early so I even got to see Kagiya pitch the bottom of the 4th, and I saw him pitching a scoreless inning culminating in striking out Takahiro Arai. By then my stomach had calmed down enough to sleep, so I went to sleep. It was 4:30 in the morning and I had to be up at 8:30 to go meet friends up in San Francisco anyway, so it was just as well.

When I woke up four hours later, I saw the final box score. The Fighters won 10-4! Holy crap! It looks like Jay Jackson just had a very very bad 8th inning pitching for the Carp, and Brandon Laird hit a grand slam, which cemented him as the series MVP.

(You should just read Jason Coskrey's article about the game, since he was actually there and all.)

Today I seriously dug my 2006 Nippon Series Champions t-shirt out of the depths of my random Fighters crap and wore it around San Francisco. I cannot believe it's been 10 years since the last time the Fighters won the Japan Series, and how very much my life has changed since then. It really has been a pretty insane adventure since then. It was during the 2006 postseason that I had an ongoing bizarre AIM conversation with then-Japan-Times-writer Stephen Ellsesser that made me decide I was going to move to Japan to write about baseball one way or the other, and that's what I ended up doing, quitting my cushy software engineering job to go teach English in Tokyo and travel the country watching baseball. I remember spending the entirety of October 2006 writing about the Fighters on this blog and thinking nobody out there really cared -- this was, after all, before Twitter, before Reddit, mostly before Facebook even, and before you could see live streams of games. Now there's a pretty wide NPB audience online in English.

I still can't believe how much kindness I've been shown by the Fighters and the Fighters fans over the past decade, though. While there have certainly been a few rocky moments here and there, overall it has been the most incredible time of my life. I love coming back to Kamagaya every year and feeling like I'm stopping off at home to visit my family. Same for going to the Sapporo Dome. There are basically two places in Japan that I feel like I really belong there, and one is behind the dugout of a Tokyo Big 6 team with my camera and my friends there, and the other is in the middle of a Fighters cheering section.

I ordered a few of the championship goods from the Fighters site but I won't get them for a few months. Hopefully they'll show up in time to wear to Arizona spring training next year :) And wow, I really can't wait to see everyone there again. It's going to be even more crazy this time around!

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Draft 2016 Liveblogging

Hello and welcome to my 11th annual anguish over hoping the Giants don't draft my favorite college players, also known as Marinerds NPB Draft Liveblogging!

I'm preparing this post a little earlier in the day, and hopefully I'll be able to stay up all night tonight.

I just got back from Japan a few weeks ago (I was there in person when the Fighters clinched the PL pennant at the Seibu Dome and I really should finish writing that up one of these days) so I have a few draft magazines, and one of my friends gave me a whole slew of industrial league team pamphlets, but there are always going to be a few guys that slip through the cracks in the later rounds. Always fun!

Hopefully the TBS stream will actually work this year, who knows.

Otherwise I'll just be watching the picks come in on various news sources such as Nikkan Sports, Sponichi, Sanspo, etc, plus team pages, as usual.

Moving commentary to below the draft results grid. Also now the Ikusei grid is done and so this should be complete overall.

Name                   Pos  HS/Univ/Company         T/B   DOB          Ht/Wt  
--------------------   ---  ---------------         ---   ----------   -------
Orix Buffaloes
1 Taisuke Yamaoka       P   Tokyo Gas               R/L   09/22/1995   172/66
2 Yuta Kuroki           P   Rissho Univ             R/L   08/16/1994   178/75
3 Daisuke Okazaki       IF  Hanasaki Tokuharu HS    R/L   09/17/1998   182/75
4 Yoshinobu Yamamoto    P   Miyakonojo HS           R/R   08/17/1998   177/72
5 Keisuke Kobayashi     P   Nihon Seimei            R/R   11/02/1992   187/86
6 Soichiro Yamazaki     P   Tsuruga Kehi HS         R/R   06/15/1998   188/84
7 Daisuke Iida          C   Honda Suzuka            R/R   09/19/1990   181/83
8 Keisuke Sawada        P   Rikkio Univ             R/L   04/27/1994   178/90
9 Kaoru Nemoto          OF  Kasumigaura HS          L/L   07/29/1998   185/78

i1 Yaku Cho             OF  Nihon Keizai Univ       R/R   02/26/1994   181/78
i2 Tsubasa Sakakibara   P   Urawa Gakuin HS         R/R   08/25/1998   180/80
i3 Fumiya Kanbe         P   Rissho Univ             R/R   05/09/1994   182/80
i4 Kazumasa Sakamoto    IF  Ishikawa Million Stars  R/L   11/16/1990   162/65
i5 Katsushi Nakamichi   C   Meiji Univ              R/L   04/30/1994   173/78

Chunichi Dragons
1 Yuya Yanagi           P   Meiji Univ              R/R   04/22/1994   180/80
2 Yota Kyoda            IF  Nihon Univ              R/L   04/20/1994   184/80
3 Masami Ishigaki       IF  Sakata Minami HS        R/R   09/21/1998   180/84
4 Shotaro Kasahara      P   Niigata Iryo Fukushi U  L/L   03/17/1995   177/85
5 Kento Fujishima       P   Toho HS                 R/R   05/08/1998   176/75
6 Taisuke Maruyama      P   Tokai Univ              R/R   02/05/1995   176/75

i1 Yusuke Kinoshita     P   Tokushima Indigo Socks  R/R   10/10/1993   183/82

Rakuten Eagles
1 Shoma Fujihira        P   Yokohama HS             R/R   09/21/1998   186/84
2 Takahide Ikeda        P   Soka Univ               R/R   10/01/1994   180/80
3 Kazuki Tanaka         IF  Rikkio Univ             R/S   08/08/1994   180/78
4 Shu Sugahara          P   Osaka Taiiku Univ       R/L   04/05/1994   182/78
5 Kohei Morihara        P   Shinnitetsu Hirohata    R/L   12/26/1991   184/83
6 Keisuke Tsuruta       P   Teikyo Univ (Rubber)    L/L   05/12/1994   180/84
7 Hiroki Nomoto         P   Sasebo Kogyo HS         R/R   05/16/1998   180/72
8 Tsuyoshi Ishihara     C   Kyoto Shoei HS          R/R   03/08/1999   169/87
9 Yuhei Takanashi       P   JX-ENEOS                L/L   07/13/1992   175/80
10 Naoto Nishiguchi     P   Koga Health Senmon      R/R   11/04/1996   183/80

i1 Kota Chiba           P   Hanamaki Higashi        R/R   04/22/1998   180/87
i2 Yosuke Minami        IF  Meisei Univ             R/R   08/07/1994   175/73
i3 Takumi Mukaitani     IF  Hyogo Blue Thunders     R/L   02/24/1997   170/68
i4 Toshiyasu Kimura     P   Riseisha Health Senmon  R/L   09/14/1995   176/76

Swallows
1 Naruki Terashima      P   Riseisha HS             L/L   07/30/1998   183/86
2 Tomoya Hoshi          P   Meiji Univ              R/R   04/15/1994   181/85
3 Yugo Umeno            P   Kyushudai Kyusan HS     R/R   01/13/1999   175/80
4 Hikaru Nakao          P   Nagoya Keizai Univ      L/L   09/14/1994   179/79
5 Yudai Koga            C   Meitoku Gijuku HS       R/R   08/07/1998   178/75
6 Ryusuke Kikusawa      P   Soso Ritech             R/R   05/16/1988   183/85

i1 Hajime Ohmura        C   Ishikawa Million Stars  R/L   12/21/1991   169/80

Lions
1 Tatsuya Imai          P   Sakushin Gakuin HS      R/R   05/09/1998   180/70
2 Shunta Nakatsuka      P   Hakuoh Univ             R/R   12/26/1994   191/103
3 Sousuke Genda         IF  Toyota                  R/L   02/16/1993   179/73
4 Shohei Suzuki         OF  Shizuoka HS             L/L   05/20/1998   174/75
5 Katsunori Hirai       P   Honda Suzuka            R/R   12/20/1991   180/83
6 Ichiro Tamura         P   Rikkio Univ             R/L   09/19/1994   173/80

Tigers
1 Yusuke Ohyama         IF  Hakuoh Univ             R/R   12/19/1994   181/84
2 Taiki Ono             P   Fuji Univ               R/R   05/30/1994   183/76
3 Hiroto Saiki          P   Sumashofu HS (Kobe)     R/R   11/07/1998   187/79
4 Masumi Hamachi        P   Fukuoka Ohhori HS       R/R   05/25/1998   183/88
5 Kento Itohara         IF  JX-ENEOS                R/L   11/11/1992   175/80
6 Shungo Fukunaga       P   Tokushima Indigo Socks  R/L   05/14/1994   185/90
7 Kenya Nagasaka        C   Tohoku Fukushi Univ     R/R   04/28/1994   173/78
8 Kosuke Fujitani       P   Panasonic               R/R   02/12/1996   194/95

Marines
1 Seigi Tanaka
1 Chihaya Sasaki        P   Oberlin Univ            R/R   06/08/1994   182/85
2 Tomohito Sakai        P   Osaka Gas               R/R   01/02/1993   179/80
3 Takaaki Shima         P   Tokai Ichihara Boyo HS  R/R   06/26/1998   180/82
4 Seiya Dohi            P   Osaka Gas               L/L   07/07/1995   185/81
5 Yuki Ariyoshi         P   Kyushu Mitsubishi       R/R   03/12/1991   179/87
6 Atsuki Taneichi       P   Hachinohedai Ichi HS    R/R   09/07/1998   183/80
7 Yuito Munetsugu       C   Asia Univ               R/R   07/06/1994   183/91

i1 Yoshizumi Yasue      P   Ishikawa Million Stars  R/R   05/26/1992   185/80
i2 Shota Sugawara       OF  Nihon Wellness Sports U L/L   09/19/1993   183/95

Baystars
1 Yuya Yanagi
1 Chihaya Sasaki
1 Haruhiro Hamaguchi    P   Kanagawa Univ           L/L   03/16/1995   173/78
2 Koya Mizuno           P   Tokai Univ Hokkaido     R/R   06/01/1994   175/74
3 Taiga Matsuo          IF  Shugakukan HS           R/R   04/05/1998   174/73
4 Masaya Kyoyama        P   Ohmi HS                 R/R   07/04/1998   183/72
5 Seiya Hosokawa        P   Meishugakuen Hitachi HS R/R   08/04/1998   181/85
6 Yuya Onaka            P   Hiroshima Keizai Univ   R/L   01/31/1995   172/70
7 Yukikazu Karino       IF  Heisei Kokusai Univ     R/R   07/31/1994   179/75
8 Takuya Shindoh        P   JR Higashinihon         R/R   07/16/1992   184/78
9 Keita Sano            IF  Meiji Univ              R/L   11/28/1994   177/77

i1 Takamasa Kasai       P   Shinano Grandserows     R/R   08/07/1994   179/93

Hawks
1 Seigi Tanaka          P   Soka Univ               R/R   07/19/1994   186/89
2 Yuto Furuya           P   Koryo HS (Hokkaido)     L/L   02/19/1999   176/76
3 Ryuhei Kuki           C   Shugakukan HS           R/R   09/05/1998   181/82
4 Masaki Mimori         IF  Aomori Yamada HS        R/L   02/21/1999   183/66

i1 Shogo Ohmoto         OF  Teikyo #5 HS            R/L   04/22/1998   186/94
i2 Hiroki Hasegawa      P   Seitoku Gakuen HS       L/L   08/23/1998   174/73
i3 Tsubasa Tashiro      OF  Hachinohe Kosei HS      R/L   03/19/1999   179/72
i4 Kosuke Moriyama     IF/P Fujisawa Shoryo HS      R/R   04/13/1998   187/86
i5 Rikuya Shimizu       OF  Kyoto Kokusai HS        R/R   01/22/1999   186/76
i6 Ryugen Matsumoto     IF  Sotoku HS               R/L   02/27/1999   175/72

Giants
1 Seigi Tanaka
1 Chihaya Sasaki
1 Naoki Yoshikawa       IF  Chukyo Gakuin Univ      R/L   02/08/1995   177/79
2 Seishu Hatake         P   Kinki Univ              R/L   05/31/1994   186/74
3 Tappei Tanioka        P   Toshiba                 R/R   03/21/1996   181/81
4 Shun Ikeda            P   Yamaha                  L/L   11/29/1992   174/72
5 Hosei Takada          P   Soshi Gakuen HS         R/R   07/04/1998   178/75
6 Ryusei Ohe            P   Nishogakusha HS         L/L   01/15/1999   171/75
7 Jen-Lei Liao          P   Kainan Univ (Taiwan)    R/R   08/30/1993   201/125

i1 Suguru Takai         P   Niigata Albirex         R/R   08/22/1995   180/78
i2 Shuhei Katoh         OF  Iwata Higashi HS        R/R   03/28/1999   178/84
i3 Motohiro Yamakawa    P   Hyogo Blue Thunders     R/L   01/04/1995   170/73
i4 Koki Sakamoto        P   Kansai Gakuin (Rubber)  R/R   08/19/1994   180/80
i5 Seiya Matsubara      OF  Meisei Univ             R/L   01/26/1995   173/70
i6 Ryutaro Takayama     C   Kyushu Sangyo Univ      R/R   02/21/1995   186/80
i7 Hayato Horioka       P   Aomori Yamada HS        R/R   09/11/1998   183/84
i8 Yusuke Matsuzawa     OF  Kagawa Olive Guyners    L/L   07/01/1992   181/85

Fighters
1 Seigi Tanaka
1 Chihaya Sasaki
1 Mizuki Hori           P   Hiroshima Shinjo HS     L/L   05/10/1998   177/72
2 Kazunari Ishii        IF  Waseda Univ             R/L   05/06/1994   181/76
3 Kazuki Takara         P   Kyushu Sandai Univ      R/R   06/25/1994   177/77
4 Keisuke Moriyama      OF  Senshu Univ             L/L   05/02/1994   187/85
5 Yuki Takayama         P   Osaka Toin HS           L/L   05/17/1998   180/70
6 Yujiro Yamaguchi      P   Riseisha HS             L/L   05/14/1998   180/87
7 Takuya Koori          C   Teikyo HS               R/R   04/25/1998   177/74
8 Taisho Tamai          P   Kazusa Magic            R/R   06/16/1992   178/78
9 Junnosuke Imai        IF  Chukyo HS               R/L   05/25/1998   177/88

Carp
1 Seigi Tanaka
1 Chihaya Sasaki
1 Takuya Katoh          P   Keio Univ               R/R   12/31/1994   175/90
2 Koya Takahashi        P   Hanasaki Tokuharu HS    L/L   09/27/1998   181/83
3 Hiroki Tokota         P   Chubu Gakuin Univ       L/L   03/01/1995   182/74
4 Shogo Sakakura        C   Nichidai Sanko HS       R/L   05/29/1998   177/80
5 Makoto Aduwa          P   Matsuyama Seiryo HS     R/R   10/02/1998   196/86
6 Ryota Nagai           P   Tsukuba Shuei HS        R/R   01/15/1999   181/81

12:53am: turns out that hahahaha no the TBS link does not work.
~1:10am: I have Konansports on, but it's so damn choppy that it's almost not worth watching. That means that I missed most of the ceremonial starting stuff and I'm mostly ok with that since it's silly.

The main thing about this year is that they're making the winning and losing ballots more obvious after Manaka's little mistake with Takayama last year. Wonder if we'll be able to tell or not.

Anyway, first round is in this order, and I'll put choices in:
Buffaloes: Yamaoka Taisuke, Tokyo Gas, P
Dragons: Yanagi Yuya, Meiji Univ, P
Eagles: Fujihira Shoma, Yokohama HS, P
Swallows: Terashima Naruki, Riseisha HS, P
Lions: Imai Tatsuya, Sakushin HS, P
Tigers: Ohyama Yusuke, Hakuoh Univ, IF
Marines: Tanaka Seigi, Soka Univ, P
Baystars: Yanagi
Hawks: Tanaka
Giants: Tanaka
Fighters: Tanaka
Carp: Tanaka

1:23am First ballot-off happens and it's for Yuya Yanagi.
And... OH NO HE GOES TO CHUNICHI. Sigh. I will miss you, Yanagi. (Feels like after watching him for the past 7 years I am not likely to see him much with Chunichi, but who knows)

1:27am: Second ballot-off for Tanaka and it goes to Kimiyasu Kudoh drawing for the Hawks. Sigh. Like they need any MORE top talent.

1:36am: Pretty much everybody that had a choice after Tanaka tried to take Chihaya Sasaki and he went to the Marines. Next!

1:46am the first round has finally been decided after the Chihaya lottery and I am a little bit sad that the Fighters did not take any of my favorite first rounders as Katoh went to the Carp and as you saw Yanagi went to Chunichi and all.

So, to sum up the actual first round...

Buffaloes: Taisuke Yamaoka, Tokyo Gas, P
Dragons: Yuya Yanagi, Meiji Univ, P
Eagles: Shoma Fujihira, Yokohama HS, P
Swallows: Naruki Terashima, Riseisha HS, P
Lions: Tatsuya Imai, Sakushin HS, P
Tigers: Yusuke Ohyama, Hakuoh Univ, IF
Marines: Chihaya Sasaki, Oberlin Univ, P
Baystars: Haruhiro Hamaguchi, Kanagawa Univ, P
Hawks: Seigi Tanaka, Soka Univ, P
Giants: Naoki Yoshikawa, Chukyo Gakuin Univ, IF
Fighters: Mizuki Hori, Hiroshima Shinjo HS, P
Carp: Takuya Katoh, Keio Univ, P

Ugh.

Ok, gonna fill in the table. I have pretty much lost the ability to watch the stream after gaining it, which is kinda just fine with me. It turned out the TBS stream DID work, but not on a macbook and not in Chrome, and my PC laptop is so old and crappy it's not worth listening to the fan blowing over the sound of the stream.

2:06am: just a note that the second round started while I was finishing putting the first round in the table, and the Swallows picked Tomoya Hoshi from Meiji in the second round, and that is kinda cool, I just met him during my last weekend in Japan, he's really good, that will be exciting.

2:26am: Done entering the second round and of course we are in the middle of the 4th round now. Kazuki Tanaka from Rikkio went to Rakuten which is kinda exciting and I'm sure there are other ones that I haven't spotted yet too.

3:05am: Incase it isn't obvious, I am just flipping through draft magazines and trying to keep up with the draft (I think I'm mostly done the 4th round now but we're in the 6th). Very excited about a few picks, very annoyed at some others, I will probably comment afterwards. Also, Shu Sugahara got the award for "first dude not in the draft magazines", and there are a bunch of guys who clearly have been named after pro players by the kanji in their names -- Masumi Hamachi (looks like Kuwata) and Yoshinobu Yamamoto (looks like Takahashi).

3:20am: Keisuke Sawada got picked by the Buffaloes! It's not the Fighters but I'm so damn happy he got drafted. We've been buddies since he showed up at Rikkio, basically, and I've always watched him kick ass and take names and somehow get screwed over by the fact that Meiji is always just a little bit better. (ok, nose back to translation grind)

3:37am: Still grinding but I want to look up Keisuke Tsuruta later -- Eagles round 6. He's from Teikyo University's rubber baseball club, which makes him almost as interesting as Takumi Ohshima (who got drafted out of Waseda's softball club)

Also want to look up Swallows round 6 Ryusuke Kikusawa. At 28 he is the oldest in the draft and spent last year playing with the Sonoma Stompers, but I didn't make it up to any games up there (haven't been in a long time actually).

4:26am almost done the normal draft, not gonna do ikusei tonight most likely. Got to the end of the Giants and was like who the heck is リャオ・レンレイ? and it seems to be Jen-Lei Liao who played in the Pittsburgh Pirates system for a bit. I thought 201cm/125kg was a typo at first but apparently no.

4:40am I am done with the normal grid, for the information I have at my disposal so far. I'm going to circle back and see if I can gather anything up for the empty spots, and if I'm still awake after that, I may try to translate the Ikusei draft, but you know the Fighters don't do that stuff so I'm not usually as interested in it.

5:20am I'll do Ikusei tomorrow sometime. Gotta sleep so I can go to work in the "morning".

(Ikusei is done now. Wow, there are a LOT of rubber baseball guys in this draft -- not just ikusei -- and a bunch of Senmon Gakko ones too. Senmon Gakko is like a vocational school that people go to after high school to figure out a trade, and it's not typically somewhere you go to play baseball.)

Friday, September 23, 2016

Movie review/synopsis, "Aozora Yell"

I haven’t really seen anything written about this in English so I thought I would at least try to write some kind of review or synopsis. I'm in Japan again for the last two weeks of September, mostly watching baseball, but the country seems to have decided to rain the entire time I'm here.

Yesterday (Sept 22) was yet another rainy day and so the baseball games I wanted to see were rained out, so instead I went to see a movie called Aozora Yell. I had seen posters for this outside Jingu, with a manga-style picture of a high school baseball player and a high school girl with a trumpet. And that is literally all I knew about the movie going in, since I'm not into manga, but it is apparently based on a fairly popular baseball manga that just recently finished.

Funny thing is, I went to see it because I thought it was a baseball movie, but actually, it was about 35% baseball and about 65% marching band. Fortunately, I like baseball movies AND I like band movies (like, “Swing Girls” is still one of my favorite Japanese movies ever).

The main character in this movie is a girl named Tsubasa Ono. Tsubasa is short and shy and mostly stares at her feet a lot and has a quiet voice and has very little confidence. She wanted to come to Shirato High School because when she was young, they represented Hokkaido at Koshien (did I mention it takes place in Sapporo? I kinda felt like Shirato is kinda based on Hokkai) and she loved hearing the brass band playing, and vowed that one day she would play trumpet for Shirato at Koshien.

The other main character in this movie is a boy named Daisuke Yamada. Daisuke is a catcher for the school’s baseball team. Ever since he was very young, he also saw the same Koshien game where Shirato represented Hokkaido, and he also decided that one day he would play at Koshien for Shirato. Daisuke is super-tall (the actor playing him is 185cm, but even in the manga they show him as standing a full head over Tsubasa) and very confident and is such a nice guy that it is actually cartoonish (intact, that is my one issue with the way Ryoma Takeuchi played him — and maybe it’s just the way he is in the manga — but Daisuke has like, no depth at all, he’s just a super cheerful super nice boy with a super smile and a lot of apparent baseball skill).

Tsubasa and Daisuke first meet when they are entering school at Shirato. The school has their awards display case for brass band next to their awards display case for baseball, and so the two of them are staring at the cases and are both like, in unison, “I’m so glad I’m here, I can’t wait to…” and Daisuke completes the sentence with “play at Koshien” and Tsubasa completes it with “play at the national band competition”. They both laugh and share that they had both seen that same Koshien game as kids and wanted to come to Shirato ever since. Daisuke says, “Well, I’m going to definitely get to Koshien with the baseball team. So when I do, will you be there in the stands cheering for me?” and Tsubasa, in that typical holy-crap-i-cant-believe-this-good-looking-guy-is-talking-to-me way is like “…okay…” and he’s like “Great! It’s a promise! Bye!” and walks off.

Naturally Tsubasa and Daisuke end up in the same homeroom. I almost worried it was going to turn into one of those plots where Tsubasa gets bullied by the popular kids, but instead, after all the students introduce themselves, a really pretty girl named Himari comes up to Tsubasa like “we were at the same middle school! Let’s be friends!”. Himari, also, I cannot figure out her motivation exactly, but her personality is really bright and for whatever reason she really does become friends with Tsubasa. And Himari is like “let’s go hang out after school!” and Tsubasa’s like “…actually I want to join the marching band…” and Himari’s like “omg what, it’s soooooo strict” but then Tsubasa explains that she made that promise to Daisuke and all.

In the meantime there’s another boy in their homeroom named Kido, who also joins the baseball team with Daisuke. Kido has a huge crush on Himari. He wears glasses and at first it isn't clear what he’s doing baseball-wise but along the way while working with Daisuke as a catcher and best friend, Kido eventually becomes the school’s ace pitcher. (Ironically the actor who played him was also an ace pitcher in rubber baseball at his own high school.)

Tsubasa goes to join the brass band and it is… difficult. Like, she tells them how she’s there because she wants to cheer the baseball team, and to play trumpet, basically everyone is like “WTF, you should just leave, little girl”. The brass band director (played by Juri Ueno, who I immediately recognized as having played Nodame Cantabile 10 years ago — holy crap) is like “Can you inflate this fuusen balloon from zero? No? Come back when you can.”

So Tsubasa goes off and trains to get better lung capacity and eventually comes back and joins the club, and they start teaching her to play trumpet, and so on. I found this part actually pretty unbelievable because I joined marching band in college having not played a brass instrument before, and they started me on euphonium, and while I was able to learn to play a B flat scale in 3 weeks and marched with the band that semester, it took me a LONG time to be able to play decently, AND there is no way I could do that with a trumpet. Trumpet playing is HARD. The embouchure alone is tough to master, let alone playing it in different registers and making it sound good. But whatever, it’s a manga and a movie and so of course she magically becomes adequate within a relatively short period of time.

Of course, all of the band members are kind of jerks towards her, or at least many are. There’s a boy named Mizushima who entered the band and already gets all the trumpet solos even as a freshman because he’s just that damn good. He’s also just that damn big an asshole, and pretty much almost everything he says to Tsubasa in the first year of the movie is something to the effect of “why won’t you quit the band already, you suck”. He is somehow the only boy in the trumpet section (to be fair — the JHS I taught at, the brass band club was entirely female as well, so I guess it’s not that weird that 70% of their brass band club in the movie is female). The section leader is named Kasuga and she apparently is REALLY pissed that the school hasn’t won a gold medal in the 3 years she’s been there. There’s a girl named Mori who is really good at trumpet but sprains her wrist at some point in the movie and then hides it from the rest of the band (but Tsubasa sees her leaving the doctor’s office, and Mori threatens her if she tells anyone).

Anyway, despite all this, Tsubasa does persevere and stays in the band and does her best, and Daisuke does his best in the baseball club, and as freshmen, they do go to the prefectural final game, where Shirato barely loses the game, and it’s at least somewhat Daisuke’s fault. His senpai gives him batting gloves that he wrote “go to Koshien” on.

Written artifacts are kind of a thing in this movie. There’s the gloves, and also, one of the days when Tsubasa is crying in their homeroom after getting yelled at by Mizushima and the rest of the trumpet players, Daisuke comes up to her and draws a happy face on her shoes like “look, you can stare at your shoes… and when you do, you can think of me and get courage”. Also, a side plot is that during a festival, Tsubasa and Daisuke get pushed together date-like by Himari and Kido (in a somewhat funny scene where the two of them are spying on Tsubasa and Daisuke and Kido is like “hey you know… we could also go out together huh?” and Himari’s like “haha very funny I have no interest in you silly boy”). So Tsubasa and Daisuke go off to write ema — the wooden prayer tablets — and Tsubasa writes hers as “aim for the National Band Competition”. Daisuke won’t show her his, but (spoiler) later in the movie she comes back to the shrine to pray for him after he gets injured, and it turns out he’s written a bunch of them over the years that all say “I want to take Tsubasa to Koshien”.

At the end of freshman summer Tsubasa does confess to Daisuke that she loves him and he’s like “I’m really sorry but I have to focus on baseball”. And Kido and everyone are like “are you an idiot? you clearly like her and she likes you and…”

Time cuts to two years later. They are all 3rd-years and the brass band still hasn’t made it to nationals and neither has the baseball team. Daisuke is captain of the baseball team, Mizushima is the president of the brass band club, and Tsubasa still kinda sorta sucks at trumpet but is doing her best (but, of course, she ends up like, mentoring a freshman on how to play better, and that freshman makes the cut for ensembles while Tsubasa doesn’t). There’s a new manager girl in the baseball club named Akane who has a huge crush on Daisuke, so she’s always telling Tsubasa to get lost whenever she comes to watch the team play. (She eventually comes to her senses when she sees how much Daisuke actually likes Tsubasa and gets inspired by the marching band but it takes a while, and until then she’s a total bitch, but I’ve seen that plot before so it was pretty obvious what would happen).

I’m going to cut out on the synopsis here for two reasons: 1) it really would be spoiling the ending if I tell what happens during their 3rd year, and 2) I have no more time to write this right now, so if I leave it hanging, I won’t get around to posting it. Suffice it to say that it is a happy ending and almost every one of these plots and characters gets tied up in a way that is beneficial for them (although it is never clear whether Kido and Himari ever hook up or not).

I enjoyed this movie because I enjoy cheesy Japanese high school baseball movies. Also, even though Daisuke has so little depth as a human being, Ryoma Takeuchi is so adorable that it’s worth watching anyway, even if he seriously looks like a living manga character (you have to see him smile).

Tsubasa is a surprisingly deep female character to be honest — while her growth from shy mousy freshman into confident senior is what you expect out of the movie, I felt like her conflicts were real and her emotions were real, and only mildly cartoonish, all things considered. When Daisuke turns her down the first time she is distraught, but he says he wants to be friends and she does her best to stay friends with him, even saying at one point like “does it bother you that I’ve said I like you?” Tsubasa also takes a lot of shit from Mizushima and yet she keeps trying to get him to crack his stubbornness and his gloominess, and finally does get him to smile and to work with her and to bring the band together. Like, she has some real moments where you don’t expect her to be the one who steps out to support the upperclassmen who have been terrible to her, but she does.

If you’re not into predictable cheesy Japanese high school movies based on shoujo manga, though, this definitely is not the movie for you. You’ll cringe every time Daisuke smiles, you’ll want to smack Tsubasa for having no backbone, and you’ll find everything in it pretty predictable.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Fighters Spring Camp - Two-Shot Friday!

I mean, that's not an official thing or anything, but I was surprisingly lucky today in getting photos with and talking to a whole ton of really interesting and awesome people!

Yesterday was an off day for the team, so Dani and I went to tour Chase Field. I'm not going to write a separate entry about it (maybe some other time), but it cost $7 and we got to go all around the concourse (and past the pool in CF!), down into the visitor's clubhouse and bullpen, into the press room, up to the Diamond Level suites, and then down onto the field for a bit (well, standing on the warning track in front of the dugout). I've been on several stadium tours now, and I think this one you at least certainly get your bang for your buck.

At the end of the tour, we went into the gift shop. I didn't really want to get anything big, since I know I won't wear a Diamondbacks t-shirt, but I got a small Chase Field pin, AND this is relevant a bit later, I saw that they had Diamondbacks chapstick, and so I bought one for Kagiya. (This sounds weird unless you watch enough Fighters variety shows like Dani does and find out that he actually has a problem with dry lips and is always carrying around chapstick in his pocket. Dani even gave him a bunch of chapsticks earlier in the week and is probably going to kill me for mentioning that here.)

After getting back to Peoria, the only Fighters-related thing that happened to me for the rest of the day was, I went to the nearby mall to get food, and... nearly walked right into Hiromi Oka out on the concourse. I said hi, but he ignored me. Probably he was as surprised anyone recognized him as I was to see him. At the food court, then, I saw Takumi Ohshima and Yuya Taniguchi standing at the Jamba Juice with Takahiro Nomo (Hideo's son, and a translator for the Fighters). I wasn't really sure what to do other than to pretend I didn't see them and move on. It isn't surprising that several of the guys on the team would spend their off day shopping; it's a typical hobby for young Japanese men, and I'm sure they wanted to bring back some souvenirs to Japan.

Today, Friday, was my last full day in Peoria, as I'm flying out tomorrow evening. It was another practice day, so I packed light. I got to the stadium, got out of the car, and thought that my bag seemed a little TOO light -- get this, I had prepared my dSLR camera and then completely not taken it with me when I left the hotel. Oops. I figured I could maybe go back for it at lunchtime, but for now I wanted to enjoy the craziness of the morning practice session.

And believe me, it was CRAZY. Do you want to know why? This is why:

Yes, Yu Darvish came to visit camp this morning. Some of the fans didn't seem surprised -- he had apparently either mentioned it on Twitter or it had surfaced in the media that he would stop by camp at SOME point during the two weeks, but nobody knew when.

Ohtani must have been relieved since for an hour or so this means the media throng was following somebody else around for a change.

So that was sort of nuts. Darvish walked around mostly inside Field 6 and the bullpen area and seemed to just be hanging out watching stuff. Also in exciting things, Romash Tasuku Dass, if you remember him (he was a half-Indian Fighters pitcher that got cut from the team after 2011), was hanging around camp as part of Darvish's entourage. I actually did say hi to him like "Long time no see, what are you up to now?" and he basically said he's working as an assistant for Darvish.

Eventually Darvish got whisked off on a cart and things got back to "normal", whatever that means. I talked to a whole bunch of random fans in the morning, and I also met Keith Werman, who played in the Mariners system for a year or two and is now working for the Fighters and Padres and apparently helped facilitate the Fighters coming to the USA. (There aren't many non-Japanese people around in camp with Fighters gear; 99% of the non-Japanese people around are either scouts or are random Peoria people who just came by to see what was going on because they're regulars at the PSC. So I wondered what his story was and decided to just ask.)

I caught Kagiya as he was coming off the field at one point and was like "Hey-we-went-to-the-Diamondbacks-stadium-and-I-saw-this-lip-cream-at-the-store-and-thought-of-you-so-here-you-go-it's-major-league-lip-cream" and gave him the chapstick. He laughed and thanked me. I guess that was a success.

The foreign pitchers all kind of came off the field at the same time so I asked Chris Martin and Anthony Bass if I could get photos with them, and I also managed to get Kuriyama-kantoku, and then Luis Mendoza came out and we chatted about basketball for a while! That was really cool. He said that he went to the game with two of the other players (Nakamura and I forgot who the other one was). I was like "Didn't the rest of the team go to a hockey game?" and he was like "Yeah, but I wanted to see the Warriors, they're such a good team, it's fun to watch Stephen Curry play and all."

Bizarrely there was another fan there -- a Japanese woman who lives in Arizona now but used to live near me in the Bay Area -- who had also been at the game! That was pretty random.

(I didn't find Dani until almost noon, so I ended up making friends with a whole bunch of random other Japanese fans who were around, because I needed to bug someone to take photos for me. And people were interesting -- one woman was there with her son, because her husband was cooking the meals for the Fighters. Another woman, a Masui fan, had come in from Osaka for the weekend and told me she was going to Okinawa next weekend. Another man, Tanaka-san, had lived in Arizona for a few years so his English was pretty good and we ended up hanging out together for a lot of the day just because we were always in the same place.)

I kind of intended to leave and go back to the hotel around then, but interesting things kept happening. For example, a bunch of umpires showed up at the field and were hanging around! Curiosity got the best of me so I chatted with them for a while. They said that umpires do have spring training too, of course, and so they were also going to work out with the team for the afternoon. I mentioned how I could immediately tell during the game that they had Japanese umpires there because of the way they called the strikes (it sounds like "TORAAAAAAII"), and they were joking how one of the umpires is the "quiet man" because he doesn't do that. I dunno, it was funny. I got a photo with the younger one, Tomoya Ishiyama, number 25:

I dunno, I have several friends who are big fans of some of the umpires, crazy as that sounds. And of course, I've always kept an eye on Kengo Iwashita since he graduated from the Hosei baseball team and became an umpire as well. And one of my old junior high school students is currently studying to become an umpire too, crazy as that sounds!

A little bit after that, I guess to start preparing for fielding practice in the afternoon, Makoto Kaneko came out to the field we were hanging out next to, and I was like "Kaneko-saaaaan" and he was like "chotto matte ne?" and then when he came back I asked if we could get a photo and holy crap he said okay!

I had seriously been all prepared to pull out the pouting "But I even wore my Kaneko shirt todaaaay" like I had done on Saitoh the other day, except I didn't even need to!

So at that point I was like "Great! Now I can leave for lunch and go get my camera so I can take pictures at afternoon fielding practice and all," and so Dani and I walked from Field 6 over to Field 4, just to see what was going on there on the way out. And so Tanaka-san was hanging out there, AND we all went over and got a photo with Takashi Saito, who was surprisingly nice as well!

And then I got to talking with this older guy from Minnesota who spends his winters in Arizona -- his name was Duane and he is also relevant to this story quite a bit -- he was saying how he'd seen us at the game the other day, and was also saying how he'd been sitting with Seguignol and with Matt Winters, and I was like "dang, I've always wanted to meet Matt Winters, he's such a legend within the team."

"Well -- Matt's right over there, why don't you say hi to him?"

"Wait WHAT?"

And he points out a guy in a blue polo shirt and calls out like "Hey Matt, this girl wanted to meet you."

And Matt Winters, legendary Fighters outfielder of the 90's and scout for the last ten years comes over and is like "HEY! You're the girl who wrote the Fighters blog for all those years! I was such a big fan, why did you stop writing?"

If you've ever met me, you know that I am rarely speechless -- infact, usually completely the opposite -- but for once I really had no idea what to say! I mean, my friends still wear their "Winters 10" jerseys sometimes! And he had read my blog to keep up with things back in the day! How crazy is that?

I ended up talking to Matt for about an hour or so. It was just really awesome. He is completely full of crazy stories about both playing for the Fighters as well as scouting for the Fighters. Like he would tell funny stories about him and Rick Schu and Kip Gross and all hanging out back in the day, and then talk about things like how he just happened to see Brian Sweeney pitching in Omaha one day and said "This guy is perfect, we need a pitcher, can we get him?" And, oh man, Matt brought up the entire Jason Botts debacle that I may have partially contributed to back in 2008-9. That was about as nostalgic and embarrassing as my blogging history gets, certainly.

Matt eventually had to actually run off and talk to some more relevant people, so I went to sit back down with Dani and Tanaka (who had gotten a photo and autograph from Winters as well), and he's like "So you wrote a blog about the Fighters? In English? Can you give me the URL?" and so we traded business cards, and I wrote this blog's URL on the back of mine, and then something even weirder happened:

A guy behind me is like "HEY! Did I just hear you wrote a Fighters blog? Are you Deanna?"

And that guy turns out to be Dan Evans. Yes, former GM for the Dodgers and such. We follow each other on Twitter.

And then he's also like "Do you know if the other girl, Dani, is she here?"

Dani was standing next to me talking to someone else in the stands so I'm like "Dani! Turn around, this is Dan Evans, you need to say hi to him!"

And he's like "Can I get a photo with you guys? We have to put this on Twitter."

(Yes, you read that right. An MLB executive asked if he could get his photo with us. Like I said, this day couldn't possibly get any weirder.)

No, seriously, Dan is a very cool guy and it was great to meet him and chat with him for a while. Like Matt, he also had real relevant work to be doing and people to talk to besides a bunch of crazy fangirls, but he said it was great to meet us and that he learns lots of interesting NPB gossip from following us.

Next thing that happened was, there was this half-Japanese boy there wearing a Kansai little league t-shirt. I didn't get why this was relevant until Sho Nakata came out of BP, saw the kid, gave him a big hug and a baseball bat and his batting gloves, and of course the whole media was very WTF over this. The Fighters official photographer even took a picture of them together, and they were chatting together for a few minutes. So while the media swarmed Sho, I asked the boy what his story was, and he was like "Oh yeah, I grew up in Kansai and I played at the same little league that Sho played in, a few years later, and he visited us, and so now I'm here in Arizona in college and Sho invited me to come out to see him at camp."

And my jaw dropped like "That is so awesome! You're so lucky and I hope you're enjoying it!"

And before I could ask more, the media swarmed up to him to ask him a bazillion questions, so I excused myself and went back to sit down.

I noticed that the Fighters' director of operations, Toshi Shimada, was standing near us so I said hi to him -- not that I'd ever spoken to him before, but I was basically like "Matt Winters was talking about you!" and he laughed like "Yeah, I think Matt's bitter that I get to boss him around now unlike the old days," since he was Matt's interpreter, and then he was like "Oh, and I saw you on TV the other night with the Kagiya jersey," and I was like "I hope you don't think I'm too stupid," and he said no, it was nice of me to be such a big fan. And we got to talking for a while, about the future of the team coming back to Arizona and some other stuff. His take on it all was pretty funny -- like, the players were a lot more enthusiastic their first few days in the US but are now kinda like "let's go home already", but he also said that of course, when they go to Okinawa, it'll be the same way -- a few days of "woo Okinawa!" and then a week of "Okay, let's go home already".

So that was cool too. I feel like this week has been great for getting to meet people all across the Fighters organization, from the players to the staff to the front office.

By this time it was already 2:30, and I was starving, but there was no point in leaving. I was talking to Duane again, the guy from Minnesota who had introduced me to Matt Winters, and Duane mentioned that since he had the season tickets to the normal Peoria spring training, he had gotten comped tickets for the Fighters vs. Lotte Giants cames on Monday and Wednesday. And I was like "Are you kidding me? That's so cool, those shouldn't even exist!"

"Wait, do you want them? I'll go get them for you. I'm probably just going to throw them out, but a super fan like you, you should get them signed or something, put them in a scrapbook of this trip!"

And he seriously said he'd meet me back by the front gates in about 15-20 minutes with them. Dani and Tanaka and I walked out there a bit later since practice was winding down anyway, and... and he showed up with the tickets! He had two for Monday and two for Wednesday, so I kept one of each and gave one to Dani and one to Tanaka (it's not like I needed four, but having one of each day was kind of awesome).

And finally at THAT point I went and got something to eat, dropped off some things at my hotel, put on more sunscreen, and came back to wait around for players to come out.

Except it turned out they were having some big party that evening - a barbecue with some Padres people, supposedly including Trevor Hoffman. So after waiting for like an hour none of the players had come out, and we were all a little worried. Two girls in particular, they were both leaving tomorrow morning and had bought Valentine's presents for Taniguchi and Nakashima, and were a little despondent.

Eventually all of the players did come back through to go to their party. Well, most of them anyway. We never did see Nakashima. But Taniguchi came by and I got him to sign one of my tickets, and I got Kaneko (!) of all people to sign the other. So that worked out. I spent a while talking to all the people there, and I hope they managed to find the players they wanted to see, or otherwise had good evenings. I did feel really sorry for the Nakashima fan girl. I left around 6pm when it became dark.

Okay. I don't have any action photos from the day, so you're going to get a ton of my two-shots with people plus a funny Ohtani pouty face in the dugout. Enjoy!

Yukihiro Nishizaki retired a year or two before I started following NPB, but he's often been around as a commentator on Fighters TV. I saw him pitch in the Master's League once.

There were some holes in the dugout fence wall, so I poked my camera in to see what I could see, and came out with a pouty Ohtani face.

Chris Martin is much taller than me.

Anthony Bass is only mildly much taller than me. :)

Manager Kuriyama!

Recently retired Satoshi Nakajima, who has been parading around in Padres gear all week

Takashi Saito! Who actually has every right to parade around in Padres gear, or several other teams :)

Matt Winters!

Winters still signs the way he did when he was a player, with number 10 and his name in katakana and all. Tanaka thought that was really cool (he's been a Fighters fan for 25 years so he actually remembers Matt as a player!).

Shota Ohno, who I have seriously wanted to meet since he was in college. No joke. I just wish I hadn't been so shy back then. Now he's captain again, just like he was at Toyo.

Sho Nakata talking to the boy from his little league.

Hayao Segawa, who I'd never met before, and I couldn't find my camera at the time, so this was taken with my cellphone. He was nice and waited a second for me while I scrambled to find something to take the picture with after I asked. Segawa's one of the oldest rookies the team's ever had, but he's also from Hokkai HS originally so I hope he's successful with the team!

And last but not least -- these are those tickets that Duane gave me! He said to go get 'em signed and put them in my scrapbook, so here they are! It's really neat having tickets to a game that didn't have tickets. :) The Japanese fans were all calling these "幻のチケット", like when you have tickets to a postseason game that doesn't happen, that sort of thing.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Fighters Spring Camp Day 3 - Bravo Fighters and Other Game Day Craziness

Today camp featured another game between the KBO Giants and the Fighters. Same teams from Monday's game, although this time they switched which uniforms they were wearing, so I have a completely new set of pictures that I'm never going to finish going through.

I slept in slightly this morning, by which I mean I got to practice around 10:15, by which point they were already winding down to get ready for the game. BUT, I did get to catch up with Fernando Seguignol for a while, which totally made my day. This winter I spent a week in Costa Rica over the holidays, and there were bananas everywhere, and I kept telling my fiance about how we used to have this player on the Fighters who was from Panama and people would wave bananas during his at-bat -- and well, get this, when I mentioned it to Seggy, it turns out I was in the part of Costa Rica that is only a few miles away from his hometown in Panama! How crazy is that?

After that Dave and I wandered over to the main field. On the way we saw Kagiya running in the Field #3 outfield, and I was looking over at him, and he smiled and waved at me while I was debating if I should wave or not! So I felt like slightly less of a big dork smiling and waving back at him. That was good.

The posted "menu" for the day actually had the lineups for the game on it, so that meant I also knew that Ohtani would pitch two innings, then Arihara 2, then Yagi 2, then Segawa, Inui, and Kanehira each 1. I feel kind of silly for not having looked at it on Monday, since I would have known Kagiya was pitching too. Go figure.

We did enter the stadium at opening, although despite there being a lot more people for the game due to Ohtani starting, those people were mostly scouts and sat behind home plate, so we had no competition to sit behind the dugout. So, I set up behind the dugout, behind the opening in the fence, and put up my Ohtani towel that I brought with me that day, with the idea that in theory he'd have to see it when he came back to the dugout.

Then I hung out for a while just taking photos and stuff. Dani didn't come until around 11:40, so it was a little harder to go around as we only had two of us to watch stuff. So like, at one point, Sho Nakata threw a ball far back into the stands and I was like "Oh, that was at Inaba," so Dave ran off to get Inaba's signature, for example.

I spent about ten minutes really wanting to say something to Kaneko and finally at some point when there was a lull in the pre-game stuff and he was just kind of standing around I called down to him,

金子さああああああん！ (Kaneko-saaaan!)
はい？ (Hmm?)
アメリカに来てくれてありがとうございます！ (Thank you for coming to the US!)
ああ、どうも。 (Oh, sure.)
来年も来てください！！ (Please come back next year!!)
（笑） (laughs)

I'm somewhat jealous since Dave managed to get Kaneko's autograph before I showed up this morning, but that's beside the point.

Anyway, I was able to run and get a hot dog and drink from concessions before the game started, which was good -- and they even had souvenir cups for Padres/Mariners spring training, so I got one of those, and asked them for as much ice as possible, and it ended up lasting me all game!

Let's see if I can sum up the game to mention the things people might actually care about that happened. I mean, overall it ended up being a 1-1 game, so not a lot of scoring to speak of. The Fighters run came in the 6th inning when Haruki Nishikawa led off with a double and scored on a single by Go Matsumoto. The Giants run came in the 9th inning when Dong Su Kang led off with what ended up being a triple into left-center, and scored on a single by Yeung Sek Son. I pretty much completely lost track of which Giants pitcher was on the mound when, so I don't know who gave up the Fighters run, but I do know that Masashi Kanehira gave up the Giants run.

Shohei Ohtani pitched the first two innings. He faced 7 batters and it basically went: Fly out to center, ground out to short, single to right, strikeout, strikeout, strikeout, strikeout.

I know this sounds lame, but I just don't know enough about the Lotte Giants to know what to say about them. There was a somewhat funny moment when Jun Seok Choi, the Lotte DH who is around 6' and 235 pounds and thus looks utterly not Asian in build, hit what could have and maybe should have been a double, but since he was lumbering around the basepath he got tagged out on a 9-4 play before he actually got to second base.

Ryo Watanabe looked really good at second base, I have a bunch of stars next to plays he made for various reasons I can't remember now (although one I remember being him jumping to catch a line fly).

Speaking of Ryo, they had in a row in the lineup Ryo Ishikawa, Ryo Watanabe, and Ryosuke Kishisato, or as Dani was saying, the "Ryo Trio", because the announcer kept pronouncing their name like "Rio Ishikawa". So I was singing "His name is Rio and he dances on the sand..."

Apart from game action, most of the wackiness of today arose from when I decided to go for a walk around the 5th-6th inning. This was mostly because I realized that I wasn't really going to get to see the stadium if all I did was sit behind the Fighters dugout the whole time. Also, it was really hot out, so I thought taking a break in the shade for a bit would be nice.

This turned out to be my downfall, as basically, I went to stand in the shade for a minute and I ended up getting approached from this guy with a big TV camera, and he was like (in English) "Hi, I'm with a TV show, can I ask you a question?" but I was looking at the board he was holding, which said "Who would you choose as your boyfriend?" which is a variation of a TV segment "恋人選び", which I know I've seen at least one version of. Like, sometimes it's "which member of AKB48?" or "which guy on the national soccer team?" and so on, and they survey a bunch of people and try to figure out the most popular.

So, Bravo Fighters was going to do this in Arizona and ask random American women to look at a group of Fighters players and choose someone.

Except that I am the least random American woman you could possibly find there. Which should have been obvious by my custom signed pinned pimped-up Fighters gear, but maybe not.

He shows me this board:

and I'm thinking, like, there are several Fighters players I find quite adorable and charming, except ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THEM ARE ON THIS BOARD. I wonder if they put it together for "guys we think might be appealing to American women", because there's no way you'd do this for Japanese women without including Taniguchi.

So I answer, "Huh? Kagiya's not on there?"

And he's like "Kagiya?"

I turn around to show him my uniform like "Yeah, he's my favorite player, the pitcher, number 30".

"Oh, sorry. No, no Kagiya. How about out of this list of guys?"

I pause for a bit. "Huh, I don't know. Maybe Sugiya?"

"Okay, Sugiya. Why Sugiya?"

"Because he's really funny. He's always laughing and makes me laugh a lot."

Anyway, I told him he should wait for my friend to get back since she's wearing a Nishikawa uniform, and sure enough Dani came by and I had him interview her too, and she didn't even know what happened during my exchange but also picked Sugiya.

He ended up talking to me for a while and filmed part of my scorebook as well, because I was keeping score after we talked, and I showed him how I had some games from the Sapporo Dome last fall, and stickers of guys like Kisanuki on the front, and so on. I'm a big dork, these things happen.

When I first started writing this entry I just knew that the segment had aired, which was possibly one of the most mortifyingly embarrassing things to happen to me in a while, since a bunch of friends in Hokkaido emailed or tweeted at me saying they had seen me on TV, and a few even sent screencaps.

However! Since I didn't finish this entry before falling asleep, in the morning, someone had found the episode of Bravo Fighters for me on Youtube! So you can watch it all, in its glory. My appearance is at about 12:35, though the entire segment starts at about 11:00 when Ikeda-san explains his idea to do the Koibito-Erabi schtick.

Or if you don't feel like watching that video, a few screencaps:

Me saying "Ehh? No Kagiya?"

They subtitled me as a "Big Kagiya Fan"

Captioned as "Fighters fan since the Tokyo Dome era"

Me saying "Well, Sugiya is the funniest guy..."

Yeah.

Oh, also, if you watch the rest of the clip, you might notice the first half is all about Ohtani's start, and all the scouts who showed up to watch him, and Dani and I make a brief cameo at 2:47 or so with our cameras out behind my Ohtani towel hanging from the dugout:

So aside from telling the entire island of Hokkaido about my crush on Kagiya, the other funny thing that happened while walking around was that Dani and I ran into Minivish, the somewhat infamous Yu Darvish cosplayer who's been around for the last few years. He's from Ibaraki but lives in LA; I met him a few times before, like in Oakland and also at Yankee Stadium for days Darvish was starting.

Before the game, actually, a bunch of Fighters players were pointing and laughing like "Hey, there's that crazy Darvish cosplayer", and someone else at the game even tweeted how WOW MINIVISH IS HERE by taking a photo of him talking to me.

So Dani and I went to chase down Minivish and next thing we know he's getting filmed for a segment on Bravo Fighters as well, although obviously not asking who he'd choose as his boyfriend.

After all of that excitement I just walked around the stands for an inning or so. Made it all the way to the bullpens in right field, where we saw Hakumura walk by and said hi, and then Dani went back to the seats and I walked to the left field area. There's a lounge there that looks really nice, but it wasn't open for the game.

I came back to our seats and mostly didn't move again for the rest of the game for fear I would manage to embarrass myself even more.

As mentioned, the game ended in a 1-1 tie. Knowing this time that we'd get thrown out of the stadium pretty quickly afterwards, rather than dawdling behind the dugout until we got ejected, Dani and Dave and I went up to the area behind home plate and took some photos with the stadium in the background and stuff. Then Dave left, since he had to pack up to head back east afterwards. Dani and I went into the Peoria team store, which had a ton of awesome Mariners and Padres spring training gear that we totally didn't want to buy because it was all stupid expensive! I found a cool t-shirt or two and they were all like $40. I mean, I have a good job now and can afford whatever, really, but I have a LOT of t-shirts and these days I try hard not to buy things that I'm not going to use or wear if at all possible.

So, Dani and I both bought eco-friendly shopping bags, since they were both cheap and actually useful, plus they weren't branded Mariners or Padres -- just about every piece of merchandise was branded to one team or another.

I thought about maybe trying to get some of the Fighters to sign my bag, except that I think then I won't bother ever using it, so instead maybe I'll see about getting a postcard signed and I can put that on my desk at work or something and it might be nice.

Dani went back to meet players after the game and all, but I had bought a ticket to the Warriors-Suns game, so I couldn't really stay around all that long. Oddly, most of the Fighters team had gone to the Coyotes-Canucks hockey game, which I even knew was happening, but I figured that rather than stalking the Fighters at the hockey arena, I'd be better off going to another Warriors game -- and I was able to get a lower-level seat for $70, which is pretty much impossible to do in Oakland. Like, when the Suns come to Oakland in a few weeks, there ARE no tickets for under $100, not even in the upper deck. So I thought I'd take my opportunity to see the best team in basketball a little closer up. (We were at the Warriors-Thunder game on Sunday, and paid like $150ish to sit in the upper deck, and were lucky.)

I was originally going to bring a Warriors shirt with me, but my luggage space was a bit tight and I wasn't sure how well it would go over in an away city. Turns out that probably half the arena or more were wearing Warriors gear and carrying Warriors signs; I completely didn't feel guilty cheering any of the many many times Stephen Curry made a 3-point shot or Klay Thompson pulled points out of thin air as well. (They ended with 26 and 24 points each respectively.)

So instead I went in Fighters gear:

And then it turned out that Luis Mendoza was also at the game! Alas, we were on opposite sides of the court, so I didn't see him. Probably just as well, really.

Anyway, if you've read this far, you deserve to see some actual real, relevant photos:

Haruki Nishikawa

Team huddle while Shirai talks

Makoto Kaneko

Bit wider shot of the huddle for irony's sake -- you can see the other side of this in the Fighters PR tweet. And Dave is at the left standing there over the dugout.