Friday Foto: Takahiro Fujioka

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!

Draft Notes: Shunsuke Nakamura (aka Game Report: Toyodai vs. Asiadai)

(I started writing this on Oct 21st but got sidetracked. Basically, the inspiration for this post was seeing a pitcher whose name is in the draft and that I thought looked really good, but for some reason is not mentioned in almost ANY draft magazines...)

Thanks to all of the craziness in Tokyo Big 6 this semester, and a bunch of rainouts in both Big 6 and Tohto, the Tohto University Baseball League decided to switch their schedule from the normal 8-week format with Asia and Toyo playing each other in the 8th week to a 7-week format with 3 games per day in the 7th week, with the Asia-Toyo series happening as the 3rd game of the day each time.

(The 8th week will, instead, be used to finish the Week 4 games, as Toyo-Aogaku and Chuo-Kokushi have only played one game each; right now they have the 2nd day of games scheduled for Oct 26th, and it's likely there'll be at least one game on the 27th, and I think they want to be finished up by Oct 28th for Draft Day.)

I noticed that Tuesday's games, while scheduled to be played at 10, 12:30, and 3pm respectively, ACTUALLY started at 10, 1:15pm, and 5pm, so I thought there was a chance something similar may happen on Wednesday, and I could catch the final game of the day and see some Asia and Toyo players for their last time as amateurs.

I knew that the following players from both universities were registered for the draft:
Toyo
Keisuke Kanuma, RHP. Team captain, very solid but not particularly exciting pitcher. Kinda like Kazuhito Futagami.
Masahiro Inui, LHP. Had a brilliant semester in F08, has been average since. Left-handed but not particularly huge or overpowering.
Ryo Hayashizaki, SS. Hit a homerun off Ma-kun at Koshien 2006, has been a prospect since. Reminds me of Eishin Soyogi.
Takanori Satoh, C. One of the "Big 3 Catchers" of Tohto this year. Not as good as his predecessor, Shota Ohno, nor as good as Aogaku's Shota Koike, who unfortunately broke his hand this semester, but certainly not bad.
Asia
Kazunori Tanaka, OF
Shunsuke Nakamura, RHP

While I've seen all of those Toyo players many times, this was my first time to see both of the Asia players; the last time I caught an Asia game in person was several semesters ago, and neither of them were on the national team. I follow the league and have a general idea what's up with players, certainly, but it's just been a while since I saw that particular team in person. (I don't have a Tohto team the way I have a Big 6 team, but if I did, it would be Toyo.)

Anyway, the games did run late, but not quite late enough, so when I arrived at Jingu, it was the bottom of the 2nd inning. Fortunately, I was able to piece together the first inning and a half using the sparse game comments on the Tohto site as well as the batting lines; I knew that Masahiro Inui got knocked out after 7 batters in the top of the 1st, and that Asia captain Kenshiro Kashima hit a triple to bring in 3 runs and scored himself on a wild pitch to Bruno Hirata, so when I arrived it was 4-0.

At that point, starter Shunsuke Nakamura was pitching for Asia University, and captain Keisuke Kanuma had replaced Inui on the mound for Toyo.

So, certainly, I was interested in seeing Nakamura. If nothing else, he has an interesting name collision in that there's also a famous soccer player in Japan with that name (though different kanji). I noticed that he was pretty tall; he wears #19 and so I thought maybe I was just guessing him as being near Kagami's height because they have similar builds and deliveries.　　（But he is actually listed as 186cm/81kg, which is really close to Kagami.)

And my first impression was that he's a big kid who throws a big forkball. The first thing I saw him do was strike out Takanori Satoh and Takumi Horikoshi in succession. But he was also hitting 152-153 on the Jingu gun, mixing in a few change-ups as well.

Asia added another run in the top of the 4th when Hiroaki Ono walked and then Tomoki Takada hit a triple to right to bring in Ono, making it 5-0.

Meanwhile, in the bottom of the 4th Nakamura allowed his second RUNNER of the game, when he plunked Atsushi Kimura in the back. After 5 innings, Nakamura had faced 17 batters and struck out 9 of them.

Asia added two more runs in the top of the 6th; Shota Tashiro was hit by a pitch and Hiroaki Ono hit one out to center that Toyo CF Yuya Oda dove for and missed, so it went for a double and Tashiro scored, 6-0. Takada followed that with his SECOND triple of the day to bring Ono home, 7-0.

That was it for Keisuke Kanuma. Not the greatest day for the two Toyo draft hopefuls, between him and Inui they gave up 7 runs in less than 6 innings.

But the rest of the Toyo bullpen performed admirably and the rest of the game was scoreless for Asia. Junki Fujita pitched 1.1 innings and walked one and struck out 2; freshman lefty Takaaki Nohma pitched another 1.1 innings and struck out another 2, and Takuya Uchiyama finished it out by hitting one batter and striking out another.

It didn't matter as Shunsuke Nakamura pitched the entire game for Asia, throwing 130 pitches, striking out 11, giving up 5 hits, one walk, and hitting one batter. The highest I saw the radar gun catch him at was 154 km/h (about 96.7 mph). The Toyo batters seemed to have no idea what to do against him.

The game went until around 7pm, so not as late as the other game, and Asia won 7-0. (Box score here in Japanese.) I decided to wait around by the players' buses outside, even though I don't know any of the players, I see Tohto League all of like 2-3 times per year usually so haven't gotten to get my face familiar with them. I didn't have anything to get signed but thought a photo or something might be nice...

Instead, though, I ended up talking to a friend of a friend from my Big 6 bleacher bum group, an older woman who's a huge Yusuke Nomura fan; turns out she likes Toyodai too. (She jokes that Nomura is her grandson; I think she's like 78 so it wouldn't be that far out there!) She suggested that I wouldn't want to talk to Inui or Hayashizaki or Satoh anyway since Toyo got totally beaten down; Inui particularly would likely be in a bad mood. I guess that's probably true.

So, I got nothing. Which is okay. I went to this game on a whim anyway. Also ran into one of my Kamagaya friends, who had managed to get Nao Higashihama's autograph. We walked back to the train station together and I grilled him about Shunsuke Nakamura, like "Why is this kid not listed in any of the draft magazines? And what HAPPENED to Inui today?"

Well, at least part of the puzzle, I understand now; even this year, though he is a senior, and freaking HUGE, with a REALLY FAST fastball, Nakamura is actually Asia's #2 pitcher, not #1. The #1 pitcher is Higashihama, and has been pretty much since Higashihama burst onto the scene last year as a freshman. So Nakamura kind of has been in the shadows for most of his time. Last year, most of the pitching was shared by Higashihama and then 4th-year Keisuke Kuramata (now a pitcher for ENEOS).

And I looked a little into his high school background; he was also a pitcher at Shiga Gakuen HS... and it seems that even then he was their #2. Shiga Gakuen has made it to Koshien all of once ever, at Senbatsu 2009. When Nakamura was a senior, in 2006, they made it all the way to the Shiga prefecture finals before losing 6-3 to Hachiman Shogyo. Hachiman went on to lose to Shizuoka Kogyo in the first round of Koshien 2006, which is now known as the Yuki Saitoh Koshien. The best account of that final Shiga tournament game that I could find is on a Shiga Gakuen blog. I believe that his teammate Takahiro Isa actually lost the game, though Nakamura was wearing #10 during the tourney, a number which generally designates "#2 pitcher" for most schools.

Also, when researching that Shiga Gakuen 2006 team, I came across a bunch of interesting pages, including this scouting review of a whole bunch of players from the Kansai area that year. I'm not going to go into too much detail, though I will say that the page ALSO raves about this excellent left-handed pitcher named Yudai Ohno, who is now a top guy in the 2010 college draft pick. But the thing is that their comment about pitchers from Shiga Gakuen for that year is that they considered a guy named Junkou Kawaguchi to be the best of the 3, that Takahiro Isa was considered their #2, and their comment on Nakamura is limited to, basically, "he's not really there yet as a pitcher, but the kid is HUGE and has a 144km/h fastball and a decent forkball in his arsenal."

Since then, Isa and Kawaguchi have gone on to Aomori University, in the middle of nowhere, where Isa has pitched a bunch and I'm not sure Kawaguchi ever appeared in a league game. And Nakamura is at Asia-dai, pitching games at Jingu in the top tier of the best or second-best college league in the country, depending on who you ask. So go figure.

(And looking at the 2006 HS draft registrees also pulls up some interesting names of guys who are now 4th-years in college and going into the draft again, like Ryo Hayashizaki, and Rissho's Masaki Minami.)

Here are Nakamura's starts this semester at Asia-dai:

                   IP   BF   NP    H   BBH   K    R   ER
9/15  Kokushikan    9   33   112   6    1    2    1    1 
9/22  Chuo          5   22   74    4    2    2    4    1 
10/7  Aoyama        8   29   108   6    1    7    2    2 
10/15 Kokugakuin    9   34   150   6    3    7    3    3 
10/20 Toyo          9   33   130   5    2    11   0    0 
          
Total              IP   BF   NP    H   BBH   K    R   ER   ERA    WHIP
                   40  151  574   27    9    29   10   7   1.575  0.90 

It's clear that the Toyo game was better than average for him, and that I probably witnessed his best pitching performance ever and got a little hyper about him. On the other hand, overall his numbers aren't bad, and he CAN throw fast and he IS a huge kid. You can't blame me for seeing a 6'2" Japanese kid with a 96-mph fastball pitch a complete game shutout with 11 strikeouts against a top-notch college team (Toyo won the national college championship in the spring, after all, and I watched them beat down both Hachinohe's Takahiro Shiomi and Tokaidai's Tomoyuki Sugano) and thinking he might be something special.

Anyway, to sum up: this kid may end up being a sleeper in the draft and go in a later round to some team, and with good coaching become a very good pro pitcher. There have definitely been "perennial #2 guys" who get drafted and turn out just fine; even this past year saw Kenta Matsushita and Hisashi Takeuchi get drafted out of Big 6, and Takeuchi was well-known to have very little on his side besides a blazing fastball and a huge frame. But he's already appeared at ichi-gun for Hiroshima.

Or Nakamura may just end up in the industrial leagues or somewhere else, who knows. Unlike the Big 6 kids, I don't know much about him personally, so he may already have an entire backup plan in place for not getting drafted. (I personally talked to a Big 6 guy who has a really interesting draft backup plan including trying to play in the US... but I'm not going to say anything more about that until after draft day... and no, it's not who you think it is.)

Still, I personally hope he gets drafted just because it'd be funny to be talking about "Shunsuke Nakamura... no, the BASEBALL player!" Kind of like "Yuki Saitoh... no, the left-handed HIROSHIMA CARP pitcher!"

These photos suck because I only had my little camera with me at Jingu, but here are a few from that game on Oct 20th:


What it looked like when I arrived at Jingu. Dark and 4-0 Asia.


Shunsuke Nakamura.


Nakamura again.


Nakamura pitching. His frame really reminds me a lot of Kagami's.


Bruno Hirata. I first saw him a few years back too, he's a 3rd-generation Brazilian-Japanese who was on the Brazil national youth baseball team, then came to Japan as an exchange student in high school at Hachioji because he hoped to play at Koshien, and stayed for college. I'm not sure what he's doing next year, though he's not entered in the draft.


Kazunori Tanaka at bat. Like I said, he's also entered in the draft, but he didn't impress me in particular.


Toyo's Takaaki Nohma.


As you can see, unlike a Big 6 game, the stands are really sparse for Tohto games -- this is the entirety of the Toyo cheering section, including the cheer girls and the brass band and the alumni and fans.


Game over, the players line up and bow to each other.


Final score.

Tohto League Opening Weekend: Aoyama Gakuin vs. Chuo

I took this picture almost by accident today:



The two guys are Chuo University's righty ace pitcher Hirokazu Sawamura, and Toyo University's lefty ace Takahiro Fujioka. Fujioka had just pitched a complete-game 11-inning 13-strikeout 150-pitch shutout against Kokushikan University, and Sawamura was warming up for the Chuo-Aogaku match... but wasn't actually scheduled to start today's game. However, these two are two of the best-known college guys in the country. Sawamura is widely considered to be the #2 or #3 prospect in this year's draft; he has hit 98 mph on the radar gun at Jingu (notoriously fast, but still) and has generally been Chuo's ace almost his entire time there. Fujioka is going to be the #2 or #3 guy in the draft NEXT year; he just pitched Toyo University to the All-Japan Championship title, defeating Tokaidai's ace Tomoyuki Sugano in the finals (and Sugano is almost definitely going to be the #1 guy next year). I'm not sure what they're laughing about but when I saw Sawamura go over to Fujioka I was like "OMG MUST SHOOT THAT".

Anyway, in a few years when those two are starting against each other in the NPB All-Star game, I will have to dig this photo out again and smile.

As for the day... yeah, I skipped going to Chiba and cheering in the heat. Instead I went to Jingu because the Tohto League opening week was on a weekend for once; usually they play weekdays, and I can never go anymore now that I work normal hours. I was worried it might be crowded and I might not be able to just go to the front row and take photos, but... no, even with it on a weekend, and even with these guys being some of the best college ballplayers in the country, still nobody comes to Tohto games. Although the heat might have hurt them; the covered areas behind home plate were actually pretty full, but I basically could go sit behind the dugout in the very front row and it was pretty much empty around there.

I showed up at 1pm, so most of the way through the Toyo-Kokushi game -- which was tied 0-0 at the time. But then Takafumi Sakai hit a 2-run homer and that pretty much won the game for Toyo. Still, I got to see Fujioka pitch a few innings, which I wasn't expecting since I was so late.

The Chuo-Aogaku game... I was on the Chuo side, but Sawamura wasn't pitching, and so Aoyama Gakuin University basically clobbered them. Infact... Aogaku's starting pitcher was a kid named Yuto Fukushima. If that name sounds familiar to you, then you also watched Koshien in 2008, because he basically pitched Osaka Toin to the championships. Well, or more like, he was their pitcher when they stomped their way to victory. Anyway, he still rocks; 9 innings, 145 pitches, 12 strikeouts, and he had a shutout going into the 9th, when Chuo scored 2 unearned runs, BOTH on errors (one was the second baseman taking a liner to the stomach and falling down and losing the ball, and the other was the right fielder simply dropping the ball).

Aoyama won the game 5-2. They scored their runs on a 2-RBI single by Shota Koike in the 3rd inning, an RBI ground-rule double by Manabu Kino in the 5th inning, a solo homer by Koh Shimozuru, and then Hiroaki Masano scored on a wild pitch by Chuo's Yohei Kagiya.

Kagiya also gave up the home run to Shimozuru, which is amusing to me because the last time I saw Kagiya pitch, he was a senior at Hokkai HS, pitching at Koshien 2008 against Toho HS. I was almost late for work because I was watching that game; but the most memorable thing was that Yusuke Yamada launched a homer off of Kagiya on the very FIRST PITCH of the game, and Toho eventually won 15-10. Yamada is now at Rikkio and another Toho boy from that game, Shogo Wada, is now at Hosei. This is what makes HS and college baseball so interesting; these guys always seem to resurface.

What I love about Aoyama Gakuin is that they got relegated into the 2nd-level league after finishing in last place in the fall of 09, which was the first time they'd been relegated in like THIRTY YEARS, so in the spring of this year they basically said "Screw that" and DEVOURED the rest of the 2nd league. Fukushima himself was 6-1 and the team was 10-1 and then went through Rissho to get themselves back up to 1st League.

As such, though, they literally had absolutely no ouendan, which was kind of pathetic; there were a bunch of guys from the baseball club there, and a small group of Aoyama alumni, and that was IT. No cheer girls, no guys in black gakuran suits yelling, no brass band. Chuo had its ouendan in full force, so it was kind of sad how Aoyama was beating the crap out of Chuo and yet all the cheering was coming from the Chuo side. Even in the 7th inning, the Chuo ouendan played their school song and sang it solemnly, and on the Aoyama side, one of the baseball club guys got up and led everyone to sing their school song, but you could barely hear it from the other side of the stadium. At the end of the game, too, the losing team Chuo had a big "fure fure Chuo" thing going on, and Aoyama had no answer for them, like "What do you want? We have 50 people sitting here. We can't match your 1000 people and brass band, sorry."

One other interesting thing about this day is that I saw the three top college catching prospects in the country in Aoyama's Koike, Chuo's Sameshima, and Toyo's Satoh. Koike and Satoh have been on the national collegiate team for a while and Sameshima is a solid guy and also Chuo captain this year. I look forward to seeing who gets drafted out of Tohto this year; there are always a bunch of intriguing prospects floating around there.

Liveblogging: Toyo vs. Tokai, All-Japan College Finals

I didn't think I could deal with another afternoon in the sun -- not feeling so great after watching the semi-finals yesterday -- so instead I'm watching the final game on TV and liveblogging it.

Toyodai                    Tokaidai
-------                    --------
Sakai rf                   Ishimine cf
Uehara 2b                  Tanaka ss
Kimura lf                  S. Suzuki dh
D. Suzuki 3b               Fushimi c
Satoh c                    Yoshikawa 2b
Horikoshi dh               Matsukuma lf
Hayashizaki ss             Takeuchi rf
Ogata cf                   Sakaguchi 3b
Samejima 1b                Ohno 1b
   
Fujioka (6-1, 1.07)        Sugano (5-0, 0.44)

And so it starts. Except that BS1 isn't showing it yet and I am on pins and needles waiting!

Top of the first (Toyo 0, Tokai 0)
Sakai grounds out to second on the third pitch.
Uehara hits a fly that lands in right for a single. One on, 1st.
Kimura hits a low pop fly out to left. Two out, 1st.
Suzuki grounds out to second. Three out.

No strikeouts for Sugano -- kinda odd. Wonder if he's tired after throwing 142 pitches yesterday.

Bottom of the first (Toyo 0, Tokai 0)
Ishimine walks (Fujioka's control seems a bit off, maybe he's nervous).
Tanaka comes up bunting and does infact bunt, pitcher to first. One out, 2nd.
Suzuki hits a pop fly out to right, Ishimine can't move up on it. Two out, 2nd.
Fushimi strikes out swinging, three down! First strikeout of the game.

BTW, Shota Ishimine is Tokai's captain this year, and has also been on the national collegiate team for a while. Also, Ishimine and Sho Suzuki were the two guys who hit home runs in yesterday's game against Keio.

Also, Jingu looks relatively empty! I thought it'd be full today, though maybe it'd help if the FINAL had been Keio-Tokai...

Top of the second (Toyo 1, Tokai 0)
Satoh singles to center on the first pitch.
Horikoshi bunts to the pitcher, advancing Satoh. One out, 2nd.
Hayashizaki grounds out to third; Two out, 2nd.
Ogata hits a long fly ball into the right-field corner that goes for a double! That scores Satoh -- 1-0 Toyo.
Samejima fouls off a bunch for a pretty long at-bat, eventually grounding to first where Ohno dives for the ball and throws to Sugano covering first in time -- three out.

Satoh and Hayashizaki are also on the national collegiate team. Sugano seems to be warming up a bit, he hit 150 km/h on the gun a few times and is throwing that obnoxious slider of his, so we'll see. Doesn't look as sharp as he did yesterday, though he could just be pacing himself. Still, he gave up one run in 24 innings of this tournament so far before today. Toyo has the slight advantage here in having a bunch of decent pitchers even if none of them are as good as Sugano at his best.

Bottom of the second (Toyo 1, Tokai 0)
Yoshikawa of the funky kick swing grounds out to the mound.
Matsukuma strikes out swinging -- that's two for Fujioka.
Takeuchi grounds out to third, three down.

Tokai's ouendan is still doing the funky sequence they did yesterday -- Pirates of the Caribbean, Popeye, Space Battleship Yamato, and then a variety of other typical Koshien type songs (like that Bakufu Slump one I can't remember the name of)

Top of the third (Toyo 1, Tokai 0)
Sakai hits a pop fly out to center.
Uehara singles to center. One out, 1st.
Kimura singles to left, that'll move Uehara to 2nd. One out, 1st and 2nd.
Suzuki hits a pop fly out to center. Two out, 1st and 2nd.
Satoh lines back to the mound and Sugano catches the ball for the third out.

Takayama is warming up in the bullpen for Tokai. Sugano hasn't struck anyone out yet, but he seems pretty unfazed by this all.

Bottom of the third (Toyo 1, Tokai 0)
Sakaguchi strikes out swinging.
Ohno hits a pop fly foul, caught by the second baseman.
Ishimine hits a single to center (of course it'd be Ishimine, he's probably the best player on the team.)
Ishimine steals second and also reaches third on the errant throw during Tanaka's at-bat. Two out, 3rd.
Tanaka grounds out to second -- three out.

Top of the fourth (Toyo 1, Tokai 0)
Horikoshi grounds back to the mound.
Hayashizaki strikes out swinging and that is Sugano's first one of the day.
Ogata grounds back to the mound, that's three.

Bottom of the fourth (Toyo 1, Tokai 0)
Suzuki hits a pop fly out to right.
Fushimi hits a pop fly out to center.
Yoshikawa grounds out to short -- the throw to first is high but Samejima makes the tag as he comes down jumping. Cute.

Top of the fifth (Toyo 1, Tokai 0)
Sugano is still out there on the mound, for the record. He's up to 70 pitches through 4.

Samejima grounds out to first, unassisted.
Sakai grounds out to second, Sugano covering first as the 1st and 2nd baseman went for the grounder. Two out.
Uehara grounds out to short.

This game has suddenly started going REALLY fast, it's only 2:09pm right now.

Bottom of the fifth (Toyo 1, Tokai 0)
Matsukuma strikes out swinging.
Takeuchi grounded out to first.
Sakaguchi singles to left. Two out, 1st.
Ohno strikes out looking -- wow.

Top of the sixth (Toyo 3, Tokai 0)
Kimura grounds to third but Sakaguchi fumbles the ball and Kimura reaches first on the error.
Suzuki... oh wow. Suzuki doubles to right -- a ball back to the wall in center-right -- and Kimura runs all the way around to home, slides in the same time the ball gets there, and it looks like Kimura missed the plate on his way in and is tagged out. Lucky for Tokai. One out, 2nd.
Satoh grounds out and Suzuki moves to third -- Two out, 3rd.
Horikoshi doubles to left and Suzuki scores. 2-0. Two out, 2nd.

Looks like this may be nearing the end for Sugano, two guys are warming up for Tokai... but not yet apparently.

Hayashizaki also singles to left -- and Horikoshi dives easily around the throw at home to score, 3-0. And THAT is it for Sugano. Poor kid.

Lefty Ryota Takayama comes in to pitch for Tokai.

Hashimoto pinch-hits for Ogata and grounds to the mound, three down.

That's pretty huge though -- not sure if Tokai will be able to turn this game around the way they're going.

Bottom of the sixth (Toyo 3, Tokai 0)
Toyo fielding changes: Takimoto enters the game playing CF, batting 8th.

Ishimine grounds out to second.
Tanaka singles to center.
Suzuki strikes out swinging and Tanaka steals second -- so that's two out, 2nd.
Fushimi strikes out swinging too -- that's seven for Fujioka.

Also I love Tokai's ouendan -- it's nothing like Big 6, just a bunch of guys, maybe 5 of them, wearing baseball outfits instead of gakuran, dancing on the platform and sometimes holding up "T O K A I" signs and whatnot.

If Toyodai is 120 years old, I have to wonder why it didn't end up in Tokyo Big 6 instead of Tohto?

Top of the seventh (Toyo 5, Tokai 0)
Samejima strikes out looking.
Sakai walks (but two of those balls in a row were slow curves, funny stuff)
Uehara bunts and is barely out, moving Sakai to second. Two out, 2nd.
Kimura SLAMS ONE OUT OF THE PARK IN LEFT! Man, you could tell that was gone the second it left his bat -- so that's a 2-run homer for the Tohto League batting champ. 5-0.
Suzuki pops one foul and Ohno makes the catch at first. Three down.

Bottom of the seventh (Toyo 5, Tokai 0)
Yoshikawa hit a pop fly out to center while BS1 was showing the news.
Matsukuma grounds out to third.
Takeuchi singles to right.
Sakaguchi hits a pop fly to shallow right and the second baseman makes the catch.

Top of the eighth (Toyo 5, Tokai 0)
Tokai changes pitchers from Takayama to Akama. I think they also just said Matsukuma was switched out for Iwamoto in left field.

Satoh grounds out to third.
Horikoshi grounds out to short.
Hayashizaki singles to left.
Takimoto ... doesn't get an at-bat as Hayashizaki gets caught stealing second on the first pitch. Three out.

Bottom of the eighth (Toyo 5, Tokai 0)
Ohno singles to left.
Ishimine hits a pop fly out to right.
Tanaka hits a pop fly foul between third and home.
Suzuki strikes out swinging -- that's eight for Fujioka.

Top of the ninth (Toyo 5, Tokai 0)
Takimoto grounds up the middle and is barely out, nice play there by Tanaka.
Samejima hits a liner to second.
Sakai grounds out to second.

Well, this is it -- last three outs of the game to see what Tokai can do. Fujioka is still on the mound for Toyo, he's up to 105 pitches through eight.

Bottom of the ninth (Toyo 5, Tokai 0)
Fushimi hits the first pitch he sees out to centerfield... and it's caught.
Yoshikawa walks.
(Mound conference ensues. But Fujioka stays.)
Yamane pinch-hits for Iwamoto and strikes out swinging on a slider. Down to the last out...
Takeuchi grounds out to second and that's the game!

(I should note that the final two at-bats took forever, these guys fouled off a ton, and there was a pitchout or two. But...)

Toyo is the champion!

Cheers of "Akio! Akio!" go up for a doage for the Toyo manager, 63-year-old Akio Takahashi... and they end up dropping him, heh. (He blames it in his interview on them spending all their energy winning the tournament.)

Next is an interview with team captain Keisuke Kanuma, who was yesterday's game hero as well.

Next, an interview with Takahiro Fujioka, today's game-winning shutout-pitching guy, who is just like "Dude, my pitches all worked today. I'm really happy."

I took a few photos of my TV at the end:

Game 103 Photopost: Toyo vs. Chuo - Almost Perfect

Today was　都民の日 at my school, so I was able to spend the afternoon down at Jingu Stadium catching my one Tohto League game of the fall season. (I simply can't go to weekday afternoon games anymore for the most part, except when these scheduling blips happen.) In theory I'm a Toyo University fan, so I wanted to go see them, and thus targetted the afternoon game with them playing against Chuo. (Sadly, this means I missed Nao Higashihama pitching in the morning for Asia-dai, but hey, I have a few more years to see him play.)

The dumb thing is, I was kind of hoping to see Toyo's Masahiro Inui pitch. I even sat on the first-base side in the hopes of getting good shots of him, since he's a lefty. But no, righty Keisuke Kanuma started for Toyo. Kanuma wears #18 now in the wake of the recently departed Hiroki Ueno, my Lotte 2009 ni-gun ichi-gun WHATEVER boyfriend, and while technically results-wise I suppose he is wearing it as well as Ueno did, he's not nearly as much fun to watch pitch. (And for the record, crazy as catcher Takeshi Saika is, he's no Shota Ohno either.)

Chuo also put up a righty starter, Yuuhi Yamasaki. I'd never seen or heard of him before, I'll admit -- but let me tell you that I WILL be keeping an eye on him for the foreseeable future. Because, and I am not making this up, Yamasaki had a perfect game going for 6 and 2/3 innings. He retired the first 20 Toyo batters he faced, without a single one reaching base. Ultimately he would pitch 8 innings of 2-hit ball, striking out 8 and walking none.

Infact, there isn't a lot to report in terms of game action in this game BECAUSE it was such an insane pitcher's duel. Yamasaki was DEALING, but at the same time, while Kanuma was allowing scattered runners here and there, he ALSO wasn't giving anything up, until Chuo team captain and Hokkaido native Kenta Mima hit a solo home run into the left-field stands to lead off the 7th inning.

That was the ONLY run scored in the entire game.

Hirokazu Sawamura, who I'm at least a little familiar with, pitched the bottom of the 9th, and while Toyo managed to get Ryo Hayashizaki all the way to third base, he was left standing there as the game ended with a score of 1-0.

Here's the box score. I'm not making this up.

It wouldn't be hard for me to tell you all the baserunners in the game:

Chuo -
1st inning, Kei Suginuma, hit by a pitch on his back. Bunted to second, left standing there.
2nd inning, Yuki Murayama, walked. Left standing on first.
3rd inning, Kei Suginuma again, legitimate single to right (first hit of the game). Stole second, left standing there.
5th inning, Yoshihito Itai, doubled into the right-field corner. Made it to third on a grounder, left standing there.
7th inning, Kenta Mima home run. Yoshihito Itai single to left, Issei Endoh single through a diving 3rd baseman, also to left, advanced Itai to second, and they were left standing there.
8th inning, Kei Suginuma grounded to 3rd, but 3B Daichi Suzuki dropped the ball, recovered it, threw to first, and drew the first baseman off the bag for an error. Suginuma was bunted up, and a bit later Kenta Mima walked. They were both left on base.

Toyo:
7th inning, Takafumi Sakai singled to left. Stayed on first.
8th inning, Takumi Horikoshi singled to center. Was bunted up by Saika, left on second.
9th inning, Ryo Hayashizaki walked. Moved to second on a bunt, moved to third on a grounder, stayed there as Sakai struck out to end the game.

And that's it.

So, on that note, here are a whole ton of photos from the game instead. I feel kind of silly posting them when I'm so far behind on cropping my Tokyo Big 6 photos, but hey, this is my one Tohto game of the year as opposed to going to Big 6 fairly often, hopefully.

First, here is Yuuhi Yamasaki, the kid who was perfect for two-thirds of the game:








(The final one is shortly after Sakai got the first Toyo hit of the game, and the manager came out to the mound, probly to say "Okay, kid, your perfect game is gone, how do you feel?")

Next is Keisuke Kanuma, the Toyo starter, who was almost as ferocious, but not quite:








(He kind of has the "pile-of-arms-and-legs" thing going for him like Rikkio's Tohmura, but he isn't quite as tall.)

And last but not least, Hirokazu Sawamura, who pitched and won the entire game for Chuo on Tuesday, and closed out the 9th inning of this game:







He's quite distinctive-looking. You might notice I ran over to the 3rd-base side to take photos of him -- I really should have gone one inning earlier and also gotten Yamasaki from that side. Alas.

The rest of these photos are just in the order I took them, and not particularly organized:


Seiya Inoue, Chuo's somewhat large first baseman. He's 180cm/99kg, which is fairly big for a Japanese guy, but not quite as big as Okawari-kun at 175cm/102kg, or worse, Asia-dai's Ryoji Nakata, who weighs in at a whopping 115kg for a 171cm-tall frame. Nakata seriously looks like a sumo wrestler hiding in a baseball uniform.


Kei Suginuma getting hit by a pitch in the first inning.


Takeshi Saika catching a foul ball in the 2nd inning.


The aforementioned 2-hit Yoshihito Itai.


Suginuma, looking kind of determined.


Suginuma steals second. The throw was wide and ricocheted off Toyo captain and second baseman Shuhei Kojima, who had to scramble to recover it. (He's the one with his butt up in the air after falling over.)


Toyodai cheer girls. There were maybe 5 of them total. Tohto doesn't get quite the same attendance.


I think there were also about 5 people in their marching band.


The aforementioned captain Shuhei Kojima.


Takafumi Sakai, who would get the hit to break the perfect game.


Ryo Hayashizaki hitting a foul.


Toyo manager Akio Takahashi advises Hayashizaki about... something...? in the middle of his at-bat. Whatever it was, it didn't work as Hayashizaki struck out.


Yamasaki still has a perfect game through 6 innings (check out all those 0's).


High fives at the Chuo dugout after Kenta Mima's home run.


Chuo catcher Tesshin Samejima.


A Toyo runner? On first base? Is that POSSIBLE?


Tsukasa Tsuzuki. He was a teammate and classmate of Ryota Imanari's at Urawa Gakuin.


Inoue at bat... and you can see how full the Chuo stands are behind him.


Kenta Mima, not hitting a foul ball.


Mima again, not too happy about a called strike.


Inoue is the big guy at first, and the smaller guy is pinch-runner Yuya Oda.


Daichi Suzuki.


The Toyo dugout in the bottom of the 9th... a range of emotions from "Come on, we're still only down 1-0, we can do this" and "I can't freaking believe we're about to lose our SECOND series of the season already. We're not SUPPOSED to lose. We're Toyo Freaking University. Come on."


The teams bow to each other after the game.


Final score and scoreboard.


To be honest, I left this game feeling a little bit unfulfilled -- pitcher's duels are neat, but there's very little game action, and you don't get to see nearly as big a variety of players. When you only get to see a team once per semester, it's a little bit more sad.

On the other hand, I think most of the players I care about seeing right now in the Tohto League are not seniors, so there's always next year, in theory.

I came home and watched the Fighters game on TV in the evening (both yesterday and today they were broadcast on BS1, so I could actually watch). Something amusing happened during the game where at one point, they were doing the Inaba Jump, and simultaneously, my house started shaking. As it turns out, there was a Shindo 4 earthquake in Ibaraki at about that time. It was pretty freaky though, as for a second I couldn't tell whether the screen was shaking due to the Inaba Jump or due to the earthquake.

And on another note: I nearly cried when I saw all the stuff from Tatsunami's retirement ceremony. The fact that during the game, he started at 1st base, went 3-for-4, added another double to his already-career-leading total, now at 487... it just sounds perfect. I know I don't talk about the Dragons here much anymore, but I really do adore Tatsunami and hope he continues coaching for the Dragons for a long time. He is almost the exact definition of what a Hall of Fame player should be.

(And if the Dragons release a Tatsunami doage desktop background, it might finally oust the Masa 200 one from my desktop.)

Anyway, that was a bit of a digression.

I'm off to Sapporo on Saturday morning! If only the Fighters hadn't lost tonight I'd pretty much feel guaranteed to see them clinch this weekend, but now I'm not so sure. Grr.