Marinerds, etc.

This is my last picture post of Japanese baseball games/stadiums. In theory I have one more trip photo post to do, of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, but I haven't decided if I'll do it in the same format as the rest of these posts (with the thumbnails up on the blog page) or not.

Remembering that day now, it was such a damn nice Saturday afternoon in Yokohama. It was beautiful and sunny outside, and Yokohama was the only stadium I went to in Japan where they didn't have those damn fences up around the field. Before the game it was possible to go down and watch batting practice and take pictures and all, though the ushers made us all go to our proper seats way too soon. Still, some combination of the sunny weather and the fact that I only had a day or two left in Japan at this point and no need to conserve memory card space led to me taking around 500 pictures at the park that day.

Combine that with this past weekend being really busy for me (My team finished Puzzle Hunt!) and that's why it took me almost a week to get this set together, culling it down to only 120 pictures and working with them, especially since there were so many awesome pictures I really liked, but I didn't think having ninety billion shots of Yoshinobu Takahashi would really interest anyone else out there. Just kidding. Mostly.

Anyway, here's the blog entry from that day and the rest of that weekend, and the box score. It was a fairly mediocre game overall with the Giants kinda beating the Bay Stars, though to be fair, the Giants and Bay Stars both mostly spent the 2006 season playing mediocre baseball. The best part is that the same day I went to Yokohama, Chunichi's 41-year-old pitcher Masa Yamamoto went and pitched a no-hitter in Nagoya.

Full photoset with thumbnails and descriptions here:
Bay Stars vs. Giants at Yokohama Stadium, September 16, 2006

And of course, I'll put up a couple of thumbnails here to give you an idea of how many shots I got of players, mascots, cheer girls, beer girls, etc.

Yokohama Stadium, inside and out:


Scoreboard, Kazuhiro Sasaki's 250 saves marker, seat backs:


Section marker, Yokohama fans with flags, Yomiuri fans with towels:


Cheerleaders making a V, cheerleaders posing, players posing:


Tatsuhiko Kinjoh, crazy half-sidearmer Atsushi Kizuka, former closer Kiyoshi Toyoda:


Takahiro Saeki, Yokohama starter Yuuji Yoshimi, Giants starter Tetsuya Utsumi:


Warmup stretches, warmup dances, bespectacled Makoto Kosaka, Hara-kantoku offers advice, Takayuki Shimizu:


Masaaki Koike, Motoaki Hirano, Seiichi Uchikawa, Takuro Ishii!, Shuuchi Murata:


Yuuki Yoshimura, Shinji Niinuma, Ryota Wakiya, Seung-Yeop Lee, Hiroki Kokubo:


Tomohiro Nioka, Hitoshi Taneda, Shawn Sonnier, Yoshinobu Takahashi, Hisanori Takahashi:


Vendors: Kirin, Asahi, Yebisu, Sapporo, and... Yokohama Stadium:


Mascots Hosshey, Hossiena, first pitch Hiroko Sato, stack of noisesticks, and Kinjoh signing stuff:


Whew, that took forever to get through. And I can't believe it took me two and a half months to do all of these. I suck.

I'll try to actually have some real relevant content on here again sometime soon. Honest.