Marinerds, etc.

KITAKO WON THE GAME 5-4!!!!
It was 2-0 for most of the game, I started watching in the 6th inning (I went to the Daiei department store near my work, on my "lunchbreak", they have a big electronics dept on the third floor with lots of TVs), Koryo's starter Yusuke Nomura had a one-hitter going into the 8th, and then BLAM, Saga pitcher Takahiro Kubo singled, the bases got loaded, Nomura walked in a run (it was Kubo), and then Soejima (I think thats how you say his name) hit a grand slam home run. 5-4. Koryo almost had a guy on third in the top of the 9th but instead he got himself picked off in a sac bunt attempt trying to go to third. 2 outs and the last batter was Yusuke Nomura, the Koryo pitcher, and Kubo struck him out.

ADACHI MITSURU COULD NOT HAVE WRITTEN A BETTER STORY.

It was really cool, even though a lot of the 50-year-old guys in the Daiei store looked at me funny the whole time, like "why is this crazy gaijin here cheering for Saga?"

It's funny, though, watching the players at Koshien, you could almost imagine what they will look like several years from now as grown-up players. I guess that's why everyone loves highschool baseball here. It's like watching the future.

The thing about Saga that really intrigued me was that they had two really good pitchers to put out -- Masafumi Baba started most of the games and Takahiro Kubo came in later. I was thinking that Yusuke Nomura was a really awesome pitcher (he got a ton of strikeouts and just had some amazingly nasty stuff that he threw), BUT he was going to have to get tired at some point, and what would they do then? And then came the 8th inning and sure enough, he did. I think it's got to be hell on some of these kids to just throw so many pitches in such a short amount of time, which is why I thought the pitching tandem was going to do so well. Though, man, for a while it sure seemed like it wasn't going to work out that way.

Now of course, the question is... will Kubo be Saga-oji? Or something else along the lines of Yuki "Handkerchief Prince" Saito? To be fair, Nomura's a bit cuter than Kubo, but Kubo really sort of reminds me of Masahiro Tanaka, so...