Anyway, what I've been up to the last six months baseball-wise: not much. Work has been keeping me pretty busy. I went back to Japan for 2 weeks in April and went to around 20 games and stalked the Nichidai Sanko boys (which I should photopost about), and I went to a Frederick Keys minor-league game in DC with my brother, and I'm going to watch the San Rafael Pacifics tonight to see Tomochika Tsuboi, former Fighters guy, who is now playing in the indie leagues over here. I also hope to see the Tacoma Rainiers sometime since Brian Sweeney and Luis Jimenez are playing for them, but last weekend it was 106 degrees in Sacramento and I couldn't do that.
The other game I went to was the A's vs. Rangers game on June 7th because Darvish was starting for the Rangers. Go figure, the Rangers were in the Bay Area for an entire week and the only day he started was the afternoon game where my company was having a team-building event. Of course, I skipped the event and went to the game...
I really wanted to meet Tateyama, which I didn't succeed in. But I did meet a ton of Japanese people, who were all crowding the Rangers bullpen before the game, including a lady who came here from Sapporo by herself to see him, a guy from Ibaraki who was cosplaying as Darvish, some various other people, I just chatted with them in Japanese, very fun. Even the guy who was sitting two seats to my left was from Hokkaido, though he works in San Jose now. I wore my Imanari jersey so a lot of people were saying things to me about how "Ryota got traded to Hanshin, didn't he? Too bad..." Very cool times, even if Darvish sucked (he gave up 6 runs on 6 hits and 6 walks in 5 innings, no joke) and the Rangers lost, I still had a good time at the game. (Plus in all honesty I kinda want the A's to win, they're really the underdog around here since I work with too many hipster Giants fans.)
I also brought my camera, so here are some shots from it.
See the entire photo set here with more Darvish and some Tanner Scheppers and whatnot.
Darvish in the bullpen warming up
Yoshinori Tateyama greets Mike Napoli at the bullpen
Koji Uehara goes for a walk in the late innings
Darvish cosplayer dude. He came here from Ibaraki.
You know, the photos of Darvish remind me an awful lot of another photoset I took in March 2008...