Marinerds, etc.

I gotta admit, I didn't even know what the hell QVC was until I just looked it up.



Going to The Stadium Formerly Known As Chiba Marine isn't all that much fun for me anymore. I have a lot of memories there, of course, from all the time I spent there during Bobby Valentine's time as manager, and so going there now feels strange, unless I'm sitting in the Fighters cheering section in left field.

But well, on Thursday night I had been sending phonemails with Steve to see if he was at the Tokyo Dome (he wasn't), and he suggested I come to Chiba Marine sometime during the weekend. And then they announced the starting pitchers for Friday night, and you wouldn't believe who was starting for Lotte...



Hiroki Ueno is one of my favorite favorite baseball players and through a lot of dumb luck, I barely ever get to actually see him play. Infact, I think the last time I got to see him start a game might have been Draft day 2008 when he was still at Toyo University.

Unfortunately, in this game at Chiba, he had a rough first inning -- he walked 3 batters, loading the bases, and then Seung-Yeop Lee (wearing the wrong uniform, apparently he didn't have his?) hit a 2-RBI single and Shogo Akada followed it up with another RBI single to make it 3-0.

The Marines put one on the board themselves in the bottom of the 1st, with Shota Ishimine leading off with a walk and stealing second, and coming in on a Jose Castillo single.

But that was it for a very long time as Buffaloes starter Yuki Nishi, all 20 years old of him, pitched a bunch of scoreless innings after that. In the meantime, the Buffaloes added a run in the 4th off a Sakaguchi RBI single, making it 4-1.

Nishi game out of the game in the 6th after giving up another run -- this time largely on letting Castillo advance on a wild pitch, so when Hisao Heiuchi made a dramatic infield single, headsliding into first just ahead of the throw from shallow center, it made the score 4-2.

As for Ueno, he went 7.2 innings, and if not for that horrible first inning, he would have won the game, so that made me kind of sad. Instead, the Buffaloes won 4-2, with Mamoru Kishida getting the save for them, and the Marines putting in Yuta Kimura for their last 2 innings.



Other things:

There were fireworks. Apparently they change the firing location each game? We couldn't see them at ALL from the infield jiyuuseki on the 1B side:



Another observation is how popular Shota Ishimine is. Batting leadoff with an interesting cheer song (hailing to him being from Okinawa with a big "I-YA-SA-SA" cheer in the middle), I'm surprised by how many #5 shirts I saw at the stadium, and they were Ishimine shirts, not all just old Koichi Hori shirts. I thought people might be more pissed off about #5 going to someone again so soon after Hori left, but Ishimine's a likely Rookie of the Year candidate and is trying to fill those shoes as best he can. I said it last fall and I'll say it again, Ishimine is the MAN. Heck, one of my college baseball friends was at this game just because she's been following Ishimine around, she doesn't usually go to pro games all that much.

I'm saddened by how boring the Lotteria at the stadium got. Ever since the Bobby Burgers went away it's been kind of silly, the Taekyun burger was terrible, and apparently this year's special was a Saburo menchi katsu burger, but of course, the team traded Saburo -- err, Ohmura -- to the Giants, so now there's basically nothing special. I forgot to hunt down some Karakawa karaage. Oh well.

I went to the Marines team store to try to find ANYTHING of Ueno, too -- a t-shirt, a towel, a cell strap, ANYTHING. But there was nothing. I even asked a store clerk, like "Hey, do you have any Hiroki Ueno merchandise?" "Uh, who?" "Hiroki Ueno. Tonight's starting pitcher. Number 15." "Oh, number 15. No we don't."

Sigh.

Hanging out with Steve and and his friend Lou was fun though. I really have no reason to go to Chiba much anymore except Fighters games, so it was good to have people to hang out with.

Oh yeah, and after the game...



Way too many mascots in Chiba. This one is "Cool".

I have a new Baystars jersey!

Well, technically, I got this new Baystars jersey on November 7th, the week after the draft. But now it is in the form that I want it to be:




(If you can't read Japanese, the name is "Kagami Kisho". If you don't know why I spent 3000 yen getting his name and number put on a jersey, you should read back all posts on this blog labelled "Hosei".)


For the record, I got my jersey done at the Sports Authority near where I live in Akabane. I also got my Ryota Imanari jersey done there two years ago. As you can see, the Imanari jersey is signed at the bottom... I need to get that done to the Kagami jersey ASAP too!

As it is, the Baystars site finally put up their information on rookie training at Yokosuka Stadium, and even do say "Please come support us!", so I think I'll go down there later this week. Their off days are the 11th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, if you are thinking of going. (I'm only here until the 18th.)

I'm also thinking of going to try to stalk Tatsuya Ohishi since I couldn't do that for his time at Waseda. The Lions rookie training schedule has them off on the 11th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, and 27th, if you're curious.

I wish I could go stalk Shuhei Fujiya at Lotte Urawa but there just probably won't be time. Maybe in the spring. I know they're training up there, and I even have a friend who wants to stalk Shota Ishimine, but, timing.

I'll be at Kamagaya on the 16th for the unveiling of the new rookies there. I hear it's going to be insane, but my connections (read: Ojisan) should make it possible for me to get in regardless. I'm a little depressed about Saitoh-mania, to be honest... and here I'm just hoping to meet Masaru Saitoh, or Masahiro Inui or Yodai Enoshita or Haruki Nishikawa. It's bizarre, but I saw almost all of the Fighters draft picks play as amateurs.

Anyway.. this post is called "Things I have", so I wanted to mention something else.

I came back from my trip to Kyushu over the weekend, spending about 22-23 hours on local trains over the course of 2 days. I stopped along the way in illustrious places like Fukuyama (where I failed to see Taishi Ota.. no, just kidding) and Wakayama City (where I failed to see Tama the Stationmaster Cat because it turns out she doesn't "work" on Sundays, sheesh) and at the Osaka Dome, where I happened to be there the day after the Buffaloes unveiled their new uniform design.

(I'll post a few more pictures of the Buffaloes store and display soon, if you happen to check back.)

To be honest, the Buffaloes new design was not so intriguing to me, as they only had t-shirts with the logo on it, sweatshirts, towels, and cellphone straps. If they'd had t-shirts with player names/numbers I might have gone for one, either T-Okada or Ohbiki or someone. But, alas.

So instead, I got one of the T-Okada Home Run King foldout thingies they made. This is actually a pretty cool little contraption:


From the outside it almost just looks like an oversized baseball card.


But then you unfold it...


And it is a big series of photos of each of his home runs for the season! Except... you might notice it only goes up to 32... and he had 33 home runs...


...because the back side is a huge poster of home run 33.


Pretty neat, huh?

I know, you're probably wondering what the heck I was doing at the Tokyo Dome for a Buffaloes-Giants game. But as you can see from this shot of the "out-of-town scores" from the middle of the game...



...the Fighters-Yakult game got rained out, as did pretty much every outdoor game in the country, so this was the only indoor option in the Tokyo area. I had two friends in town from Seattle this past week, and I'd promised to take them to a baseball game here. They wanted to sit in a cheering section, so the Fighters game today seemed like the best idea, until the Tokyo skies decided to open up and start raining around 9am, and they're not supposed to stop until sometime on Tuesday. So instead, I said we could go to the Tokyo Dome and see if there were any tickets, and if there were, at least my friends could see a game, even if it was going to be between the team that I hate the most in the country (the Giants) and the team in the Pacific League that I care the absolute least about (the Buffaloes).

We even ran into another friend of mine outside the Tokyo Dome, who was like "Wait, is that really Deanna? At a Giants game? WTF?"

Anyway, we did manage to get 3 pretty good seats in the upper deck on the 3rd-base side. I got to at least explain the whole ouendan deal, and also got to explain pretty much why I despise every single member of the Giants lineup. ("This guy, Chono, he turned down the Fighters and the Marines for drafting him. And this guy, Ogasawara, he was my favorite player... when he was on the Fighters. Now he's some clean-shaven doppleganger. Think Johnny Damon. Oh, and this guy, he hit a sayonara home run off the Fighters at Game 5 of the Japan Series last year. And this starting pitcher, Nishimura? I totally DESPISE him. My favorite Fighters player, Hichori Morimoto, had a 2-year streak of playing in every single game, until this jerk over here hit him with a pitch and broke his hand, and Hichori has never really been the same player since.")

The nice part is that the Buffaloes actually smacked the hell out of Nishimura for a change. In the first inning, Arakane got hit by a pitch, Gotoh singled and then "T" Okada singled home Arakane, 1-0. Aarom Baldiris followed that up with another single that landed in shallow center, and Takeshi Hidaka grounded to second, only Edgar Gonzalez ate the ball and Gotoh scored on the error, 2-0. Koji Yamasaki hit into a fielder's choice, but it wasn't a double play and so Okada scored, 3-0.

Then in the second inning, Shogo Akada got on base, and Gotoh walked, and then "T" Okada slammed a home run into the Orix cheering section! 6-0!

It was a nice start to the game.

I amused myself by yelling alternate things to the Giants cheers, like "GO HOME HISAYOSHI" instead of "CHONO HISAYOSHI". One of my friends decided that "Shinnosuke" sounded like they were cheering "IMHOTEP!" so he started yelling that instead. And so on.

Ogasawara got hit by a pitch in the 3rd inning and had to leave the game. There were mumblings that he might have broken his wrist, though reports on Yahoo indicate that no fractures was found and he was just bruised up pretty badly.

Alex Ramirez pounded one of the most impressive home runs I've ever seen at the Tokyo Dome, in the 6th inning. I think it almost hit the roof -- and it hit the left-field back wall of the stadium above the IIJ sign, right below the roof. It was said to be 140 meters, which is 460 feet or so -- but it was to LEFT, not to center, so you can imagine how high that thing was going. It would have gone straight out of some other stadiums like Jingu. No, really. 6-1.

Tomotaka Sakaguchi hit another home run off of reliever Takahiko Nomaguchi to lead off the 9th inning, which made it 7-1.

Yoshinobu Takahashi pinch-hit in the bottom of the 9th -- I feel like I haven't seen him at bat in YEARS at this point -- he singled to center, and then Hayato the Kid hit a home run to left field to make it 7-3, off Mamoru Kishida.

But, fortunately, that is where the game would end.



(And the Yahoo box score.)

Something odd I just realized is that Takahiro "T" Okada went to the same high school, Riseisha, as Hosei's Ryo Imai, and was one year ahead of him... which means Okada didn't play at Koshien, but Imai did. I think Okada is obviously having the slightly more successful baseball life these days, though.

I enjoyed this game despite not really caring about either team involved. I mean, I got to hang out with my friends, babble about all the nuances of Japanese baseball, and see the Giants get slammed down. What else could I ask for? We ate churros and Tokyo Dome ice cream sandwiches, and one of my friends drank 4 beers and a hi-ball. Really. He had a goal of trying to flag down a beer girl from each one of the major companies, though I think he got Suntory, Kirin, and Yebisu, and didn't manage to get Sapporo. Alas.

The only sad part is that we never got to see the Orix Towel Dance, which I had been telling my friends was the only cool thing Orix fans really do. I only had my Tokyo Big 6 towel with me, but I was totally ready to dance with it. I guess the 1st inning was too early to start doing it; not sure why they didn't do it in the 2nd inning when there were a lot of guys on base and very few outs, but whatever. They never really had a "chance" moment later on. Too bad.



Actually, see that IIJ sign over my friend's head on the left? That's where Ramirez's home run hit the back wall, above that sign. No joke. That thing was SLAMMED.

The weather forecast is calling for the rain to continue through Monday too, which has me a little bit worried. The Fighters-Swallows games didn't actually HAVE a makeup day scheduled, and Yahoo shows the other 3 rained out games today as being made up on Tuesday, but not Swallows-Fighters, so I wonder what'll happen -- maybe they'll be tacked on at the end of interleague? That'd kind of suck. The Big 6 college games also get shoved back a day, and if they can't play on Monday, I think they get to bump Tohto League out of Jingu on Tuesday, although all that remains in Tohto is the Asia-Rissho catfight, as Toyo already clinched the league. We'll see, I guess.

Two entries in one, because I'm swamped and these are already a week late. (They're about the games on March 30 and 31. I've been adding to this slowly.)

TLDR version:
Tuesday: Keisaku Itokazu started for the Fighters and gave up 5 runs in the second inning on three hits, two walks and a hit-by-pitch, and the Fighters never really recovered from the deficit. The Buffaloes eventually won 8-4.
Wednesday: The Fighters held a nice 1-0 lead behind starter Buddy Carlyle and relievers Tateyama and Miyanishi, and then our new closer Brian Wolfe came out and gave up a 3-run homer to "T" Okada in the 9th and the Buffaloes won this 3-2.
Holy crap: the Fighters are in last place in the PL, and even Yokohama is doing better than we are overall. WTF.


So, last week my boyfriend was visiting me from Seattle. I told him we had to go to the Fighters games at the Tokyo Dome, and I told all of my friends in the cheering section that I was bringing him. He doesn't speak Japanese and they don't really speak English, but it was less of a problem than I thought it would be. I lent him a jersey and some cheersticks and taught him the words "Kattobase" and "Ganbare", and we were on our way!

We were there early enough to catch the mascot B*B wandering around, so now I have yet another photo with him...



Mike pointed out that we are standing in the wrong order and if I was in the middle, the jerseys would read "Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters" instead. Whoops.

Also, I did pinbadges for the first time this year. I'll talk about that a bit later.

Also, look who we saw warming up in the outfield!



Shogo Akada, recently traded from Seibu, and SOOOOOOOO TAGUCHI! Back from the majors. Exciting. My friends asked Mike (through me) if he knew about Taguchi, and when I translated his "only because Deanna told me about him," I said "Yeah, Taguchi is really famous in the US."

It was kind of amusing acting as a translator and also as an ouendan teacher of sorts. For the first game, on Tuesday, rather than sit in the first row, we sat in the sixth row with a slightly different group of friends, so that Mike could see people in front of him and copy their actions for clapping and waving and all. He doesn't speak any Japanese, but I taught him the general rhythm for clapping sticks, when to yell "Kattobase", wrote out a list of the lineup in English for him, and that seems to have worked out fairly well in general.

Mamoru Kishida started for the Buffaloes, and Keisaku Itokazu started for the Fighters. Itokazu really ran into some problems in the second inning where, with two outs, the following happened:

Okada singled.
Shiozaki singled.
Hidaka walked.
Ohbiki walked. 1-0.
Sakaguchi ALSO walked. 2-0.
Akada hit a bases-clearing double and everyone else scored. 5-0.
...Gotoh grounded out. Inning over.

That kinda set the tone for the rest of the game, as being down 5-0 behind an iffy starter is not easy to crawl back from. The Fighters picked it up to 5-1 in their half of the 2nd, but Koyano basically scored on a GIDP by Tsuruoka, and we didn't even bother to do a run-scoring cheer for it. Seriously.

Okada hit a home run in the 3rd to widen it to 6-1, and the Buffaloes made it 7-1 on a crazy grounder/rundown in the 5th.

FINALLY, in the Lucky 7th, Koyano singled with one out, Sho Nakata followed it with another, and then Takayuki Takaguchi HIT A HOME RUN! That made it 7-4 and a lot closer, and Kishida came out of the game.

The Buffaloes added another run in the 8th when PINCH RUNNER SOOOOOOOOOO TAGUCHI stole second and scored on an Ohbiki single, though I could have sworn Itoi's throw beat him to the plate. Nakata did gun down Takeshi Hidaka one runner later at least.

The weirdest play of the game was in the Fighters' half of the 8th, when Itoi hit a single to right that bounced off the RF wall, and from our angle I have no clue where it hit, but apparently whether it was fair or foul was in dispute and people came out and argued for quite a while about it. The Fighters fans started chanting "VI-DE-O! VI-DE-O!!" over and over again. The single stood but Koyano immediately grounded into a double play anyway.

Jon Leicester closed out the game and it ended at 8-4.



So then there was Wednesday. This time rather than it just being two white people in the crowd, it was us plus Ken Dick (who posts to the japanesebaseball.com forums but actually blogs about hockey), plus Shini from the japanesebaseball.com forums, who was moving back to Hong Kong on Thursday. Ken met up with us earlier in the day for lunch before heading to the Dome, but Shini was stuck at home glued to his TV watching Koshien until game time, pretty much. Of course, being Asian, he doesn't count as a foreigner anyway, apparently, but that's another story.

We went into the stadium and found my friends Hiromi and Risa at the seats in front, and they'd saved four seats for us in the 2nd row at my request (easier for people to pick up ouenka if they're watching people in front). We chatted with people around us (including Akki, who was making good use of his college education to say English sentences like "I am a terrorist.") and then when Ojisan showed up we all went off to do pinbadges and to find batteries for Ken's camera. We were successful on both fronts, and we also got ice cream! And then another friend gave me 3 more badges when I came back into the stands.

Here's an amusing side story: Before the game I'd told Mike, "I'm going to get a Ryota Imanari pinbadge today one way or the other. Either it'll come out of the pin machine, OR somebody is going to come up to me and say 'Deanna! I got a Ryota badge and I don't want it, here you are!'" Sure enough, shortly after we arrived at the stadium, Kaori from Osaka called out to me and said pretty much EXACTLY that and gave me her Imanari pin, and I was so happy about it that I opened it up and put it on my uniform right then and there (I have all 5 years of his pins now).



I guess since I'm talking about it now, I'll mention that I've already somewhat made out like a bandit on pinbadges this year. After two games, this is what I have:



The design is really cute this year, like a Japanese folding fan, and the names are all in Japanese for a change, every year until now they've been in English. So for those not familiar with the team numbers, so far I have: Kensuke, Tsuboi, Carlyle, Sunaga, Tadano, Hayashi, Itoi, Ohno, Nakajima, Yanuki, Yoshikawa, Inaba, Tanimoto, Ozaki, Unten, Sekiguchi, Imanari. And the opening series badge from Sapporo, since Hiromi had a double of it.

The thing is, the way you acquire pinbadges is -- first, you show up to the game and show your fan club card at the fan club window, and they give you a pin randomly just for coming to the stadium, a raijo badge (来場). Then you have the option, if you are a fan club member, to buy up to 5 tokens to put into the gatchapon capsule machines, for 200 yen each. You go upstairs and put the tokens in, spin the handle, and hope you get some good ones to come out. But the point being, in theory, you usually acquire 6 badges per game max. So 18 in two days is pretty good :)

Anyway, side quests aside, we got back to our seats just about in time for the starting lineups. This one saw Buddy Carlyle starting for the Fighters against Shogo Yamamoto for the Buffaloes.

In the second inning, I discovered that before the game, the Fighters ouendan had taught everyone a new chance theme... because after Shinji singled and moved up on a bunt, and Koyano also singled, and the team found itself with runners at the corners and one out, they started singing this new song for Nioka...



It's apparently a variation on an old theme used for when the opponents changed pitchers. I picked it up on the fly by listening to everyone around me, and as far as I can tell, the words are:

F-I G-H-T (x2)
Fighters, soreyuke sore Fighters
Bokura no nakama da, ganbare Fighters
Tokyo Dome de, kagayake, (player's name)!


Anyway, apparently this new chance theme works well, because Nioka doubled to left and scored Shinji to put the team ahead 1-0!

And then not very much happened in the game for the next few innings. I spent a lot of it talking to Shini and Ken and Mike, and to some of my Japanese friends too. During one of the downtimes, one of my friends told me we were on TV. Bizarrely, someone in Hokkaido took a picture of their TV and sent it to Mariko, so she beamed it to my cellphone using infrared.



Japan is weird.

Oh, one other wacky thing: that crazy groundskeeper dude who was working the Tokyo Dome games all last year and going nuts on first base before the end of YMCA, who had even been there for Tuesday's game, was NOT there on Wednesday's game! I felt terrible because I was making a big deal about how everyone had to go look at the first base groundskeepers, and then nothing happened.

Yoshinori Tateyama came out to pitch the top of the 7th inning, and I got out my Kamagaya towel, and some of my other friends yelled down a few rows, "Deanna-san! Tateyama deta!!" and I made a big show of putting the towel over my head. Shini was like "Dude, everyone knows you do this?" I must point out, however, that it WORKS: Tateyama pitched 1.1 scoreless innings with two strikeouts. So there. As long as I continue to not see him pitch, he will pitch well.

Wish I could say the same for our new closer Brian Wolfe, though. He basically came out to hold that 1-0 lead in the 9th, and then Cabrera singled, LaRocca singled, and "T" Okada blasted yet another home run into the left-field stands to make it 3-1 Orix. Urgggghhh.

The Fighters managed to get one run back in their half of the 9th on an RBI single by Tomohiro Nioka (who is leading the team in RBIs), but that's all they would be able to manage as the game ended with two runners on and a groundout to first. Bleh. Notch another save for Jon Leicester and ANOTHER Fighters loss.



Despite all that, I guess we had a good enough time at the game...



Afterwards, the four of us adjourned to Denny's by the Tokyo Dome and ate food and talked about sports for an hour or two, mostly about baseball and Koshien and stuff. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that I can go home from games not really caring whether we won or lost, as long as I had a good time hanging out with people. Probably a good thing, given how awful the Fighters are this year.

Oh, and for the record, Ken bought an Ogasawara jersey for some family member, and I didn't kill him. I must be getting soft in my old age.

I just got back from the weekend and was reading news and had a HUGE shock when I saw that Hiroyuki Oze died on Friday. At first I figured it must be a typo, or I was misreading it (originally saw the news in Japanese), or something. Oze-kun? MY high-socks-wearing, speedy-running, cute-smiling lefty-batting up-and-coming young awesome outfielder? *WHAT?!*

Unfortunately, no, it seems to be true. Worse, it seems to have been suicide. Various sources indicate that Oze had been depressed for a while since his mother died when he was in college, and he had even sent emails to some friends the night before saying "Thank you for everything until now", and then his body was found unconscious and bleeding on the roof area over the second floor of the hotel the team was staying in; I think he was staying on the 10th floor.

If you've been around this blog for a while, you may know that Oze was actually pretty much my favorite Orix Buffaloes player these last two years. Not sure exactly how it happened beyond me just noticing his high socks first and then realizing he was an awesome young player shortly afterwards. Nadya and I used to talk about him being the secret gem buried in the Orix lineup; I kind of saw him as an outfield version of Shunichi Nemoto from the Marines, who was another one of those hardworking exciting young college-drafted guys who tore up the minors and who you really wanted to see succeed rather than get lost in the shuffle.

Oze was only 24 years old. I feel terrible for his family -- he was recently married, even. That's got to be really tough to deal with for them, for all the players and the fans as well, seeing such a bright young man with such potential ending his life like this. I really thought this year was going to be a breakout for him, especially with more playing time in the outfield likely to open up. I mean, I'm not an Orix fan, certainly, but there are usually one or two players I secretly pull for on just about any team, and Oze was my guy for the Buffaloes. Urgh.

Well, I just went back and cropped a few photos that I took of Oze last spring in Chiba, which I felt were kinda stalkerish at the time, but seriously, I *really* liked him. So here's a few of those and a few other Oze-related photos from earlier posts here..



Oze in the dugout at Chiba, April 29 2009. He had started on the bench, though he came into the game later on as a pinch-runner, stole a base, played left field for a bit and hit a pop fly out.


Same game, Oze during batting practice. He was in the last group to bat.


Playing catch with Tuffy Rhodes between innings.


Another pregame shot of him.

And a few other images...

From April 26 at Skymark:

The scoreboard at Skymark with Oze's at-bat cartoon, in the lineup.


And my view of him. I have more shots like this than I care to admit, as this is generally how I saw him, standing in front of the Fighters ouendan. One of my friends used to make fun of me like "There's your Orix boyfriend!"

From the Kiyohara farewell at Seibu day, Sept 29 2008:

Oze during batting practice with Makoto Moriyama. I tried so hard to get a shot of him that day and also failed.

Also Sept 2008, the first time I actually sat in the infield at the Osaka Dome, so I could see the scoreboard:


Seriously, this sucks. I don't know any other way to put it. Every time I see Orix this year, I am going to be thinking of him. I'm sure a lot of other people will be too.

I'm always joking to my Fighters friends that I am extraordinarily bad at planning trips here in Japan, and yet things always seem to work out okay. Going to Osaka during "Silver Week" was definitely a prime example of that.

("Silver Week" was a calendar glitch in 2009 wherein the relocation of Respect for the Aged Day to the 3rd Monday of September made it the 21st, and the Autumn Equinox holiday of September 23 gave them a "sandwich holiday" day on September 22nd as well, or effectively, a 5-day weekend for many people.)

Generally, travelling during big Japanese holidays is expensive and a bit of a nightmare, as pretty much everybody in the country is also travelling. My original idea for how to spend the Saturday and Sunday of Silver Week involved not leaving Tokyo, going to some minor-league and college baseball games, as well as possibly kicking it back at Jingu, kutabare Yomiuri style.

Instead, I found myself at the Osaka Dome with Team Shinozawa and friends.



Thanks to not booking my trip until only a week in advance, I took a shinkansen to Osaka at around 6:40am, arriving a bit after 9am, and got to the Osaka Dome around 10am... for a 2pm game. There weren't many people around at that time, but fortunately, I recognized a guy I'd met in Hiroshima that was part of our group for this game, so I got to sit with him and his friends at the very front of the line, as we waited until they opened the stadium at 12:30pm. It sounds crazy to wait outside in the sun for two and a half hours, but it really isn't so bad. I had people to chat with, and I also spent some time in the big baseball merchandise shop inside the Dome, which was open from 10am.

(In case you don't already know, the Osaka Dome shop completely beats the Tokyo Dome shop in every way possible -- it's bigger, nicer, and has tons more merchandise for every team and an MLB corner and then even random stuff like Ibaraki Golden Golds.)

The craziest thing I saw there this time was:


NPB-flavored Crocs! You could get a pair of Crocs for any of the 12 NPB teams here, for around 4000 yen. I don't wear Crocs, but if I did, I would totally have gone in for a pair.

Finally, we went into the Dome, and we staked out what we thought was a prime space for our group -- right behind the ouendan:



Which would have been great, except for when the ouendan leaders stood on a stepstool to lead chants, and were right in my line of sight. Oops.

I did the usual pre-game aisatsu routine of saying hello to a bazillion people, including yelling hello down to Brian Sweeney. Bizarrely, the Fighters cheering section was pretty much packed, but the Osaka Dome itself was relatively empty. I suppose it makes sense -- not only was Hanshin also playing at home, but all the Fighters fans were travelling for the big weekend.

Anyway, there was a game. Keisaku Itokazu started for the Fighters, which was kind of ominous to me since I've seen him pitch a lot this year but he always seems to have bad luck. Yoshihisa Hirano started for Orix.

It ended up being a low-scoring game, though -- the Buffaloes got up 1-0 in the 3rd when hotshot-of-the-future Takahiro Okada singled and was driven in a bit later by Masahiro Abe, three consecutive singles for Orix. The Fighters tied it 1-1 in the 6th when Hichori walked, moved up on an Inaba walk, moved up on a Shinji groundout, and then Terrmel Sledge hit a double to center that went far enough to the wall such that we couldn't see it land from our viewpoint.


(This is one of my friends, wearing a silly American flag hat every time Sledge came to bat. People generally hold up flags of the countries their foreign players come from, but for American players, often anything gaudy that screams "USA!" is acceptable.)

And so it continued, Itokazu vs. Hirano, on and on, 1-1 until we got to the 9th inning. Yoshio Itoi, for whom an entire gigantic cheering group came down from Hokkaido wearing blinking devil-horn hairbands and black t-shirts, hit a single to left, and then Tomohiro Nioka hit a ball that rolled up the 3rd-base line... and WASN'T foul! Ha! Iiyama pinch-ran for Nioka, as we all broke out the Kita no Kuni Kara chance music, some of us using the clicky-clacky Buffaloes noisemakers we'd received upon entering the stadium. Tsuruoka bunted up the two runners successfully, and then Kensuke Tanaka walked. Bases loaded for Hichori, who slammed the ball out to centerfield for a triple! Everyone else scored, making it 4-1!

Bullpen musical chairs ensued for the next two batters, as former Fighter Akio Shimizu struck out Atsunori Inaba, and then Ryan Vogelsong got Shinji Takahashi to ground out.

We kind of figured Hisashi Takeda would come in for the save, but... no, the bottom of the 9th came and it was still Itokazu out there! He retired the side in order for a complete-game win, and was the game hero as well!



After the game, our group split up for an hour or two to take care of things like checking into our respective hotels and dropping off luggage and whatnot, and the plan was to regroup at 7pm at a restaurant called Nakatani, which one of the actual local fans in our group had made reservations at.

Nobody told me anything about the place, other than that it was a chanko-nabe restaurant. They just gave me a map and said it was in the basement, and if I got lost, call one of them and they'd help me figure it out.

Well, I get there a little after 7, half our group is there, and sure enough, it IS a chanko-nabe restaurant, which means cooking a bunch of meat and vegetables in a big hot pot:



But the decor is... well... interesting, to say the least:









After staring at the photos and the jerseys for a little while, I have the sudden realization that HEY WAIT A MINUTE THE GUY SERVING US DRINKS AND FOOD LOOKS JUST LIKE THE BASEBALL PLAYER IN THOSE PHOTOS.

Yes, the proprietor is a guy named http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E8%B0%B7%E5%BF%A0%E5%B7%B1">Tadami Nakatani who used to be a professional baseball player. He is from Kansai and played for the Tigers, Kintetsu Buffaloes, and Orix Blue Wave, pretty much never leaving Kansai. He didn't have an illustrious career as an outfielder but apparently was well-liked, judging from the sheer amount of signed stuff in his store and whatnot. And he certainly SEEMED like a nice enough guy.



One of the other guys in our group asked for a photo with Nakatani-san, so I figured I would bug him too. Nakatani has an Orix jersey hanging by the front door -- it's #132, from when he was doing some sort of instructional work with the Buffaloes. (I was like "Why do you have an ikusei jersey?")

Anyway, good food, good times -- although the bill ended up running around 4000-5000 yen per person depending on how much beer they drank. We had the chankonabe and also a weird kind of rice that I forgot the name of, where you also cook that in the huge nabe pot, with eggs and some other stuff. It was tasty though.

There were really only 3 or 4 tables at the place depending on how you look at it, and our group took up 2/3 of the restaurant. We got a guy at the other table to take a group photo for us:



We lingered at the restaurant a bit, and took some more photos outside the restaurant, and Nakatani-san even came up with us to say goodbye, and so on. I wonder whether the people who come to his restaurant are always baseball people, or if he gets a mix, or what. It was definitely an appropriate place to go to with a big group of baseball tourists, at any rate.

And I got to talk to some people in our group who I hadn't met before, but will undoubtedly see again, either in Sapporo or around Kanto. So that was good. (One guy, he was even in town from Sapporo, but is a Takuya Nakashima fan and was continuing his Silver Week by going to ni-gun games, so we hung out a bit at Kamagaya on Tuesday too.)

I crashed pretty hard when I arrived back at the hotel, and next thing I knew, it was morning, I woke up and checked out and found myself back at the Osaka Dome at 9am. For a 1pm game. Yeah. There were very few people there at that point, mostly just mats on the ground and bags people had left:



Well, and there were several members of the Fighters ouendan sleeping on cardboard slats outside the gate. I have no clue whether they were there all night or not.



I found the place where I was supposed to be waiting, but only one guy was there, and he seemed willing to acknowledge my presence but totally unwilling to talk or anything, so I ended up wandering around a bit again. Went to Lawson's to get some water, stopped back in the Dome store for a while, stuff like that. I also took some silly photos around the Dome, like this one:


(Mister Buffaloes, Tuffy Rhodes!)

And by the time I got back to the gate at 10:45am, it was PACKED!



Even more folks were there on Sunday than Saturday, and from even further places. I saw the Michinoku Fighters boss guy and a few of their group, and I saw a few more Sapporo people that I hadn't seen before. I also ran into some Osaka fans that I've always run into there.

We ran into the stadium at 11:30 when they let us in, and this time staked out a part of the first 3 rows one section over from the ouendan, so I got to sit in the very front!

I ran up to watch batting practice a bit. This time I saw Terrmel Sledge out there catching flies in the outfield, so I waved at him and he actually waved back. We yelled some stuff at each other but I couldn't hear him and I am not sure he heard me, but he made some motions like batting and catching, and someone said "Did he say he will hit you a home run?" Heh.

A bit later, my friend with the ridiculous USA flag hat put it on and asked me in Japanese, "Deanna, how can I tell Sledge that he is cho kakkoi?" and I'm like "well... you would say 'You are cool!'"

But before I could point out that it is really weird for men to tell other men in English things like "You are cool! I love you!" he yelled down "HEY MISTER SLEDGE! YOU ARE COOL GUY!!!!" And a few things in Japanese, and then "GIVE ME HOME RUN!"

I was thinking that Sledge was going to wonder what kind of wackos we were up here.

But Sledge just laughed and waved at us and yelled at me, "Tsuyaku!" ("Translate!")

So I'm like "He's a really big fan of yours. Also he wants you to hit him a home run. Take a look at his crazy hat!"

I would have yelled hello to Sweeney again, but this time he was taking... infield practice?



I dunno.

---------

You know what? This entry has been sitting in my pile for several days now, and rather than just let it continue to slide, I'm going to just sum up by saying: the game was Darvish vs. Komatsu, and Darvish's shoulder is apparently still tired, because he walked SEVEN BATTERS in five innings, and the fact that it only accounted for giving up 2 runs is some kind of miracle.

Despite all that, it WAS actually a 2-2 game for a bit there... until the Buffaloes went and totally beat up on the Fighters bullpen (namely Miyanishi and Tanimoto) in the 8th inning for a whopping FIVE RUNS, with a 3-run homer by Koji Yamasaki. Ouch.

The final score was 7-2.


Here's your game hero, Yamasaki.

Most of my friends went to the train station directly after the game, to take their trains that were scheduled at reasonable times, or go to the airport, whatever. Me, I was taking a night bus back to Tokyo, so I wasted a few hours hanging out near Osaka station, then got on my night bus. The next morning I got back to Tokyo, slept for like 2-3 more hours, then went to Jingu for the Meiji-Rikkio game.

The end.

Wow, I'm not even sure where to start with this one. I didn't think anything crazier was going to happen this week after dancing YMCA on the field on Tuesday, but I was wrong.

Brian Sweeney was starting for the Fighters tonight, and so over the last day or two I'd traded with some people to get two extra Sweeney pinbadges, with the idea that I'd try to find his family so that they could wear them for good luck. Amazingly, while I was waiting to do the pinbadge machines today, the entire Sweeney entourage happened to walk into the stadium, so I caught up with them in the stands a bit, and one of the guys said, "Hey, you look like you're having a lot of fun out there in the outfield, can we come join you?"

I told them by all means to come out there and I'd see if we could even scramble them some seats in the front area where I was sitting with my gang. They stopped by a bit before the game started, but nothing was going on then, so they said they'd come by later.

In the meantime, Brian started out by walking Alex Cabrera and giving up a home run to Tuffy Rhodes in the first inning, making it 2-0 pretty quickly. And two more runs came in the 3rd inning to make it 4-0 with Ohbiki driving in one and another run scoring when Tuffy grounded into a double play that time.

The people behind me (not part of my group of friends) were grumbling, "Sweeney, go home!" but I told them that they should just have patience, that the Fighters would surely find a way to win, and Brian would do his best in the meantime.

Fortunately, the Fighters lived up to that. Makoto Kaneko hit a home run in the 3rd to make it 4-1, and then we had a WILD 5th inning.

Shota Ohno led off with a single, Kaneko struck out, but Kensuke Tanaka got his third hit of the day, a single. Toshimasa Konta then hit a hard grounder up the middle, and shortstop Keiji Ohbiki managed to dive and STOP the ball, but couldn't get up to make a throw, so suddenly the bases were loaded. We did a huge Inaba Jump, but he struck out. Eiichi Koyano, who has been CRAZY CLUTCH MAN recently, came up with the bases loaded and two out, and delivered a huge double into the gap in right-center, scoring Ohno and Kensuke to narrow the lead to 4-3. Sledge walked,and then Yoshio Itoi hit ANOTHER double, this one down the right-field line. Konta scored, Koyano scored, and it was 5-4! Nioka grounded out, but the Fighters had the lead, and they kept it the rest of the way.

Brian only lasted another two batters into the 6th, before letting Hayashi, Ejiri, Kikuchi, and Miyanishi combine to keep the rest of the game scoreless. It was still enough to earn him (and the team) a much-needed win.

In the meantime, the Fighters added another run in the 6th, off John Leicester, who replaced starter Hirano on the mound. Shota Ohno led off again and this time was hit by a pitch in the middle of his back (ouch), Kaneko bunted him up, Kensuke walked, and then Konta got HIS third hit of the day, a double to left, scoring Ohno. 6-4. Leicester was taken out for former Fighter Akio Shimizu, who got a pop out from Inaba and then intentionally walked Koyano to get to Sledge, but it worked as he grounded out with the bases loaded.

It was about this time where things get really fuzzy for me, because most of the Sweeney posse came back -- his wife Connie and his daughter Ava, and their friends Brian and Liz and Steve, who I'd met the other day in our YMCA adventures. (The others joined us a bit later.) We scrambled to make room for them, but Ojisan had fortunately saved four extra seats in the second row for friends of ours that never showed up, so it worked out okay. I gave Ava my cheer sticks to use, and tried to quickly explain to everyone else what to do: "Just repeat whatever everyone's yelling, usually three times. And a really important word is 'Kattobase'." It turns out it was actually Ava and Connie's first time cheering in the middle of the stands like this, but they'd been to more than enough games to know the routine and everyone else caught on pretty quickly! They really enjoyed being in the middle of the craziness, which made me happy. I don't often get to introduce people to the cheering section, let alone friends and family of the starting pitcher, you know, so it was quite an experience for me too.

Or as Steve said, "The bleacher bums in NYC have NOTHING on you guys -- this is a million times better than anything they ever do!"

We sadly didn't get to do an Inaba Jump in the 8th, BUT we did get to do some chance music and Koyano also knocked in two more runs with a double to right! 8-4! He also got himself tagged out trying for a triple, but whatever, it was pretty cool anyway, and there were high-fives and banzais all around.

So, the Fighters won, and the Sweeney clan got to experience a Fighters cheering section post-game celebration, with all of the singing and clapping required, including an Inaba Jump, which made Ava really happy. The funny part was, the ouendan leader was trying to decide which player to do a cheer for next at one point, and so Connie yells, "SWEENEY!!"

Some people were like "Sweeney?!" but then the ouendan leader, after joking a bit, said, "Since we have Sweeney's family in the stands with us today, and he was the winning pitcher, let's do Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for them!"

We seriously did the Kanto Chance Music Theme, aka Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, yelling "Kattobase Sweeney!", and followed it up with the Kita no Kuni Kara chance music as well, yelling "utte utte sore yuke kattobase Sweeney" at the end as well. Yes, it's a little weird to be doing a batting cheer for a pitcher outside of interleague, but it was pretty fun and people were all laughing.

After we finished all of the cheering and did a sanbon to end, about half the stands wanted to come take photos with Sweeney's family. I think most people recognized Mia and Ava since they've come out with Brian when he does hero interviews in Sapporo, plus, well, they are totally adorable American little girls, which are quite a rarity for most people here to ever see.

Even I couldn't resist...



I also made everyone take a photo together when they were first down there. (Steve was taking pictures of everything in sight anyway.)


(The guy in front of me is Akki, who's a big Sweeney fan. Although he threatened to throw his jersey over the outfield wall after that Rhodes home run in the first inning.)


This is Liz, who was really really nice, both today and before the YMCA thing. I feel like if we'd met under other circumstances we'd probably be pretty good friends! She really got into the cheering stuff and my group said she was awesome.


And the final score. The game heroes were Koyano and Itoi, which isn't too surprising. It would have been super-cool if Brian had been game hero, but I think we're happy enough that he just got the win today. Koyano seemed kind of dazed during his interview, at one point they asked something like "Were you hoping to get a go-ahead hit when you came up to the plate in the 5th inning?" and he's just like "Yes? Um, I think so?" It was cute.


I just hope I didn't use up too much ouendan karma today. I tried to explain on Connie's behalf that she had a great time and really wanted to thank everyone, and I think they understood. I'm sure that at first people were wondering what on earth the big group of gaijin were doing there, so it worked out pretty well, all things considered. I'm not sure they get players' families in the outfield stands that often, let alone foreign players' families!

Onwards! I'm leaving for Nagoya in the morning on my way to Koshien! (By the way, Tohoku won, Nichidai San won, and Seibo lost today, none of which are too surprising, really. Mie won, which IS surprising.)