Marinerds, etc.

I posted this originally to the japanesebaseball.com forums as a reply to "Who's more likely to get the Sawamura award, Yu Darvish or Yoshihisa Naruse?" But, I want to have this around to work with as an article later, so I'm reposting it here.

For those who don't follow the NPB, Darvish is the best Iranian-Japanese pitcher in the history of baseball, and the ace pitcher for the Nippon Ham Fighters. The tall lanky right-hander just turned 22 two months ago, and his line for this year is 15-5 with a 1.82 ERA, 210 strikeouts and 49 walks in 207.2 IP.

Cherub-cheeked Yoshihisa Naruse is The Boy Who Can't Lose for this year's Chiba Lotte Marines. He's a young lefty -- his 23rd birthday is tomorrow -- and his line for this year is 16-1 with a 1.82 ERA, 138 strikeouts and 27 walks in 173.1 IP.

Yes, Darvish and Naruse both have amazing real ERAs, and are tied for the lowest ERA in Japan this year. But for those who also like being sabermetric statheads, there's a statistic called "fielding independent ERA", which you calculate based on things which the pitcher can control -- walks, strikeouts, home runs. I ran the numbers for all pitchers in Japan who logged over 100 innings, and Darvish comes out ahead in that with a 2.64 FIP.

Top 5 FIP (using ((13*HR + 3*(BB+HBP) - 2*K) / IP) + 3.2)

1 NHF  Darvish      2.64
2 CLM  H Kobayashi  2.71
3 OB   Kishida      2.76
4 FSH  Sugiuchi     2.87
5 CLM  Naruse       2.89

In addition to running the FIP numbers, I also examined a statistic called WHIP: Walks plus Hits per Inning Pitched. This is basically an indicator of how many baserunners a pitcher is allowing in general. It's important because, after all, if a pitcher doesn't allow a lot of guys on base, then there aren't a lot of guys to score runs. Right? Generally, if a guy posts around a 1.1 or lower, that's great, meaning they allow slightly over one runner per inning. Darvish had a 0.83 WHIP, which is just amazing.

Top 7 WHIP: (everyone under 1.1)

1 NHF Darvish      0.83
2 NHF M Takeda     0.87
3 CLM Naruse       0.92
4 TYS Greisinger   1.03
5 NHF Glynn        1.05
6 CLM S Watanabe   1.06
7 FSH Sugiuchi     1.08

Another way to look at pitchers' strikeouts is in the number of strikeouts per 9 innings they have, not just the total. If a starter is managing to strike out over 1 guy per inning, that's really really good. Usually relievers have higher K/9 ratios because they come out and throw harder for a shorter period of time, but starters have to sustain their ability for a longer outing. Darvish is one of only three pitchers in Japan who logged over 100 innings and managed to strike out over one batter per inning:

Top 5 K/9:

1 RGE Tanaka       9.48
2 CD  Nakata       9.37
3 NHF Darvish      9.12
4 TYS K Ishii      8.83
5 FSH Arakaki      8.67

The only place where Darvish is weak is specifically in walks - his BB/9 and K/BB ratios are a little weaker than Naruse's. Darvish walked 2.13 guys per 9 innings, where Naruse walked 1.40 guys per 9 innings, so Darvish's ratio of strikeouts to walks is only 4.29, where Naruse's is 5.11, just from the lower ratio of walks.

But on the other hand, only three pitchers in Japan logged more than 200 innings: Wakui at 213, Greisinger at 209, and Darvish at 207 2/3. Darvish also has a Japan-leading 12 complete games to Naruse's 6, though Naruse has 4 shutouts to Darvish's 3.

What does this all mean? It basically means that it's pretty difficult to tell who's going to get it. I think there's a good argument for Darvish even on the "normal" stats -- IP, K, ERA, W -- but it's really not clear-cut. The only thing for sure is, if either of the Giants lefty aces get it, then something bizarre has transpired.

I have to admit that I wasn't all that excited about going to Fan Fest this year, so rather than camp out at 8am with PositivePaul and Corco and the other insane autograph-seekers, I overslept and didn't get there until 11:30am, and I had to pick up my friend Jason on the way. By the time we arrived, all 3000 of the autograph vouchers were gone. Oops.

This year (as opposed to last year), I did the following:
- saw a bit of the Hargrove Q&A
- saw the Felix/Rivera Q&A
- walked around the infield and sat in the visitor's dugout
- watched a few rounds of Last Fan Standing trivia, didn't get picked, got bored and left
- toured the history exhibit and the clubhouse and all, since Jason hadn't seen them before
- walked around the stadium and saw all the various tables set up all over the place
- saw the last few minutes of the Lincoln/Armstrong Q&A
- saw the Putz/Betancourt Q&A
- saw the Bavasi Q&A

And that's about it. I took a whole bunch of pictures, and I took notes on my Sidekick, but they're a bit scattered. I'll see what I can piece together and throw in a few of the photos I've cropped.


Mike Hargrove answers questions in the Dugout Dialogue.

Hargrove actually seemed to be in a fairly good mood, but some of the questions he got were pretty crazy. Someone asked him, "What the hell was the deal with you guys losing to Oakland so much last year? If you'd even gone 50-50 against them you'd have been in the playoffs!" Another person asked him why they traded Jamie Moyer, and I really don't know why he'd be the one to answer that (he said something like "Well, you know, Jamie's in his 40s, we didn't know how much longer he'd be playing, it's not that we didn't like him or something.")

He mentioned that he'd been emailing back and forth with Ichiro a bit these last few weeks and that he expects to keep Ichiro in center field this upcoming season.

People asked about Broussard and Mike Morse, and Grover basically said that he figured both of them were going to be role players this year. He actually described Mike Morse as a utility guy, saying "he can play some infield, a bit in left, a bit in right," which means he obviously wasn't watching last time Mike Morse actually played in the outfield, but hey, that was followed by "though none of these guys really have the talent level of Willie Bloomquist as a utility player, of course."

He credited JJ Putz with having a spectacular season and really bailing the team out there, and said they owed it to Eddie Guardado for teaching him so well. And in a completely random question, someone asked who the backup catcher would be this year, and Hargrove was like "Uhh... Rene Rivera?" with this look of "Do I have another choice?" on his face.

He was mobbed by people seeking autographs, but since I got him last year, I didn't bother, but instead found a better vantage point for the Felix and Rene Rivera session.


A pensive King Felix.


I swear this was in response to "You only have #34 because of Freddy, right?".


Backup catcher Rene Rivera shared the session with Felix.

So yeah, the minute Felix came out there was a ton of applause, and the first thing they started talking about in his session was, of course, how much weight he'd lost and how great he looked.

"How much weight did you lose, anyway?"
"I lost 25 pounds!"
"How'd you do that?"
"I stopped eating fried food."

I was really struck by how great Rivera and Felix both were at speaking English. Last year Felix had an interpreter, but this year he pretty much fielded everything on his own. They did have a Spanish interpreter there, but the guy literally just sat there, they never asked him for help, and Felix's speech was really good.

Rivera got a couple of questions from time to time. Someone asked what he has to do as a backup catcher -- "I have to stay ready for anything, so I work harder to keep in shape." Which pitcher does he like to face? Rodrigo Lopez. Is he looking forward to catching for Jeff Weaver? "I look forward to catching for EVERYONE."

Felix got a pretty wide variety of questions. Some people asked about his pitch selection, and his funniest response was "Pitching inside? I love it!"

The pitcher he looks up to the most? "Freddy Garcia. Doesn't everyone know that?"

Any particular batters he likes to face? "Vladimir Guerrerro." What does he do for that? "I keep the ball fast and down in the zone. Not that it matters, he can hit everything."

Why does he have number 34? "Because I had it in the minors... hey, come on, it's NOT because of Freddy, I swear! It's just a number I like. Baseball players are sort of superstitious about their numbers."

Yeah, so like I said, we wandered around for a while after that. I didn't actually do the "run around the bases" thing last year, so that was sort of fun, and we did the whole take-pictures-in-the-dugout thing, so now I finally have a picture of myself sitting in a major league dugout that isn't Yankee Stadium.

You can pretty much walk straight into the clubhouse from the visitor's dugout, so we did that. We went into Last Fan Standing, got tickets, but weren't picked to compete. Sadly, the categories we saw were NL/AL Wild Card Teams, and "Former Teams of the Mariners 40-Man Roster", which actually was a contest of "Can you name all the teams Batista and Guillen have been on?" After those, we wandered off again.

We went through the Pacific Northwest baseball exhibit down in the Diamond Club, but it was pretty much the exact same thing as last year, though Jason enjoyed seeing the history stuff. Also, I'm pretty damn sure I saw Dave Eskenazi hanging around there, and I probably should have said something to him, except that 1) I forgot his name at the time and 2) it would have probably freaked him out if I was like "I remember you from the SABR book reading!" But since most if not all of the collection was his, I bet I could have at least gotten a whole bunch of questions answered about it all. Sigh.

During the clubhouse tour, we noticed that they had Felix and JJ's lockers next to each other in the locker room. Johjima and Ichiro have lockers off in a corner, next to the... lost and found? And Hargrove appeared to have an Iraqi flag in his office, signed by some of the troops, I think. Also, John McLaren was just hanging around the clubhouse in the area between the weightroom and the locker room, I guess it was after his Q&A, so he was taking pictures with little kids and being all greeter-like, saying "Welcome to our clubhouse! Hi guys, how do you like the clubhouse? Isn't it awesome?"

A sampling of the random tables around the concourse of the stadium included the Aquasox and Rainiers, the SABR table, the Season Ticket booth, the Moyer Foundation (featuring Moyer jerseys from both Mariners and Phillies), the silent auction and memorabilia sale (featuring crazy things like a Dominic Woody jersey for $65 and autographed Bobby Madritsch 8x10's for $5, both of which I at least pondered for a few seconds before not buying them), and the Nintendo booths.

One of the Nintendo booths was a game center much like the one they usually have in the outfield area, and one was this newfangled Nintendo Fan Center demo. Apparently the Mariners will be the location test next year for a Nintendo DS feature, where you can use your DS during a game to get up-to-date stats and scores and even broadcast video of the games, and to order food, and to play trivia games and such. Jason commented that it'd make my Sidekick obsolete, until I asked about how much the service would cost, and then the guy's like "well... it'd have a fee per game... or per month... or something... for some of the features at least..." Yeah. Either way, I think it's a neat idea, but how many people actually bring their Nintendo DS to the stadium on a regular basis?

I got back to the Q&A area just in time to catch the last part of the Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln talk.


Mariners president Chuck Armstrong, broadcaster extraordinaire Rick Rizzs, and Mariners CEO Howard Lincoln.

I guess the funniest one was an exchange that went something like this:

Fan: "I had a question for you guys -- now that he's available again, have you guys considered re-signing David Bell?"
Armstrong: "No."
Fan: "Err. Why not?"
Armstrong: "We have Adrian Beltre playing third base and we have the best utility player in the major leagues in Willie Bloomquist. Where would we put David Bell?"

(It might have actually been Lincoln, not Armstrong, I forget.)

Another one was like:

Fan: "Have you considered doing something like the Diamondbacks do, where there's a specific place before each game where a player or two will come out and sign stuff for fans?"
Rizzs: "Hey, let me tell you all about this great thing we do called the Mariners Caravan! We go barnstorming all over from Oregon to Canada to Spokane, with various players, talking to fans and signing stuff and all. It's great!"
Lincoln: "Yeah, Rick, and don't they make you drive the bus?"


Mariners closer JJ Putz, being all ponderous.


JJ Putz.


Yuniesky Betancourt.


It's the Rick Rizzs show!

They had Yuniesky Betancourt and JJ Putz do a Q&A session together at 2pm, which was pretty odd, to say the least. I was looking forward to it, because "well, Betancourt doesn't really speak English and Putz is pretty dumb, so this could turn into some fairly entertaining Rick Rizzs filler time," and sure enough, the sound guys had even cued up a few rimshots for the bad Rizzs jokes.

But it wasn't that bad. Unlike last year, when Putz unintentionally played the straight man to all of Jarrod Washburn's jokes, he actually had a few funny things to say on his own, and seemed to intentionally be going along with Rizzs's jokes. Betancourt got asked a bunch of questions about Cuba, mainly, and I'm really not sure he was all that into the entire thing (possibly because he couldn't understand a lot of what was going on, though I feel bad guessing that).

Rizzs asked Putz about the new contract. "And what's the best part of the deal for you?" Putz started at him blankly until Rizzs was like "The radio show, right?" and Putz was like "Oh yeah! Bullpen Banter is the most important part!"

Fan: "Were you afraid when you were facing Barry Bonds?"
Putz: "Nah, not really. I mean, he plays left field, we could see him from the bullpen all along. Though then I got out there on the mound and suddenly there's this giant guy at home plate practically holding a toothpick."
Rizzs: "But you sure got him, didn't you?"
Putz: "Yeah. Fastball inside."

Fan: "Is there any hitter that you really wouldn't want to face?"
Putz: "Duhh... uhh... uh, I don't know... Richie Sexson! Yeah."

Fan (a little girl): "Umm... where were you born?"
Putz: "Trenton, Michigan."
Betancourt, through translator: "Santa Clara, Cuba."
Putz: "And where were you born?"
Little girl: "Tacoma!"

Fan: "Who was your favorite player growing up?"
Betancourt: (something about how he was inspired by various stuff)
Rizzs: "My favorite player growing up was JJ Putz!"
Sound guy: [rimshot]
(the laughter and such drowned out Putz's response)

Rizzs: "What's it like having [Betancourt] in the field behind you?"
Putz: "It's great. When he's out there you just pray for ground balls."

Fan: "This one's for Yuniesky... do you have the green light to steal?"
Betancourt: (I didn't really understand the answer, even from the translator)
Rizzs [covering]: "Hey, JJ, do YOU have the green light to steal?"
Putz: "Oh yeah! Sure do!"
Sound guy: [rimshot]

So, oddly, most of the crowd dispersed after that interview, and then a little bit later, Rizzs came back out with Bill Bavasi. I don't think that was actually on the original schedule. So there weren't a ton of us out there at that point, but I have a feeling that over half the people there were blogizens, given the questions that were asked. I was sitting with PositivePaul (we spent the entire Putz/Betancourt Q&A snapping pictures on our dSLRs) and David J. Corcoran at this point as well as my friend Jason and Paul's brother-in-law Dave. I even actually asked a question over the microphone, though I'll get to that in a second.


Bill Bavasi, the Mariners general manager

He got asked questions all over the board as well, though I thought he actually gave pretty good answers to a lot of them. Someone asked about Arthur Rhodes, and Bavasi said that Rhodes wanted to come back to Seattle, and that pitching in Citizens Bank Park was just a nightmare for him (though I think an exact quote was something like "Koufax would have gotten killed in this Philly park"). When asked about the Jeff Weaver signing, Bavasi explained that it was in this weird limbo of "pending a physical", which really means "we've essentially signed him but there's a whole bunch of stuff that needs to get settled first."

Fan: "Why did you get rid of Soriano for Ramirez?"
Bavasi: "Wait, we didn't 'get rid of him'. I'm an old GM, you know, compared to all these young guys in the business today, the GMs who just want to make deals and make an impact. We saw a starter with upside, and the Braves saw a reliever with upside, and that's how it went."

Fan: "If you could have any player for your team, who would it be?"
Bavasi: [paraphrased] "Well, if I can't build a time machine and get Babe Ruth, then I'd want a guy sort of like Derek Jeter. I mean, not Jeter obviously because we have a fantastic shortstop, but someone with a makeup like his, with the talent and the proven ability to go out there and win games. You want to build a team around a guy like him."

Fan: "Who was your favorite player growing up?"
Rizzs and Bavasi simultaneously: "BABE RUTH!"
Bavasi: "No, just kidding. It was Sandy Koufax."

(Deanna's note: You know how I grew up with Steve Carlton being my absolute hero when I was a kid because I was left-handed? Bill Bavasi is also left-handed and his dad was GM of the Dodgers through Koufax's career. So even though the latter might seem like the obvious reason, I'd actually bet more on the former. Wish I'd thought of asking about it at the time.)

Corco got up and tried to ask a question but he completely just started babbling about something about Broussard, and I didn't even try to take it down at all.

So I asked the girl with the microphone, "Can I ask him why the hell he traded Chris Snelling?"
She said "Sure, but phrase it a little more positively. What's your name?"

So I told her, and a bit later, the whole stadium could hear "Deanna from Seattle has a question. 'So um... what were you thinking with the Snelling trade?'"

I think Bavasi might have recognized me from the USSM feed, because he even said something like "Hey, I love the guy, and I know you do too. But we wanted to give him a chance to play, and we wanted some veteran experience, which is why we got Vidro." He went into comparing the '95 Mariners to the '95 Angels and saying how they had a great young team in Anaheim but not enough veteran experience, so they choked down the stretch, whereas the Mariners had these great experienced players, or something. I dunno. But he did spend a few minutes basically apologizing for the trade and just reaffirming that he thought it was a shame since he thought Snelling was such a great player and prospect. (Later after the actual Q&A he mentioned that Snelling had some problems swinging a bat with and without his knee brace, and that would also play into his ability to produce at the plate in the future. But he also admitted that there was a pretty good chance Snelling would succeed and we'd end up looking pretty dumb down the line.)

The funny part is, a question shortly after that was:
Fan: "How does fan opinion in general affect your trades?"
Bavasi: "I know you guys are going to hate this, but: NOT AT ALL. Seriously. You know, I go to, say, a Sonics game, and I'm definitely a fan of them, but do they want ME making THEIR rosters? No way. I do what I have to here in order to try to make the team better, to try to make them win."

One guy (I think it was the same one) said something like "You know, you get criticized a lot for your moves, and I just wanted to let you know that I think you don't deserve that," to which Bavasi replied, "Hey! Come on down here! You're my new best friend! No, just kidding."

One little kid got the microphone and said "I want to thank you for signing Richie Sexson because he's my favorite player."

There was a funny exchange about the posting system that led to Bavasi saying "Rick, it's just money!" but I forget the question exactly. And there was an exchange about Jeremy Reed, about how his spot now is basically being the fourth outfielder and he'll have to pretty much battle back from there, start his career over essentially.

After Bavasi was done officially talking, a whole bunch of people swamped him at the dugout and chatted more about other stuff. As suspected, several of them were other USSM/LL folks, though I only actually caught Bretticus's name because he was wearing a Shaun Alexander jersey and carrying a Chris Snelling jersey.

I forget exactly what he chatted about, it was mostly more stuff about Snelling, things like why couldn't Snelling DH instead of Vidro, some other questions, a bunch about Jeff Weaver and dealing with Scott Boras and the motivations behind the one-year deal, and so on. He made the particularly incisive comment that if players had only been treated better back in the days when his dad was a GM, then the market probably wouldn't be as completely ridiculous as it is today. We asked if he'd be coming back to any more USSM feeds and he said that he'd be at the one at Spring Training, but as for up here, hey, as long as they got some pizza for him, he'd be there, or something like that. He shook hands with everyone who'd been gathering around the dugout, even me, and then he walked off.

See, this is why I don't do the whole hating on the management thing. People who get all riled up like "Fire Hargrove!" "Fire Bavasi!" etc, I think if they went to one of these events and actually just talked to them, they wouldn't be the same way. Though maybe I'm wrong, I dunno. I have to say, I wouldn't want to be a GM.

After that, I had to leave to go to another appointment. I'm not really sure I missed much of anything; it's more a shame I wasn't there earlier, though to be honest, waiting in the autograph lines is dead boring as far as I'm concerned :)

Also, man, I really shouldn't have stayed up this late dumping this all out of my brain. Argh. I'll try to edit it down and/or correct things tomorrow sometime.

(edit> for the record, there's an article with these and other quotes from Fan Fest, might be truer versions of the quotes I posted, too)

Dodgers sign catcher Mike Lieberthal

My mom loves to tell this story. It's the summer of 1994, and I've just graduated from high school. In our family, on special occasions like birthdays, the person who's celebrating gets to pick somewhere to go for dinner that evening.

My family asks me where I want to go to celebrate. I'm sure they expected me to want to go to The Pub, a steakhouse I liked over in New Jersey, or something along those lines. But no, there was somewhere else I wanted to get dinner.

"Are the Phillies in town? I want to go to the Phillies game tonight."

So off we go, my whole family, still dressed up from the graduation ceremony, to Veterans Stadium, where my mom proceeds to tell every single person in the stands that her daughter just graduated with high honors, blah blah blah blah blah. I don't really remember the game that well. The Phillies lost, and John Kruk hit a home run, and my mom went on about how cute Darren Daulton was, and I said something like, "Down with Daulton!"

A week later, indeed, down with Daulton, as he broke his collarbone or something. Up with Mike Lieberthal, who replaced Kevin Stocker as my Phillies rookie crush.

Two months later, I moved away to Pittsburgh for college, and never lived in Philly again. A week after that, baseball went on strike, and I ended up pretty busy with classes and whatnot for the next four years, only going to one or two games a season (usually when the Phillies came to Pittsburgh). As the years went by, the Phillies roster changed, and eventually, only one name had stayed the same all along. And now there are none.

It feels like a lifetime since I moved away from Philadelphia. I suppose if you use catcher knees as a timepiece, it has been.

Phillies trade Gavin Floyd to the White Sox for Freddy Garcia

Here's another story. It's May of 2003, and I'm debating what to do for my birthday. The Yankees are in Seattle from the 6th to the 8th, and my birthday's the 7th. As it happens, the music band They Might Be Giants are also playing in town on May 6th and 7th.

One of my friends suggests I go to the TMBG concert on my birthday and the Mariners game the day before or after. That way, just in case the Mariners lose the game -- I rarely seem to actually see the home team win on my birthday -- it won't ruin the day for me. Seemed like a sound plan, so we went with that and got tickets accordingly. The concert rocked, and the next day I get together with a bunch of friends for the game; we get junk food, drinks, find our seats, and have a blast. Edgar Martinez hits a sweet home run in the first inning, the Mariners get a 3-0 lead, everything's peachy.

And then Freddy Garcia gives up nine runs to the Yankees in the third inning. They're just coming up to the plate and hitting him like a printer in Office Space. Julio Mateo comes in to stem the bleeding, and the Yanks ultimately score ten runs total by the time the dust clears.

So we spend the rest of the game watching the stadium empty out and betting on how many runs the Yankees will score total, as the Mariners were eventually completely mauled to the tune of 16-5. It sucked.

A few weeks later we were at pub quiz with a group, and one of the trivia questions that came up was, "Which pitcher holds the record for giving up the most home runs in a season?"

As a joke, I yelled out, "Freddy Garcia!"

It got a good laugh.

Mariners trade Rafael Soriano for Horacio Ramirez

It's the end of August 2006, and I'm in a huge debate over what the hell to do with my fantasy baseball team before heading off to Japan for a few weeks. I know I've got to put it into low-maintenance mode, as it's unlikely I'll be able to switch out my bench players more than once or twice a week, rather than once or twice a day. So I'm culling it down to 9 position players and a whole bunch of starting pitchers.

My favorite fantasy buddy Eugene and I are chatting about it, as I'm tossing players on their ass left and right. Chris Duncan gets the axe, Esteban Loaiza gets a spot. I decide to cut some of my middle relievers too so that it's all closers or starters. I drop Burgos for Broxton. I drop Lowe for Lowry. I look at what's left, and I've got to cut either Scot Shields or Rafael Soriano for another closer. Eugene recommends Tom Mastny, who I know absolutely nothing about, but everyone knows Cleveland's closer situation is somewhat akin to the 80's music video for Godley and Creme's "Cry".

So, what the hell, I ditch Soriano for Mastny. "I'm betting Soriano's totally going to get shut down soon anyway."

The very next day, I swear to god, Soriano gets hit in the head by a line drive by Vladimir Guerrero, and is hospitalized with his condition being reported from anywhere from concussion to hairline skull fracture.

I'm freaked out. I send Eugene an IM. "When I said he was getting shut down, I did NOT mean he should get the Ray Chapman treatment!"

He replies, "Well, look on the bright side. Think of all the Alfonso Soriano owners reacting to the headlines."

"Home run, home run, Hosokawa! Timely, timely, Hosokawa!"

The cheers from the outfield bleachers filled the Invoice Dome on a crisp September night. But what were they cheering for? The shortest home run in history?

Toru Hosokawa, the catcher for the Seibu Lions, was at the plate, squaring away to bunt for the third time that evening. Three times, he'd stood on deck and watched Shogo Akada hit a single, and didn't even need to see the coach's signal to know he should bunt the runner ahead to second base. Three times, he'd come in, ready to unselfishly sacrifice his own at-bat in order to advance his team's cause. Three times, the crowd screamed wildly for him to get a hit, to drive in a run.

He caught the ball with the bat, rolling it along the ground in front of home plate, and took off running as fast as he could. Matoyama's throw to first was in plenty of time for the out. Hosokawa headed back to the dugout to a roar of cheers from the Lions fans, and the words "Mission Accomplished!" flashed on the big screen.

Mission accomplished, indeed.

Sacrifice bunts are as big a symbol of Japanese baseball as Sadaharu Oh or Koshien Stadium. It's well-known that Japanese baseball players are about twice as likely to bunt as their American counterparts. But exactly how effective a strategy is it?

This year the Nippon Ham Fighters won the Japan Series against the Chunichi Dragons. One obvious reason for this is that in the 5 games that the series lasted, the Fighters scored more than twice as many runs as the Dragons did, 20 to 8. However, another significant thing they did twice as often was sacrifice bunt -- 13 times to the Dragons' 6 times. They also capitalized on those bunting opportunities more, as over half of their bunts (7) led to runners scoring, yet the Dragons only scored two runs from their 6 bunts.

Kensuke Tanaka, the Fighters second baseman who led the Pacific League in sacrifice bunts this year with 34, also set a special record in the Japan Series by hitting six successful sacrifice bunts. Even more impressively, five out of the six resulted in Hichori Morimoto scoring a run. The other run-scoring bunts for the Fighters happened in what would become the final game of the Series. Down by one run in the fifth inning, Naoto Inada doubled, Shinya Tsuruoka bunted him to third, and Makoto Kaneko successfully executed a suicide squeeze bunt to tie the game.

Elegant? Perhaps. Effective? Definitely.

The Fighters also grounded into only two double plays compared to the Dragons' six, which could also be a result of having one runner on second more often than one runner on first. Having a speedy and smart baserunner like Morimoto on second also allowed the Fighters to let RBI-men Ogasawara, Seguignol, and Inaba do their jobs more effectively.

The sacrifice bunt, a fundamental part of "small ball" baseball tactics, has been rolling towards a slow death on the MLB side of the Pacific. Sabermetrics have shown that without any other situational knowledge of a game, a sacrifice bunt will generally lower the probability of a run scoring, not raise it. And regardless of whether a manager listens to their inner stathead, most big-league skippers would generally rather play for a big inning than squander their outs, with the exception of pitchers hitting in the National League.

The number of home runs in the MLB and the number of sacrifice bunts didn't change significantly between 2005 and 2006. On average, teams bunted once more (55) and hit 12 more home runs (179) than they did last year. National League teams bunted 1190 times, about two and a half times as many as the American League 461. The World Series teams, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers, did not bunt significantly more or less than they did last year, although the Cardinals hit 14 more home runs and the Tigers hit 35 more.

Looking at the NPB, however, yields wildly different results.

From 2005 to 2006, Japanese pro baseball saw a 30% increase in sacrifice bunts from 1014 to 1323, but they also saw a 17% decrease in the number of home runs hit, from 1747 to 1453. Only the Yakult Swallows went against the trend, both increasing their home runs and decreasing their sacrifice bunts.

There were two teams that increased their sacrifice bunts far and away more than any other teams in Japan -- none other than the Japan Series contenders, the Nippon Ham Fighters and the Chunichi Dragons, reporting increases of 79 and 73 respectively. The Fighters even went from hitting a Pacific League-low 54 bunts in 2005 to their league-leading 133 in 2006. Bobby Valentine's Chiba Lotte Marines, in comparison, hit exactly one more sacrifice bunt in 2006 than in 2005, their 57 total being the lowest in all of Japan, the Yomiuri Giants' 89 being the second lowest. They also dropped from being Japan Series champions to finishing in fourth place.

Fighters manager Trey Hillman said at spring training that he was willing to listen to his coaches and players and try to play more Japanese-style small ball, rather than going for big innings. The Fighters scored 38 less runs than they did the previous year, but they also won a club record 82 games and their first Japan Series title since 1962. Hillman hoped the new strategy would let the players play better and harder, getting one run on the board first and worrying about the rest later. It worked far better than anyone expected.

Bunts, strong defense, and young pitchers with fighting spirit - ingredients of a classic Japanese recipe.

Or maybe just for the breakfast of champions.


(Data for this article culled from mlb.com and bis.npb.or.jp; my spreadsheets are here and here.)

Fighters 6, Dragons 1

Satoru Kanemura was eligible to pitch in this game, and had been named as the probable starter for the Fighters, but instead, Masaru Takeda got the start against Chunichi's Kenta Asakura.

With the action moved to Sapporo, the Pacific League homeground, the game lineups featured designated hitters. The Dragons' lineup was exactly the same as in Nagoya, but with NPB active hits leader Kazuyoshi Tatsunami DHing and batting 7th. The Fighters went back to their normal lineup with Fernando Seguignol as the DH, with Michihiro Ogasawara moving back to his normal station at first base and Naoto Inada starting the game at third. Shinji Takahashi got a start behind the plate while Shinya Tsuruoka got the night off.

The Dragons got off quickly to a 1-0 start, as Masahiro Araki led off the game with a single, stole second during Kosuke Fukudome's at-bat and was subsequently driven home as Fukudome singled to center.

However, Kenta Asakura was roughed up a bit in the first inning, with Hichori Morimoto also leading off with a single. Kensuke Tanaka predictably came in to bunt him ahead, but Tanishige's throw to second base was too late to nab Hichori, so there were two batters on when Michihiro Ogasawara stepped up to the plate. Ogasawara got a nice pitch down the middle and hit it all the way back to the wall in left-center field for a double, scoring Morimoto and Tanaka. Fernando Seguignol singled to advance Ogasawara to third, allowing Atsunori Inaba to hit a long sac fly to right field, scoring Ogasawara. Shinjo grounded into a double play after that, but the score was set at 3-1 Fighters.

Asakura settled down after that and only allowed two more Fighters baserunners in the next five innings, when Seguignol walked in the 4th and was erased by a double play, and Takahashi was stranded in the 5th following a bloop single.

The Dragons managed several hits over the next few innings, but Masaru Takeda (and then Hisashi Takeda, who took over in the 6th) managed to scatter them well enough that only one Dragons runner reached third base for the rest of the night.

Fielding played a large factor in tonight's game, notably that the Dragons turned two double plays and the Fighters turned three, including an impressive 3-6-3 play where Ogasawara charged in for a grounder, threw it to second and ran back in time for the relay at first. Also, the enormous foul territory in the Sapporo Dome played a part as five outs were made by catching pop flies near the dugouts.

The Fighters didn't capitalize on a one-out two-runner opportunity in the seventh, but in the eighth, amidst several pitching changes by Ochiai-kantoku, they managed to score three runs, each charged to a different pitcher. Hichori Morimoto led off the inning with a blooper single and was bunted over, at which point Asakura was pulled for Masato Kobayashi, a lefty, who hit Ogasawara in the knee with his first pitch. Kobayashi was then pulled for Atsushi Nakazato, who struck out Seguignol, but then Inaba came to the plate and took the first pitch he saw and launched it into the second row of seats in straightaway centerfield for a 3-run home run.

Asakura was ultimately on the hook for four runs over a 98-pitch, 7.1-inning ordeal; Kobayashi was on the hook for plunking Ogasawara and the resulting run, and Nakazato for Inaba's homer.

Trey Hillman kept reliever Hisashi Takeda in for almost 3 innings, having lefty Hideki Okajima come in to face Fukudome at the end of the 8th inning, striking him out on three straight pitches. Micheal Nakamura still came out to finish out the game, despite Inaba's blast making the lead too large for a save opportunity. It took 8 pitches to end it as the Fighters won 6-1, bringing them ahead two games to one in the series now. Masaru Takeda was credited with the win.

For his amazing plays at first base, his RBI double in the first inning which put the Fighters ahead, and for scoring a second run later on, the game hero was Michihiro Ogasawara. Ogasawara's 33rd birthday is tomorrow -- what a great present for him, getting to play in a Nippon Series as well as coming home with a game hero award!

Tune in tomorrow night as the Fighters rock the Sapporo Dome again... or not, as the expected starters are Satoru Kanemura and Kenichi Nakata, though of course we won't know for sure until about ten minutes before the game starts. How Kanemura performs tomorrow may very well set the pace for the rest of the series.

(This is a reposting of the game summary I wrote for japanesebaseball.com. Original game 3 live-blogging transcript is here.)

Fighters 5, Dragons 2

Today's matchup featured Chunichi's elder lefty Masa Yamamoto, who's had somewhat tough luck in his postseason appearances, against the Fighters' rookie lefty Tomoya Yagi, who's had blessed good luck recently.

It also featured an umpire who apparently was a little bit fuzzy on exactly how wide home plate was, as both pitchers ended up with a lot of full counts on ball threes that they thought were strike threes.

The Fighters drew first blood today as Hichori Morimoto led off with a single and was bunted over by Kensuke Tanaka. Michihiro Ogasawara struck out, but then Fernando Seguignol, who was the first beneficiary of one of those not-a-strike pitches, bounced the ball towards short, and Ibata didn't make a clean stop on the ball and it got past him, bouncing off his glove; by the time he recovered it and threw home, Hichori had beaten it there and was safe. 1-0!

Ibata, undoubtedly unhappy with that result, worked his way into a full count and then hit a line drive into the first row of the left-field seats, tying the game at 1-1.

Things settled down for the next few innings, with both sides' batters trying to work high pitch counts, mostly by fouling off a ton of pitches, an abnormally high number of which resulted in pop foul outs to the catcher.

Kosuke Fukudome got his first hit of the postseason in dramatic fashion, leading off the bottom of the fourth inning by hitting a home run into the rightfield stands, bringing the score to 2-1.

Yagi saved himself another run in the bottom of the fifth with smart fielding; unlike Darvish's play the day before, Yagi fielded Yamamoto's bunt by heading off Inoue at third, rather than getting the easy play at first. There were several smart fielding plays in this game in general; Makoto Kaneko made one in the seventh as well to catch Tanishige at second. Seguignol and Woods both had their moments of fielding excellence, diving to snag hard grounders down the first-base line.

In the top of the seventh inning, Atsunori Inaba reached base on an error as he hit a short chopper that Motonobu Tanishige misplayed, throwing to first and actually hitting Inaba in the process. Shinjo followed that with a single to right, which advanced Inaba to third. Though Shinya Tsuruoka struck out after that, Shinjo "stole" second on strike three, Yamamoto's 100th pitch of the night, with no throw to attempt to get him out. Makoto Kaneko came up to bat with runners on second and third with two outs, and though they probably didn't expect it out of a guy who usually occupies the nine-spot in a lineup, he singled to center, easily scoring Inaba, and then Shinjo also ran home, tumbling around Tanishige blocking the plate and tagging it with his hand to score as well! Masa Yamamoto, who probably thinks he's cursed by now, was pulled from the game at that point with the Fighters holding a 3-2 lead. Masafumi Hirai finished out the inning by striking out a pinch-hitting Shinji Takahashi.

Shinya Okamoto came in to pitch the eighth inning for the Dragons, and just like the first inning, Hichori Morimoto singled and Kensuke Tanaka bunted him over. Tyrone Woods chose this moment to make his stellar play on an Ogasawara liner, and that brought up Seguignol, who quickly got ahead in the count with three balls and no strikes. It seemed likely that he would be walked, but then after he got one strike on him, he hammered the next pitch and watched it fly into the stands in centerfield for a 2-run homer, taking the score to 5-2, and taking Okamoto out of the game.

Hisashi Takeda pitched the 7th and 8th innings for the Fighters, and while he did allow a runner as far as third base in the 7th, he was lights-out in the 8th, striking out Fukudome and Woods in succession. This set the stage for Micheal Nakamura to come in for the ninth inning, where he took 16 pitches to retire Morino, Ochoa, and Inoue to finish the game with the Fighters winning 5-2.

Both of the Dragons runs were scored on solo home runs.

Trey Hillman sounded happy in the post-game interview, very excited that he wouldn't have to head back to Sapporo down two games, and was pleased that the team bounced back from last night's loss.

Makoto Kaneko was the game hero for the Fighters with his timely 2-run RBI single which put them ahead, and his clever glove work at shortstop.

The 1-1 series now moves to Hokkaido, with the next game on Tuesday night at 6pm at the Sapporo Dome. Likely starters are Satoru Kanemura for the Fighters and Kenta Asakura for the Dragons, though in true Central League style, we won't know for sure until about ten minutes before the game actually starts.

(This is a reposting of the game summary I wrote for japanesebaseball.com. Original game 2 live-blogging transcript is here.)

Dragons 4, Fighters 2

As tonight's game was starting, everyone undoubtedly had one question going through their head, depending on which team they favor; whether Chunichi's Kenshin Kawakami was going to be an ace or a joker; and whether Nippon Ham's 20-year-old Yu Darvish would hold up to the pressure.

At first, it seemed like Evil Kawakami had shown up and Good Darvish, as Kawakami took 24 pitches in the first inning to retire the side, with a bunch of full counts and a walk, and then Darvish only took 10 pitches to retire three Dragons, even getting Kosuke Fukudome to strike out on three pitches straight and breaking Araki and Ibata's bats.

But the tides reversed in the bottom of the second. Tyrone Woods walked, and Masahiko Morino hit a double to center, advancing Woods to third. Kazuki Inoue was intentionally walked, loading the bases for Motonobu Tanishige, who ripped the ball up the middle for a timely single as Woods and Morino scored, making it 2-0 Dragons. Kawakami bunted the runners over, and Masahiro Araki also walked. Hirokazu Ibata came up to bat with the bases loaded; Darvish got ahead of him two strikes to none, but then fell behind to a full count before Ibata grounded out to first. Darvish needed 34 pitches to get through that inning alone.

The Fighters struck back against Evil Kawakami in the top of the third, though, Hichori Morimoto hitting the first pitch he saw for a single to right, and Kensuke Tanaka bunting him over to second. Michihiro Ogasawara, who's been walked almost every time he's come to bat with guys on base in the last month, walked yet again, so when Fernando Seguignol singled to right, Hichori was able to score, making it 2-1. Atsunori Inaba walked as well, loading the bases. Tsuyoshi Shinjo, with a flair for the dramatic, fouled off a whole bunch of pitches before ultimately hitting a sacrifice fly to left, scoring Ogasawara, bringing it to a tie game at 2-2, as Tsuruoka lined out to end the inning.

It didn't remain tied for long. Fukudome struck out again to lead off the bottom of the third, but then Woods singled to left. Morino grounded back to the mound, and Darvish fielded the ball, hesitated, looked at first, looked at second, and both runners were safe as he didn't throw anywhere. Alex Ochoa grounded out to the mound for real, as Woods and Morino advanced. Inoue hit a single to left. Woods scored easily from third, and Morino also made a break for it, but was thrown out at the plate for the third out of the inning, but Woods's run counted, so the score was 3-2.

At this point, Good Kawakami suddenly came out and disposed of Evil Kawakami, and the rest of the game was pretty much in the bag. The Fighters spent most of the fourth and fifth innings striking out; in the sixth, Shinjo hit a double off the right-field wall, but was ultimately stranded. The seventh inning saw a fruitless pinch-hitting appearance from Tomochika Tsuboi, and the eighth saw Inaba get a two-out single, which was cancelled shortly afterwards by what sounded like a 5-6-4 leaping spinning glove job by Morino to get the force out at second, confusing everyone in the chatroom between the names Inaba and Ibata. (Just be glad we didn't have Inada playing today too!)

Despite some low points like walking Kawakami and hitting Ibata in the fourth, Darvish handled the Dragons through six innings. Hisashi Takeda came in for the seventh for a 1-2-3 inning, but then ran into some problems in the bottom of the inning, walking Tyrone Woods, who was bunted over and then pinch-run for. Takeda then did a poor Yagi imitation and booted the ball on a pickoff attempt at second, which resulted in a pinch-running Hidenori at third base. Alex Ochoa hit a double off the left field wall, scoring Hidenori and bringing the score to 4-2 Dragons. Hideki Okajima came in for the Fighters at that point; he walked Inoue, and Tanishige sac bunted, and then Kazuyoshi Tatsunami came in to a standing ovation to pinch-hit for Kawakami, and flew out to Morimoto in left.

Chunichi closer Iwase came in and dealt with Jose Macias and Makoto Kaneko pretty quickly, and with a dome echoing with chants of "Ato hitori!" from the Dragons fans, a pinch-hitting Yukio Tanaka, getting his first ever Nippon Series at-bat after being on the Fighters for 21 years, who played in his first pro game two months before Yu Darvish was born... grounded out to shortstop for the third out, and that was it.

The TV broadcast pointed out that since 2001, the team that won game 1 of the Nippon Series had won the whole thing, so apparently this means the Dragons are pretty set. Ochiai was more like, "hey, we've got to win three more," in his interview, and I tuned out before Kawakami started his hero interview.

Tomorrow night they play a second game in Nagoya, where the Fighters should be pitting young lefty Tomoya Yagi against the Dragons' old lefty Masa Yamamoto. Who will ultimately end up walking more this series, Ogasawara or Woods? Tune in to find out!

(This is a reposting of the game summary I wrote for japanesebaseball.com. Original game 1 live-blogging transcript is here.)

Continued from this post where I take a stab at which players will see playing time in the Japan Series.

I liked the way Blez did his matchups like this one, so I'm cribbing the format:

Starting Pitching: The Fighters guys walk more batters and strike out fewer. This is a minus. On the other hand, on the whole the Fighters pitchers have been great at keeping the ball in the park, and also give up a lot less hits (which defense-independent pitching suggests shouldn't matter). The average age of the Fighters starters is 25. The average age of the Dragons starters is 30. The Dragons starters also have Japan Series experience though, as Kawakami and Yamamoto both pitched on the 2004 team (even if neither had particularly good results). Kawakami, the ace, has been losing steam in his last few starts, whereas the 41-year-old Moyer-like Yamamoto is something like 6-1 with a no-hitter in his last 9 starts. Yes, Yagi and Darvish both dominated in the playoffs, but -- Yagi and Darvish didn't really have to face guys who could actually, you know, hit a baseball with a bat, like Woods or Fukudome. Also, I don't trust Satoru Kanemura any further than I can throw him, which is definitely less than 60.5 feet. First the suspension and then not even being able to pitch well against a KBO instructional team? Right.

Advantage: Dragons

Relief Pitching: The Fighters' Hisashi Takeda is pretty awesome, but I'm not entirely confident how effective he'll be against the powerful Dragons lineup. The bullpen in general has been pretty decent, with Hideki Okajima being surprisingly good (how on earth did we get him for Sanematsu?), and Takehiko Oshimoto coming up out of nowhere and suddenly kicking ass as well. Closer Micheal Nakamura broke a Fighters club record for saves, and I think he'll be fine against the Dragons... if the rest of the team can get him to that point. Unfortunately, Chunichi's closer Iwase has the same handedness advantage that Micheal has, and despite Micheal's club record, Iwase notched one more save than he did! Most of the Chunichi bullpen is right-handed though, which should help the Fighters a little bit, as most of their good hitting comes from the left side.

Advantage: Fighters (barely)

Offense: This isn't even a contest. The only position we rightfully have a better hitter on the Fighters is at second base in Kensuke Tanaka, vs. Masahiro Araki. I suppose if you count Ogasawara at third instead of first, he was better than Morino, a converted left-fielder. Other than that, how can you compete with Fukudome's mindboggling 1.091 OPS and Woods's 1.037? Of course, I sort of see Fukudome and Ogasawara as being somewhat comparable hitters, but Tyrone Woods is a beast, and he's been on the prowl again, what with getting 7 RBIs off two home runs in the Dragons' clinching game against the Giants.

The other thing is, notice that Dragons batting lineup I listed? Doesn't it look awfully familiar? See, if you substitute Omar Linares for Tyrone Woods, and Tatsunami for Morino, you essentially have the exact lineup that went out for the 2004 Japan Series. Heck, some of these guys saw playing time with the Dragons in the 1999 Japan Series as well. Whereas the only Fighters lineup regular with Japan Series experience is Atsunori Inaba, who played for the Swallows in the 1995, 1997, and 2001 Japan Series. Most of the rest of the team is young or has been on the mostly-lousy Fighters for their whole career; the two ex-Tigers, Tsuboi and Shinjo, both just missed out on Hanshin's 2003 title. Obviously experience doesn't mean everything -- just look at Imae last year -- but who knows how these guys will react to the pressure?

Advantage: Dragons (arrrrggghh)

Defense: This is where I have a real problem coming up with anything to say. The only really hard number I have for anything is that the Fighters made 70 errors as a team this year and the Dragons made 59. On the other hand, errors are so weird and subjective and even moreso in Japan. The Dragons stole more bases than were stolen against them and the Fighters were the opposite. The problem is that I haven't really watched the Dragons enough to be able to know much about their fielding. For the Fighters, I know just by what I've seen that Kaneko's got pretty good range and a decent arm and that Ogasawara can cover the corners well, Kensuke Tanaka's still learning but he's got good hands, Inaba's got a hell of an arm and Shinjo's a pretty decent ballhawk. And unfortunately, most of what I know of the Dragons is stuff like Morino making mistakes as he adjusts to being a third baseman (he's got an interesting backstory), and Woods being somewhat stiff at first. But I'm under the impression the rest of their staff is pretty good at defense, and Shukan Baseball certainly seems to think so. I'd definitely take Tanishige over any of the Fighters catchers. I simply don't know, really.

Advantage: No idea, probably Dragons

Manager: You know, I think Hiromitsu Ochiai is great, I really do. But he took a team full of proven talented players and won with them. Trey Hillman took a team that most people had pegged for finishing in the second division and pretty much marched up the long climb to the Japan Series with them. He screwed up a few times with pulling starters too early or too late, but in general he seemed to do a pretty good job with the bullpen and with figuring out who should be where, keeping the players happy and managing to get a lot out of younger guys like Hichori, Kensuke, Yagi, and Darvish, as well as dealing with the antics of guys like Shinjo and Hichori.

Advantage: Fighters (if it matters)

Yeah, okay, now that I really sit down and look at it all, it's pretty depressing.

But here's the thing.

I'm looking at a lot of these things from the perspective of the whole season rather than from just the last month, and quite frankly, there's a lot to be said for momentum sometimes. The Fighters are going through a winning tear somewhat akin to the one the Chiba Lotte Marines went through at this time of the year last year, and honestly, who the heck would have picked those guys to win the Japan Series? (Besides me, of course.)

The Fighters are a younger team, too, just like it was last year when kids like Imae and Nishioka went blasting past the older Tigers; Hichori and Kensuke aren't quite as young, but you never know what could happen.

I think it'll somewhat come down to whether Kenshin Kawakami can be an ace or not. If the Fighters can take one of the first two games on the road, that'll probably be pretty huge for them.

The ballparks are actually about the same, really -- the standard 100-122-100 meter measurements to the fences, and they're both domes, with turf (interestingly, the Sapporo Dome actually has a retractable grass surface which is brought indoors for soccer games). I'm not sure whether there's any particular ballpark factor with either of them, though domes can get pretty damn loud with a good home crowd.

I think it'll be an interesting series no matter what, though. Definitely more interesting to me than the so-called World Series starting on this side of the Pacific this weekend as well.

(backdating this so it shows up under the AWESOME INTERIOR DECORATION POST)

Tonight I took a trip into the world of Other Professional Sports Besides Baseball, attending a Seattle Thunderbirds minor league hockey game with a bunch of my friends. They were playing against the Vancouver Giants, who were undefeated before tonight's game. I took notes on my Sidekick because I figured I'd want to try to piece it together later.

Keep in mind that I know next to nothing about hockey. In fact, I'm pretty sure that everything I know about the sport, I learned while playing Blades of Steel on the Nintendo when I was a kid.

The first obstacle of the evening, however, was that the Key Arena wouldn't let in "professional" cameras, which apparently is now defined as "anything with a detachable lens", which meant I had to go put my camera in a friend's car, since I bussed there. That sort of sucked, and we got to our seats just in time for the faceoff. I'm amazed that I've been able to take my camera into every major and minor league baseball park I've gone to, yet I couldn't bring it in for a minor league hockey game featuring 16-to-20-year-olds, most of whom aren't even eligible for the draft yet (and who, I may note, were born after Blades of Steel came out).

The second obstacle of the evening was trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Fortunately, two of the guys in our group actually know hockey pretty well, and put up with the rest of us continuously firing questions about the game action.

The first thing I learned was what "icing" is, which was useful because it happened a lot. Then, I got to learn a whole lot about the various ways hockey players can inflict penalties on each other, as within the first period of the game, we didn't see anyone actually score a goal, but we did see guys get put in the penalty box for hooking, boarding, tripping, roughing, and high-sticking, and it's often hard to figure out exactly what happened; even our hockey experts in the group would see a play, see a penalty called, and then debate over whether the guy shoving the other guy was boarding or roughing.

The first period ended, and they put an 18-minute counter up on the board, and I wondered why the second period was only 18 minutes, at which point I noticed that everyone was leaving the stands. Ahh, intermission. This is apparently a good excuse to launch several Australian guys across the rink on an inner tube to see if they can knock down 6 bowling pins. No, I'm not making this up. Only one of the three guys actually succeeded; the other two went wide.

I guess the long break makes sense for the players, since hockey looks like it's pretty physically demanding. They keep switching players in and out during the action, too, which makes it even harder to follow who's out there and what they're doing exactly. But on the other hand, the long break gives you plenty of time to get food and drinks. Surprisingly (to me), the concessions were still at ridiculously high prices; I suppose in my mind I think of "minor league" and think of getting dollar hot dogs at Tacoma Rainiers or Everett Aquasox games.

I've also got to take a second out and say that ice hockey referees are amazing. First, they've got to be pretty damn good ice skaters. Second, they have to be good at quickly getting out of the way of pucks, sticks, players, and anything else that flies their way. Several times I'd see a ref jump over a puck, even. Also, they don't seem to be wearing any protective padding aside from a helmet.

Anyway, in the second period it seemed like more of the same for a while; the Seattle guys even had a double advantage when two of the Vancouver guys were out for holding and tripping. But even with the 5-to-3 advantage they couldn't score a goal. I took this moment to ask, "So what's the big difference between watching this level of hockey and the NHL?"

One friend replied, "Well, these guys are younger, still learning a lot of stuff. You'll see a lot more missed passes, wasted shots, etc."

At that moment, one of the Seattle players passed the puck, and the other player missed it. Which sort of explained everything.

With about thirty seconds left on the second period, I don't know why, but I watched the Vancouver guys move across the ice and said, "Oh, check this out," and suddenly one of the Vancouver players took a sharp shot and it went in. Crazy. They announced it as Reese, with an assist by Blum. 1-0 Vancouver.

The period ended shortly after that, and then we were treated to the sight of something called "Chuck-a-Puck", where they drove a minivan onto the middle of the ice, and put a bunch of buckets around it, and then on the count of three, people all threw hockey pucks at the setup, trying to hopefully land one inside the car, but if not, the buckets were decent targets too. It was surreal, watching hundreds of pucks flying through the air, and reminded me of a club I was in back in college, where the "Treasurer's Report" would consist of the treasurer going up to the front of the room and the rest of the club would throw pennies at them for a minute or so, which would go into the club's treasury.

At any rate, you could buy these pucks before the game for $2 each or 3 for $5, and win various prizes if you managed to actually throw them into any of the targets. We did see several go into the sunroof of the minivan; I think those winners got a share of some amount of cash, though I'm not sure.

In the third period, I learned several new ways which guys could be assessed penalties, such as elbowing, slashing, and interference. Checking from behind looked particularly unfun, and took the Vancouver goalie Slade down for a bit. This kid a couple rows behind us, who had to be about 5 years old, started yelling "COME ON, YOU SISSIES!!!" during the injury break, in this high-pitched kid voice which cracked us all up. "GO HOME TO YOUR MOMMIES!!!!"

Ah, minor league.

"Elbowing" was a surprising penalty to me, since when it got called, it looked like the Vancouver guy had literally just punched Seattle's Gagnon in the face for no apparent reason.

Anyway, the Seattle guys ended up with a power play (a term I *did* know from Blades of Steel!) towards the end of the game, and with about 20 seconds left, shortly after I'd even said something like "So, where are y'all going after the game?", out of nowhere, one guy took a shot, which got stuck in the whole cluster of guys that tended to form in front of the net when a shot was close, and then Gagnon re-shot it and it went in! 1-1! Crazy!

It was the 27th shot for Seattle, against 22 shots taken by Vancouver. My friends assured me that in big-league hockey, there would usually be several more goals to go with that many shots.

Anyway, the game went into overtime, and Seattle even ended up almost immediately down a guy when someone was penalized for hooking. We sort of figured the game was pretty much over at that point -- after all, Vancouver was undefeated and the Seattle guys were unlikely to push ahead a goal, right? But, all of a sudden, the action headed down to the other side of the rink, and two crazy things happened: first, Seattle's Durand hit the puck at a weird angle towards the wall; and second, the Vancouver goalie Slade actually tripped and fell over trying to get back to block the goal, having stepped out to try to play the shot... and the puck rebounded off the wall into the now-empty goal, and Seattle won 2-1!

My friends are already talking about trying to drag a bunch of us to another game in the future, so we'll see. It's sort of fun to be the one asking all the questions about the sport, as opposed to being the big know-it-all in the group.

(This post is meant to be a more coherent, less Fighters-fangirl, more "article-style" post than the Game Two Liveblogging was.)

I have no idea whether I'm going to get busted by Yahoo for this, but I took a whole bunch of screen captures during the game yesterday. They are many and varied, some of game action, some of the post-game celebration and press conference, etc, so if you didn't get to see the game, enjoy.

Anyway, the Nippon Ham Fighters won the Pacific League Pennant last night, for real this time.


(Photo from Jiji Press via Yahoo Sports)

Fighters 1, Hawks 0 (Box Score)

For the second time within a week, we were treated to an intense playoff pitching duel. Yet again, it involved Kazumi Saitoh, and yet again, he suffered a heartbreaking 1-0 loss when his team could not score but a single run for him.

Tomoya Yagi matched him inning for inning, zero for zero, as the evening went on.

Even when teams could put runners on, they couldn't keep them there. Kensuke Tanaka singled in the first, but was erased by a double play. Nobuhiko Matsunaka singled in the second, but was also erased by a double play. Tadaatsu Nakazawa managed a single in the third inning and was bunted to second, but was then picked off the base in a beautiful play by Yagi and Tanaka. Makoto Kaneko managed a single in the Fighters' half of the third, and was left on base as Hichori Morimoto popped out.

The top of the fourth inning saw some craziness when Naoyuki Ohmura bunted in front of the plate and dashed for first. Catcher Shinya Tsuruoka fielded the ball, ducking a charging Naoto Inada, and throwing to first a split second ahead of Ohmura. The first base coach made a "safe" sign with his arms but the umpire called Ohmura out, and the game stopped for several minutes as acting manager Moriwaki came out to argue, but the umpires stuck to their call.

The top of the fifth inning saw the Hawks on the wrong side of a call yet again. After Julio Zuleta reached base on a throwing error by Naoto Inada, he somehow failed to run on a wild pitch to Jolbert Cabrera. When Cabrera struck out, suddenly Zuleta broke for second, and Tsuruoka threw him out. Kensuke Tanaka leaned down to make the tag, and Zuleta slid into the base hard, kicking Tanaka's glove and knocking the ball loose. First he was called safe, but then the umpires reconvened and reversed the call. In all honesty, if Zuleta had just run on the wild pitch, it wouldn't have been an issue.

The next few innings went by with a few scattered runners. The first walk didn't even occur until Jolbert Cabrera watched four balls go by in the top of the 8th. Hichori Morimoto managed to catch all three outs in the top of the 9th. Yagi threw an incredible 103 pitches through the 9 innings, striking out 4, giving up 3 hits.

The bottom of the 9th began with Kazumi Saitoh, already up to 111 pitches, walking Hichori Morimoto. Playing for one run at this point, Kensuke Tanaka bunted him to second base, this being only the second time in the game the Fighters had a baserunner with less than two outs. With a runner in scoring position and the game on the line, Michihiro Ogasawara is understandably intentionally walked. Fernando Seguignol strikes out, and it's down to Atsunori Inaba to do something to win the game or see it go into extra innings.

Inaba hits a grounder up the middle. Nakazawa dives for the ball and stops it, throwing to second to get the force out on Ogasawara. But Ogasawara slides into the base just ahead of the throw and is called safe. In the meantime, Hichori Morimoto has rounded third and is heading home, and by the time shortstop Munenori Kawasaki throws to the plate, Hichori slides in safe and the Fighters win the game 1-0!


(Picture from the Jiji Press. Tsuyoshi Shinjo's the guy jumping up jubilantly in the background, Hichori Morimoto is the one down on one knee with the green armbands, Naoki Matoba is the Hawks catcher and Kazumi Saitoh is the Hawks pitcher, both of whom are in a state of shock.)

Shinjo, who had been in the on-deck circle behind Inaba in the batting order, nearly explodes with joy, and soon the rest of the team comes out and there's a big pileup of a celebration. Saitoh is in such a state of shock that he has to be carried off the field by Cabrera and Zuleta, and even Matoba doesn't move for a minute or so while the Fighters are running around celebrating.

Trey Hillman, in his interview as the champion manager, keeps saying in Japanese, "Shinjirarenai". ("I can't believe it.")

The Fighters, who haven't played in a Japan Series at all since 1981 -- before many of their recent players were even born -- will play against the Central League champion Chunichi Dragons, who have been in the fray as recently as 2004, but who have not actually won a Japan Series since 1954. The Fighters haven't won since 1962, when they were still called the Toei Flyers. This should be a great series if for nothing other than the historical implications.

Kazumi Saitoh threw 127 pitches in 8.2 innings, striking out 8, walking 2 (one intentionally), and gave up 5 hits, and only that one run. You'd think that normally a performance like that would be pretty good, but when your team is somewhat devoid of people who can actually hit a baseball with a bat, you can only do so much. A frightening thing about Saitoh this season is that even in his 7 losses, counting the postseason, his ERA is a mere 2.57. The Hawks as a team had a .697 OPS, tied with Lotte, and their 82 home runs were second-lowest in the league, only to Rakuten. They mostly made it to the postseason on the strength of their pitching staff, which led the Pacific League in WHIP at 1.22 and had the second-lowest ERA at 3.13. (Stats from here.)

What really happened in the playoffs here is that the Hawks' pitching managed to neutralize the Lions' batting for the most part, and their stronger bats preyed on the Seibu non-Matsuzaka pitchers, but the Fighters were simply stronger than them in both categories. Looking at the lineups side by side, you see that the Hawks had legitimate batters in Kawasaki, Ohmura, Matsunaka, and Zuleta. But nobody else they played in these games was really reliable to do much with a bat in their hands. Inamine as DH? Nakazawa, Ide, Matoba, Yamazaki as starters? It's clear that the organization needs to get a real third baseman and someone at second base who can hit a little, even if you can't really fault them for having a black hole in the lineup for the catcher. Matoba's a good guy who handles the pitchers well and is decent defensively, so I won't fault him there. But he's no Johjima. I'd trust the Fighters bottom-of-the-lineup guys a lot more than I'd trust the Hawks guys to come through with anything (and indeed, Fighters 9-spotter Makoto Kaneko was 3-for-7 with an RBI in this series).

Or, you could say that what really happened is that the playoff rules changed to give the 1st place team a one-game advantage in Second Stage, a change brought about partially because the Hawks had two consecutive first-place finishes without making it to the Japan Series. It really came back to bite them in this case, because without that change, they'd still have a chance now.

Or, you could be like Gary and suggest that Trey Hillman just out-managed everyone, which is also definitely possible. Having manager Sadaharu Oh go into the hospital with stomach cancer couldn't have been easy on the Hawks this year.

Anyway, it's on to the Fighters-Dragons Japan Series next, where half of the country will be scratching their head and going "Who are these guys?" The schedule is up here, and the first game will be Saturday the 21st, at the Nagoya Dome at 6pm Japan time, or 2am Seattle time. ドラゴンズよ、かかってこい!

Fighters 3, Hawks 1 (Box Score)

It's really hard to remember that Yu Darvish turned 20 barely two months ago.

Tonight he went the distance, throwing a 138-pitch complete game win against the Hawks, giving up one run, striking out 11.

He did have a shaky start, and the Hawks put a run on the board in the first inning when Munenori Kawasaki and Naoyuki Ohmura led off the game by singling, Hiroshi Shibahara bunted them ahead, and Nobuhiko Matsunaka hit a sac fly to left that scored Kawasaki.

But that was the only run they'd score in the evening, as Darvish handled them pretty well along the rest of the way. Only one Hawks batter got to third base for the rest of the evening, and that was only because Homare Inamine beat out the throw at first on what should have been a double play in the sixth.

The Fighters put their runs ahead in the bottom of the third inning. Hichori Morimoto singled, and was bunted over by Kensuke Tanaka. Michihiro Ogasawara walked (which was a theme for the evening, he was walked three times, once intentionally), and Fernando Seguignol hit a single to left, scoring Hichori. (You should have seen the look on Seguignol's face, he was ecstatic.) Atsunori Inaba popped out to short right field, and then Shinjo singled to right, scoring Ogasawara, and Shinjo looked even goofier and happier. Jose Macias flew out after that, too, but it was 2-1 Fighters. Toshiya Sugiuchi, the Hawks starter, only lasted those three innings, and the bullpen took over after that.

It'd stay at 2-1 until the bottom of the eighth. Akihiro Yanase, the rookie who pitched pretty well against the Lions the other day, wasn't pitching so well here. He walked Yuuji Iiyama, and then Shinya Tsuruoka ripped one into the right field corner for a single, moving Iiyama to third. Yoshiaki Fujioka took over on the mound, but allowed a single to Makoto Kaneko, who hit a low blooper into shallow center, scoring Iiyama.

Ryuuma Kidokoro got a single off of Darvish in the top of the 9th, but that was all the Hawks would manage, as he struck out Ohmura to end the game for his 11th strikeout of the evening.

Fighters manager Trey Hillman's taken some criticism for leaving his starters in too long recently, hence the current situation with Satoru Kanemura being off the roster for the playoffs, but leaving Darvish in for today's game worked. There's a good chance he'll want his bullpen fresh for tomorrow's matchup of Kazumi Saitoh vs. Tomoya Yagi, as well.

The crowd was a sellout crowd and red/white Fighters logo placards were given out to fans at the gate at the Sapporo dome. In addition to those, several homemade signs could be spotted, cheering for individual players, or one that said "Let's go to Nagoya!", a reference to the Chunichi Dragons clinching the Central League pennant. The blue inflatable dolphins were out in force for Ogasawara as well.

Bob Timmerman is in Japan for the playoff series and writing about it on his blog. His Game 1 account, with a few photos, can be found here.

My late-night semi-coherent game-updating babblings from liveblogging last night's game are still up as well.

You may be wondering why I called this entry "The Truth About Ichiro". No, I haven't suddenly discovered that he's actually an alien from the planet Krypton or anything, don't worry.

True/False: Every game Ichiro started in his last year in Japan, he played right field and batted cleanup.

(For the answer, read on.)

You see, there's this myth going around that Ichiro played centerfield for a large proportion of his time in Japan, which is almost always propogated by people writing articles about Ichiro's move to CF this year on the Mariners. And quite frankly, that myth is wrong. I've always thought that Ichiro was primarily a rightfielder, but I never had data to back it up. Well, now I do.

A few weeks/months ago, I found this amazing page of every starting lineup in Japan from 1981 onward. While it's true that the starting orders don't necessarily indicate how many innings a player played at each position, it does indicate where they batted in the order, and generally what position they were playing, doesn't it? (I'm sure there's a databank somewhere that DOES have the exact innings that he played at each position, but I haven't found it, so this is what I do have. I don't think there's a Japanese version of Retrosheet, unfortunately.)

I wote a Perl script to parse out the starting lineup information for both Ichiro and Johjima. You can view the long outputs with breakdowns per year here:

Ichiro starting lineup spots, 1994-2000
Johjima starting lineup spots, 1995-2005

Ichiro, a summary, in 857 starts:

Lineup spot:
1st : 311
2nd : 40
3rd : 399
4th : 107

Position starts:
LF : 24
CF : 225
RF : 608

That is to say, he started about 70% of his games in right field. If you look at the text file with the extended breakdowns, you'll see that the last time he started over half his games in centerfield was 1995. The last time he started more than 10 games in centerfield was 1997. In 2000, his last year in Japan, EVERY game he started, he was batting cleanup and playing right field. He batted leadoff primarily for the 1994-1996 seasons, and batted third for almost all of 1997-1999.

So, before people go off saying that Ichiro spent his entire career in Japan as a leadoff-batting centerfielder, maybe they should look at the data.

As for Johjima, in 1072 starts:

Overall:
--------
Lineup spot:
3rd : 38
4th : 35
5th : 443
6th : 360
7th : 105
8th : 88
9th : 3

Position starts:
C : 1039
1B : 11
DH : 22

Johjima's an interesting case. He started out batting 7th/8th a lot, then worked his way up to 6th, and then spent most of his last few years batting in the 5-spot. So when I originally said that I thought he'd never batted higher than 5th, I was wrong, but when I said he spent most of his career batting 5th or 6th, I was right. Either way, starting a bazillion games per season is nothing new to him, but batting third is not actually where he was accustomed to hitting, and he never batted 2nd, either.

It's funny looking at who he batted behind in more recent years, too. The 2005 3-4-5 was usually Batista-Matsunaka-Johjima, and in 2003 and 2004 it was often Iguchi-Matsunaka-Johjima (yes, THAT Iguchi). Before that, Hiroki Kokubo batted 5th in front of him.

So, yeah. I hope this dispels some myths, though I fully expect to keep seeing articles where people insist Ichiro played centerfield for most of his time in Japan anyway.

(It's funny, though, because when I asked a friend in Japan whether he knew where I could get more concrete data on this, he laughed, like "I could have told them that without having to open up a stat book. Hell, I was the reverse: I didn't even know he'd ever played CF. He was always in right. At Orix he'd drop runners on the way to third like sacks of meat with sniper fire from deep right. He'd do that Superman shit catching hard liners out there. He owned right field.")

Speaking of which, congratulations to the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks for beating the Seibu Lions in today's playoff game and advancing to Second Stage! Hayato Terahara held together amazingly well, and it did come down to the bullpens in the eighth inning, with Hoshino walking Nakazawa and Matsunaka before Yamagishi came in and gave up a three-run homer to Julio Zuleta. Matoba doubled in another run and Matsunaka doubled another in the 9th. The final score was 6-1 Hawks. Now, onward to Wednesday, wherein I start cheering for the right team again. GO FIGHTERS! Yu Darvish was announced as the Fighters' starter for the first game. No idea who'll be up for Softbank; I'm guessing Saitoh, but who knows.

Stupid Scheduling, or The Oakland A's Will Be At Work Earlier Than I Am During The ALDS

The first and foremost piece of business tonight is that the postseason schedules are up, and they're ridiculous. All of the 8pm Eastern games involve the Yankees or Mets. There are no games starting later than 5pm Pacific.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but... six out of the eight teams in the postseason aren't even on the east coast. Three of the eight (Dodgers, Padres, and A's) are even on the west coast. You can argue that the Twins and A's are small-market teams, but what kind of idiots wouldn't want to watch Barry Zito vs. Johan Santana at a time of the day better suited to pizza and beer rather than eggs and coffee? Oh, right, the sort of people who heard that Joe Mauer beat Derek Jeter for the batting title and said, "Joe Who?"

Over at Athletics Nation, the lovely and talented BaseballGirl went off and actually called the MLB commissioner's office, and found email addresses and phone numbers where one can vent their frustration at the situation. My housemate offered to Tivo some of the games for me, but I mean, a 10am game makes it highly unlikely I won't know the outcome and details of the game by the time I'd get home from work, which takes a lot of the fun out of watching it. If they seriously don't think anyone's going to watch the A's-Twins games, why not just have them start at a normal time for our small-market coast?

Players Blog It Too, or Wright Now Is Gum Time

In other postseasoniness, Michael Cuddyer and Barry Zito have joined the mlblogs.com family to theoretically blog the postseason. Oddly, the three mlblogs.com player blogs I've been reading for a while are also of players in the postseason -- Nate Robertson, David Wright, and Dan Haren, who really needs to update his. But none of these even remotely compare with Pat Neshek's blog, which he's been writing and maintaining on his own for the whole season, even before he made the majors. I've said it before, but if you don't read Neshek's blog, you're really missing out.

(morning edit: MetsGrrl informs us that Cliff Floyd also has a postseason blog. Neat.)

(evening edit: Derek Lowe joins the madness!)

Hometown Who-roes?

I was going to talk about the Hometown Heroes thing last week, since I thought it was really cool that Mike Schmidt was named Phillies Hero on his birthday -- but wanted to wait until all of the selections had been announced. Thing is, I still can't find a comprehensive page listing all 30. The first 20 are listed in this article, but that's it. Other choices not on that page:

Mariners, Ken Griffey Jr
Twins - Kirby Puckett
Red Sox - Ted Williams
Angels - Rod Carew
Astros - Nolan Ryan
Diamondbacks - Randy Johnson
Giants - Willie Mays
Padres - Tony Gwynn
Dodgers - Jackie Robinson

I can't seem to find one for the Rockies. Also, I think it's funny that Nolan Ryan is the hero for two teams and that Rod Carew is the ANGELS' Hero, since I always associate him with the Twins.

(EDIT: Yay! Tokyo Sam finds me the entire list here.)

Kazumi Saitoh, or I'm Sorry Being The Best Wasn't Good Enough

Alright, so the Pacific League season is over in Japan, and let me ask you all a question: What Japanese pitcher in the Pacific League do YOU think led the league in wins, strikeouts, innings pitched, ERA, and just about every other category under the sun?

No, no, not Daisuke Matsuzaka. He didn't win any of those categories. Good as he is -- and I'm not going to say he wasn't -- the best pitcher in the Pacific League this year was easily the Softbank Hawks' Kazumi Saitoh. My friends thought I was crazy when I said I basically took a train 200 miles north to Sendai for an afternoon just to see him pitch, but no, it was worth it. Saitoh's amazing. His fastball registers in the low 90's and he supposedly throws one of the best forkballs in Japan. Also, he's like 6'4" or so; I have one picture I took of him up in Sendai where he's at the plate with an umpire, a coach, and catcher Matoba, and towers over them all. He also seems like an interesting and intelligent guy, from everything I know of him.

Anyway, his line for the season looks something like this (with Matsuzaka for comparison, though nobody else really comes close to these two):

             IP      H    ER   HR   BB    K    W     L    ERA    WHIP
Saitoh      201     147   39   10   46   205   18    5    1.75   0.94
Matsuzaka   186.1   138   44   13   34   200   17    5    2.13   0.92

Insane.

But it gets even more insane. I've been reading Saitoh's blog on his official website for most of the season, and the latest entry nearly made me cry. It's basically an apology to the Hawks fans for the team not being first place in the Pacific League, and saying that he feels like it's all his fault for letting them down and not winning that last game against the Fighters. But he says there's still a chance in the postseason, and it'll be tough, but he will do his best and so will the team and they'll be fighting all the way to win. (as an aside, though -- it's going to be a tough fight, with the Lions having home-field advantage in all games, and especially with Nagisa Arakaki sick with appendicitis.)

Seriously, this is a guy who should be a shoe-in for the Sawamura award, who even has a pretty good case for being league MVP, and he's apologizing for going out there and pitching 6 innings, giving up 3 runs, walking none, and striking out 10 guys.

You know, the only way I could possibly love him more, I think, is if he pitched for the Fighters :)

If I keep adding to this post I'll never get it out, and then I'll never post in this blog again. So here's a draft at my Japanese Stadium Rankings.

I tried to do this on a bigger scale than just "Did I like being in this stadium or not?", but keep in mind that these are still entirely from my observations and perspectives, sometimes aided by the friends I went to the game with. Also, I only did ones I visited this trip, hence Tokyo Dome isn't on here, but I think it would have rated pretty high, probably in the top three.

The categories:

Convenience: How far is it from the main JR station in the city? Is there a ton of additional walking? 15 minutes (Tokyo Dome) is a 10, 75+ minutes is a 1.
Comfort/Amenities: Was a 171cm-tall gaijin comfortable watching the game? Are the bathrooms and other such conveniences plentiful and good?
View/Fences: Do most of the seats seem to have a decent view? How thick/high/intrusive are the goddamn fences and other obstructions?
Food: Good selection? Tasty food? How about drinks? Vendors? Etc.
Crowd: Was the stadium full or empty? Was it a good group of people to be around? Are the home cheers decent/entertaining?
Team: Is it worth going to this stadium to see the team?

Each team is listed with the city (for the ones that are Tokyo area but really in other cities, I've listed both), whether it's indoors or outdoors, the team that plays there, and what year it opened.

So, here's how they rated, based on me trying to judge them by those categories:

1. Nagoya Dome (Nagoya, indoors, Chunichi Dragons, 1997)

Convenience: 7. From the Nagoya JR station, you can either take the Sakuradori subway to Hisaya-Odori and then the Meijo line from there to Nagoya-Dome-mae station, which takes about 25-30 minutes in all with good transferring, or you can take the JR Chuo line to Ozone station, which takes like 10 minutes, but then it's either a 15-minute walk to the park or you have to go find the Meijo transfer at Ozone and take it one stop to Nagoya Dome-mae, which seems like a waste of money. The Dome-mae station isn't that great anyway, as you still have to walk through a long tunnel called "Dragons Road" and decorated with Chunichi Dragons stuff, then walk some more to get to the dome itself. Still, it shouldn't take you more than 30-35 minutes total from the JR station with either way you choose to go.
Comfort/Amenities: 9. No issues here, all the seats were comfortable. Lots of bathrooms and stuff. Only vague downside was having to go past the smoking area in the back to get to stuff sometimes.
View/Fences: 8. Fences all around the infield but ample upper decks and higher seats to see over them. No outfield fence, just a bar. View from the upper deck was pretty nice, though a slight bit of the rightfield corner was obscured from our part of the rightfieldish upper deck.
Food: 8. I dunno, I got a burger and fries and they were cheap and decent. Selection seemed repetitive but reasonable. They have a food court restaurant thingy in back of the stadium on the terrace level, too.
Crowd: 9. Great fans, great cheering, great songs. Everyone around me was really enthusiastic and nice and I found myself humming/singing the cheer songs and at-bat songs pretty quickly. The only thing detracting from the atmosphere for me was the dome.
Team: 10. Also, the Dragons are pretty damn good. They're old, but good.
Total: 51 out of 60

2. Fullcast Miyagi Stadium (Sendai, outdoors, Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, 1950, renovated 2005)

Convenience: 9. Miyaginobara station is 2 stops from the main Sendai JR station on the Senseki line, about 5 minutes. From that station you have to walk around a smaller sports field to get to Fullcast, but it's not far and the path is obvious.
Comfort/Amenities: 10. Great renovated seats, big and comfy. Nice clean modern bathrooms.
View/Fences: 9. The fences exist for most of the park but there's plenty of reasonable seating above it or around it. The outfield fences are relatively low. Most of the views in the stadium seem pretty good. It's not all that huge a place to begin with so you're never that far from the action.
Food: 10. Lots of selection and it all seemed pretty good.
Crowd: 10. Even though the team sucks, I think the player songs and cheers were reasonably good and people actually seemed to be pretty into the game, which I wasn't expecting. The small size makes the crowd seem more cohesive, I'm sure.
Team: 1. They suck and they're not even entertainingly sucky. Sigh.
Total: 49 out of 60

3. Meiji Jingu (Tokyo, outdoors, Yakult Swallows, 1926)

Convenience: 8. You'd probly take JR from Tokyo to Shimbashi and then the Ginza Subway Line from Shimbashi to Gaienmae, I think, and it'd take you about 15 minutes. Thing is, once you exit at Gaienmae it's really not entirely obvious where the stadium is. I had to ask someone my first time there, and my second time there it was only luck that I went the right way; it's out of sight from the station, a few blocks away.
Comfort/Amenities: 7. Outfield unreserved is vast and you can choose your level of seat comfort, whether you want backs or not and how high or low you want to be. So in some ways, it's our own damn fault we sat so far up and away from the bathrooms and food stands.
View/Fences: 3. It was just really tough to get an angle without fences in our way of home plate, and when the field fences weren't, the stands fences were. In the outfield, to be over the fences, you had to be pretty far out or in no-seat-back territory.
Food: 10. I was actually pretty impressed with the food choices. They had these huge bento boxes you could get with lots of yummy things in them, or they had noodle shops where you could get yakisoba-type stuff or udon noodle soup, which my friend got and said was decent, or there was a place with fried chicken baskets and hot dogs, and all sorts of stuff.
Crowd: 9. Oh god, do I love Swallows fans. The umbrella thing is awesome and crazy. Seriously, the only reason there isn't a 10 in this slot is because the Engrish announcer drove me NUTS and I'm not sure where to compensate for it.
Team: 8. I picked this team to win the CL this year, in all honesty. Lots of ex-MLB pitchers and a nice gang of position players to round them out.
Total: 45 out of 60

4a. Yokohama Stadium (Tokyo/Yokohama, outdoors, Yokohama Bay Stars, 1978)

Convenience: 9. I'm torn about how to rate this one. Kannai station is a 45-minute ride from the Tokyo JR station, but is only a 5-minute ride from the Yokohama JR station. Also, you literally get out of the Kannai station, follow the sign that points "Yokohama Stadium" to the right, and you turn and look and... there's the stadium. Yokohama's enough of a separate and contained unit of a city that I feel okay calling it that.
Comfort/Amenities: 4. Comfortable seats, but that's about it. See, the way it seemed to be laid out is: there's a concourse running behind the lowest level of seats, with food stands, drink stands, merchandise stands, bathrooms, etc. The second level of concourse seemed to only be per staircase, and only smoking areas and vending machines (and maybe bathrooms, I forget). The third level of concourse was... stairs down to the other two. So if you were sitting high up, you pretty much had to run down to the bottom level to get food or anything else. I never saw food vendors come by except popcorn either, so I was starving and ended up running downstairs for food during the 7th inning fight song. I only missed one batter, though.
View/Fences: 10. NO FENCES!!!!! Just don't sit behind the home plate netting :) Seriously, the views were pretty great, I thought.
Food: 5. It seemed average. I had yakisoba and it was awful, but to be fair, I didn't spend much time looking at the food choices.
Crowd: 9. Despite the quality of the team this year, they have a pretty good fan base, it seems. I mean, I saw three BayStars games and was impressed by the oendan turnout at Koshien and Jingu as well. The people I sat near were really great, both before and after I switched seats.
Team: 5. A losing team, but with many bright spots, and a host of young players who they can hopefully build something around.
Total: 42 out of 60

4b. Hiroshima Municipal Stadium (Hiroshima, outdoors, Hiroshima Carp, 1957)

Convenience: 10. From the Hiroshima JR Station, you can either walk (about 20 minutes at a brisk pace) or take the #2 or #6 streetcar to Genbaku Dome-Mae (about 15 minutes). It's right between the atomic bomb memorials and Hiroshima Castle, for all your touristy needs.
Comfort/Amenities: 4. So the good part is, you can usually stretch out on several seats with your feet and stuff, and the seats aren't terribly uncomfortable, though the outfield unreserved have no seat backs as usual. The bad part is that there's no concourse behind the seats, so if you don't like what the vendors behind you are selling, you get to wander in and out behind other sections, only they're pretty much all selling the same thing anyway. If there's no appropriate-gender toilet behind your section, you go to another one. If there's no appropriate-country toilet, well, you deal with it.
View/Fences: 9. My view was spectacular, at least. The fences are low in the outfield and normal in the infield and the annoying thing is that they get higher as you get closer to the plate. The neat thing is that during BP they open the fences up so you can watch, take pictures, and possibly even get players to sign stuff.
Food: 7. Average, but for such a sparsely-attended game there were a LOT of vendors. They sold a sort of sno-cone-in-a-bag thing that my friend really liked.
Crowd: 8. You know, for a group of people who have had to watch a second-division team for the last ten years, they have a pretty good turnout in the cheering sections. I also think the lack of skimpy cheerleader girls is good, and think Slyly is the best mascot in Japan.
Team: 4. They suck, but they suck in an entertaining way. Marty Brown is hilarious. I think they've got a lot of players with potential, too.
Total: 42 out of 60

6a. Kyocera Dome Osaka (Osaka, indoors, Orix Buffaloes, 1997)

Convenience: 9. It's a 10-minute ride to Taisho station from Osaka station on the JR Osaka Loop Line. If you don't feel like walking from Taisho, it's a 2-minute ride to Osaka-Dome Mae station on the subway, which lets you out a block from the Dome.
Comfort/Amenities: 9. I was pretty comfortable for the entire game, even without a seat back in outfield unreserved, but that might be mostly because the game I saw, the Fighters were at bat for 80% of the time and thus I was always standing. There were lots of bathrooms and food stands all over the place, as you'd expect in a modern dome stadium with a concourse.
View/Fences: 8. My view from the outfield was pretty great, actually. The outfield has bars but not fences. The infield has fences, but there's also plenty of upper deck seating to see around it unobstructed.
Food: 5. Seemed average. IIRC there were fish flakes on my yakisoba though, which was kind of gross.
Crowd: 6. Unfortunately, being as I was there as part of the Fighters cheering section, I'm not sure I can really judge it. It didn't seem like Buffaloes fans could really fire up the place, though.
Team: 3. They don't suck as much as the Eagles, but they aren't a particularly exciting brand of mediocrity either. The famous-dudes-on-the-DL Kiyohara thing sucks, too.
Total: 40 out of 60


6b. Chiba Marine Stadium (Tokyo/Chiba, outdoors, Chiba Lotte Marines, 1990)

Convenience: 4. Chiba Marine Stadium is a big pain in the butt to get to; you've got a 38-minute ride from JR Tokyo station to Kaihin-Makuhari station, and then you get to either walk for 15 minutes or catch a bus over to the stadium. (I opted for the bus.) Hell, even if I count it from JR Chiba station, it's still at least 15 minutes to either Kaihin-Makuhari or Makuhari-Hongo station and you still need a bus from either. At least there's some other stuff out there like the Makuhari Messe convention center and such.
Comfort/Amenities: 9. Here is where I think Chiba is a pretty big win. Aside from the lack of seat backs in the entire outfield, it's got pretty decent seats and a ton of stuff everywhere.
View/Fences: 8 The fences are annoying as usual, but there are plenty of places you can go to see above them, and there's even a field box type of area that I think was in front of the fences.
Food: 9. Alright, I'm a big dork, but I like Lotteria. The other choices weren't bad either.
Crowd: 3. I think Lotte fans are the most boring of all, in terms of cheer songs and such. Also, why have noisemakers if they're only for like two player cheers? Sheesh. Most of the people around seemed relatively unfriendly, too.
Team: 7. They may have finished in the second division, but I actually think they're still a pretty damn interesting team to watch.
Total: 40 out of 60

8. Hanshin Koshien Stadium (Osaka, outdoors, Hanshin Tigers, 1924)

Convenience: 9. It's a 23-minute ride to the Koshien station on the Hanshin line from the Umeda Hanshin station, which is linked to the main Osaka JR station, and even less if you get an express train. The stadium is pretty much half a block from the Koshien station, with about 2349234239 vendors set up in case you forgot to bring any Tigers cheering equipment. Getting on a train with 40,000 people after the game sucks, but eh.
Comfort/Amenities: 2. I was miserable for most of my game there and I'm only 171cm tall. I worried that my legs were going to have permanent damage from being curled under the seats with no circulation in my feet. I couldn't find any western style toilets, either.
View/Fences: 9. I had an excellent view from my seat, and it seemed like most of the stadium would. The fences exist in the infield and are kind of high, but actually seemed pretty nonobstructive. The outfield fences are low, almost nonexistent as far as I could tell.
Food: 4. This is more "drink" than "food", to be honest, but I was pretty fazed by the fact that I couldn't get a non-alcoholic beverage from my seat easily. After about 238492389 beer and chuhai vendors walked by I finally flagged down the cola/tea vendor, and my bottle wasn't even cold.
Crowd: 7. I realize some people think it's great being surrounded by crazed Tigers fans, but the people surrounding me waving their noisemakers in my face the whole time didn't help. Also, how come I came home smelling like smoke despite all the no-smoking signs? I have to give them credit for being the most insanely devoted fan base I saw in Japan, and the fact that Tigers fans seem to consider themselves all part of one big toralicious family is pretty crazy. From the inside, I'm sure they're the best ever. From the outside, eh.
Team: 8. The recent Tigers are a pretty decent team to watch. Kanemoto and others are wonderful to embrace; the "JFK" and such gimmicks are actually pretty good. Unfortunately, I have major issues with Okada's managing and thus only rate them an 8.
Total: 39 out of 60

9. Invoice Seibu Dome (Tokyo/Saitama, kind of indoors, Seibu Lions, 1979)

Convenience: 3. Seibu Kyujo-mae station is pretty much right there in front of the stadium entrances, but if you don't get an express train it's a 46-minute ride on the Seibu Ikebukuro line, which can be lowered to 30-35 minutes with expresses. From Tokyo JR station it's another 15-20 minutes to Ikebukuro though, which makes it an overall pretty long trip. Also, there's nothing else to really go out to Tokorozawa for, as far as I can tell.
Comfort/Amenities: 4. The seats are comfortable enough in the infield but the outfield slanted turf is just annoying. Having beer accidentally spilled on me probably didn't help. There are no "concourse gates", the concourse just runs outside the back of the stands, so the better your seats are in the infield, the further you have to climb up the stands to get to bathrooms/food. The bathroom I was in was mostly Japanese-style toilets with a few western-style -- at least they were clearly marked...
View/Fences: 3.The fence in the outfield seating is pretty annoying and thick. From the infield it's the same, but if you sit in row 18 or higher you can get a clear shot to home plate. The lighting is plain terrible for taking pictures, though, even during the daytime.
Food: 7. Maybe slightly above average. The bento stand outside the stadium had a cardboard cutout of Takeya Nakamura eating udon soup with chopsticks. It was cute. They also had some tasty beverages, but it was annoying that they wouldn't sell us plain old bottled water. That was weird. On the other hand, they had vendors coming through with anything from Baskin-Robbins ice cream to green tea.
Crowd: 8. I have to admit that Lions fans seem to have more fun than most other fans. I don't understand why there are so few of them in attendance, besides that Tokorozawa is in the middle of nowhere, of course.
Team: 10. I'm not supposed to say this as a Fighters fan, but the Lions are really pretty good these days, y'know?
Total: 35 out of 60

Also, without the actual team factor, we get:
1. Fullcast (48)
2. Nagoya (41)
3. Hiroshima (38)
4. Jingu, Yokohama, Osaka (37)
7. Chiba (33)
8. Koshien (31)
9. Seibu (25)

Like I said elsewhere, I thought Fullcast was great. The only downside of the place is that you have to watch the Eagles.