Marinerds, etc.

It's Senbatsu time, so what did I end up doing today? I ended up going to a college preseason game and seeing a fantastic former high school pitcher. :)

It was actually entirely by accident -- I knew Hosei was playing Chuo today, I'd called to confirm the game was on, and then I got really lost trying to get to the Hosei baseball field because both the train line I wanted to take wasn't running due to blackouts, and then once I did get there, I couldn't figure out how the hell to actually get into the ground itself. (Beyond baseball, I also saw the football and soccer and some other teams practicing as well, from walking around the entire sports ground.)

Showed up in the 3rd inning, ran into both my scorekeeping buddy Suda and my retired-actress buddy Hanako Tokachi... so I ended up sitting in the front row with Suda for the entire game and we kept score together and he told me about the other preseason games. Of course, umm... we were in front of the entire Hosei baseball club that were in the stands (the rest were on the field or in the dugout). I heard one of the guys talking about me from a few rows back like "Oh, she comes to a lot of our games at Jingu, she writes Japanese really well and always keeps score and takes photos... but I thought she was a Kagami fan..."

And Kazuki Mishima (3rd-year pitcher) was sitting in the row right behind me, so when I came in I said "Long time no see!" and he was like "Whoa! Hi!"

Anyway, the really really really big deal about the game was the starting pitcher for Chuo University...

...YOSUKE FREAKING SHIMABUKURO!!! The boy who won Spring AND Summer Koshien last year!

He's only a freshman -- he hasn't even started college classes yet! But he's already practicing with the team and I guess they figured since Hosei's theoretically one of the stronger teams they're playing in the preseason, might as well have him pitch against them. He's SO GOOD! He still has that ridiculous tornado motion that makes him look like a lefty Nomo. Here he was facing college juniors and seniors and just mowed through them.

He pitched 7 innings, allowed exactly 4 runners (3 hits and one error), and struck out 6, including striking out the entire side at one point. It was really neat seeing him!

Hosei's pitcher were Ryoto "Yoshiko" Yoshikoshi for 6 innings and Kazuki Funamoto for the last 3. Funamoto is also a tall righty from Toin Gakuen who wears #19 now, but I don't think he's going to be the next Kagami for me or anything. And it's not like Yoshiko and Funamoto were bad or anything -- Chuo infact only won the game 2-0. Personally, besides Shimabukuro, the Chuo player I was most impressed with was a sophomore named Junji Kageyama, batting 9th and playing right field. He has LEGS. In his 4 plate appearances, I saw him hit a triple, then get a bunt single up the left line, then get on base on a fielder's choice and a single and steal second both times. Super runner, super bat. He's also from Toin Gakuen, for the record.

Oh, and the Chuo player I was most amused by was the boy wearing uniform number 28. He's a kid from Iwakuni named Takahiro Tsuchiya. Which doesn't seem special at all unless I tell you that the kanji for his name is 二十八貴大. Yes, his last name is the number 28, and he wears #28. Cool, huh?

Anyway, some photos. Mostly of Shimabukuro but not all. :)















And for a few that aren't of Shimabukuro....




Ryoto Yoshikoshi, starter for Hosei. I'm guessing he'll get a decent amount of time in league games this year...




Kazuki Funamoto, the new wearer of Hosei #19. But can he possibly wear it as majestically as Kagami did?


Ryosuke Itoh, freshman from Shinko Gakuen HS. (I saw him play at Senbatsu last year.) I am mostly including this photo because it amused me how you could see his name written on his belt strap.


Seiya Inoue being a big stout 3rd baseman.


Yohei Watanabe, the guy who finished the last 2 innings for Chuo.


Masashi Nanba, the Hosei captain.


Kageyama. This dude can run. I was quite impressed with him.


A dive back to the bag at first base.


Teams line up to bow to each other afterwards.


Hosei field... I tried to get the big "HOSEI" into the shot but it was impossible.


The scoreboard. Sadly I didn't get the final score! Whoops!


Me, because this represents yet another new stadium in Japan that I saw a game at!


After the game I hung out a bit; the Chuo players all did come out past the stands but Shimabukuro had already hit the figurative showers apparently since he only pitched 7 innings, maybe they didn't want him to be mobbed (a la Yuki Saitoh in the past). So I didn't get to meet him, unfortunately.

Instead I waited for the Hosei players' meeting to be over, and when it was, the players filtered out; some that recognized me nodded hello, and then Eiji Egashira came up to me with a big smile like "Hey! You're here! Remember me?" and I'm like "Dude! I went to Saga Kita this winter!!" and we got into a conversation about that for a while. He told me there was also some other stuff from the 2007 Koshien team that I didn't get to see because it was all either in the school or on the field ("I was in Saga when you were there... next time tell me and I'll show you around!") He's a very nice boy, I enjoyed talking to him for a few minutes. I had some photos to give Mishima and Yoshikoshi among others, so when Mishima came out I handed him the photos and apologized that I never got around to making him a photo book ("It's ok. These are really good. You're like a pro photographer or something!") And I gave a box of Seattle chocolates to him and Egashira (I think they're roomates now though I might be wrong) and told them to share with their teammates.

Unfortunately I kinda wanted to get Masashi Nanba's autograph, since I never did and he's the new captain. But he was still in meetings and stuff, and everyone was putting things away, like the batting nets and so on. Kota Imamura, one of the co-captains, also saw me and had a huge smile like "Hey, long time! Thanks for coming to our game!" and I told him "I hope you kick ass this season but I won't be here for it!"

So I dunno, I left and went home after that. It was nice though, a year or two ago I felt like the players only talked to me because I was with my Hosei alum friends, but today I was there by myself and they still took a second to chat, so that was neat! Maybe they were all surprised that I showed up despite Kagami having graduated :)

I took this picture almost by accident today:



The two guys are Chuo University's righty ace pitcher Hirokazu Sawamura, and Toyo University's lefty ace Takahiro Fujioka. Fujioka had just pitched a complete-game 11-inning 13-strikeout 150-pitch shutout against Kokushikan University, and Sawamura was warming up for the Chuo-Aogaku match... but wasn't actually scheduled to start today's game. However, these two are two of the best-known college guys in the country. Sawamura is widely considered to be the #2 or #3 prospect in this year's draft; he has hit 98 mph on the radar gun at Jingu (notoriously fast, but still) and has generally been Chuo's ace almost his entire time there. Fujioka is going to be the #2 or #3 guy in the draft NEXT year; he just pitched Toyo University to the All-Japan Championship title, defeating Tokaidai's ace Tomoyuki Sugano in the finals (and Sugano is almost definitely going to be the #1 guy next year). I'm not sure what they're laughing about but when I saw Sawamura go over to Fujioka I was like "OMG MUST SHOOT THAT".

Anyway, in a few years when those two are starting against each other in the NPB All-Star game, I will have to dig this photo out again and smile.

As for the day... yeah, I skipped going to Chiba and cheering in the heat. Instead I went to Jingu because the Tohto League opening week was on a weekend for once; usually they play weekdays, and I can never go anymore now that I work normal hours. I was worried it might be crowded and I might not be able to just go to the front row and take photos, but... no, even with it on a weekend, and even with these guys being some of the best college ballplayers in the country, still nobody comes to Tohto games. Although the heat might have hurt them; the covered areas behind home plate were actually pretty full, but I basically could go sit behind the dugout in the very front row and it was pretty much empty around there.

I showed up at 1pm, so most of the way through the Toyo-Kokushi game -- which was tied 0-0 at the time. But then Takafumi Sakai hit a 2-run homer and that pretty much won the game for Toyo. Still, I got to see Fujioka pitch a few innings, which I wasn't expecting since I was so late.

The Chuo-Aogaku game... I was on the Chuo side, but Sawamura wasn't pitching, and so Aoyama Gakuin University basically clobbered them. Infact... Aogaku's starting pitcher was a kid named Yuto Fukushima. If that name sounds familiar to you, then you also watched Koshien in 2008, because he basically pitched Osaka Toin to the championships. Well, or more like, he was their pitcher when they stomped their way to victory. Anyway, he still rocks; 9 innings, 145 pitches, 12 strikeouts, and he had a shutout going into the 9th, when Chuo scored 2 unearned runs, BOTH on errors (one was the second baseman taking a liner to the stomach and falling down and losing the ball, and the other was the right fielder simply dropping the ball).

Aoyama won the game 5-2. They scored their runs on a 2-RBI single by Shota Koike in the 3rd inning, an RBI ground-rule double by Manabu Kino in the 5th inning, a solo homer by Koh Shimozuru, and then Hiroaki Masano scored on a wild pitch by Chuo's Yohei Kagiya.

Kagiya also gave up the home run to Shimozuru, which is amusing to me because the last time I saw Kagiya pitch, he was a senior at Hokkai HS, pitching at Koshien 2008 against Toho HS. I was almost late for work because I was watching that game; but the most memorable thing was that Yusuke Yamada launched a homer off of Kagiya on the very FIRST PITCH of the game, and Toho eventually won 15-10. Yamada is now at Rikkio and another Toho boy from that game, Shogo Wada, is now at Hosei. This is what makes HS and college baseball so interesting; these guys always seem to resurface.

What I love about Aoyama Gakuin is that they got relegated into the 2nd-level league after finishing in last place in the fall of 09, which was the first time they'd been relegated in like THIRTY YEARS, so in the spring of this year they basically said "Screw that" and DEVOURED the rest of the 2nd league. Fukushima himself was 6-1 and the team was 10-1 and then went through Rissho to get themselves back up to 1st League.

As such, though, they literally had absolutely no ouendan, which was kind of pathetic; there were a bunch of guys from the baseball club there, and a small group of Aoyama alumni, and that was IT. No cheer girls, no guys in black gakuran suits yelling, no brass band. Chuo had its ouendan in full force, so it was kind of sad how Aoyama was beating the crap out of Chuo and yet all the cheering was coming from the Chuo side. Even in the 7th inning, the Chuo ouendan played their school song and sang it solemnly, and on the Aoyama side, one of the baseball club guys got up and led everyone to sing their school song, but you could barely hear it from the other side of the stadium. At the end of the game, too, the losing team Chuo had a big "fure fure Chuo" thing going on, and Aoyama had no answer for them, like "What do you want? We have 50 people sitting here. We can't match your 1000 people and brass band, sorry."

One other interesting thing about this day is that I saw the three top college catching prospects in the country in Aoyama's Koike, Chuo's Sameshima, and Toyo's Satoh. Koike and Satoh have been on the national collegiate team for a while and Sameshima is a solid guy and also Chuo captain this year. I look forward to seeing who gets drafted out of Tohto this year; there are always a bunch of intriguing prospects floating around there.

Today was　都民の日 at my school, so I was able to spend the afternoon down at Jingu Stadium catching my one Tohto League game of the fall season. (I simply can't go to weekday afternoon games anymore for the most part, except when these scheduling blips happen.) In theory I'm a Toyo University fan, so I wanted to go see them, and thus targetted the afternoon game with them playing against Chuo. (Sadly, this means I missed Nao Higashihama pitching in the morning for Asia-dai, but hey, I have a few more years to see him play.)

The dumb thing is, I was kind of hoping to see Toyo's Masahiro Inui pitch. I even sat on the first-base side in the hopes of getting good shots of him, since he's a lefty. But no, righty Keisuke Kanuma started for Toyo. Kanuma wears #18 now in the wake of the recently departed Hiroki Ueno, my Lotte 2009 ni-gun ichi-gun WHATEVER boyfriend, and while technically results-wise I suppose he is wearing it as well as Ueno did, he's not nearly as much fun to watch pitch. (And for the record, crazy as catcher Takeshi Saika is, he's no Shota Ohno either.)

Chuo also put up a righty starter, Yuuhi Yamasaki. I'd never seen or heard of him before, I'll admit -- but let me tell you that I WILL be keeping an eye on him for the foreseeable future. Because, and I am not making this up, Yamasaki had a perfect game going for 6 and 2/3 innings. He retired the first 20 Toyo batters he faced, without a single one reaching base. Ultimately he would pitch 8 innings of 2-hit ball, striking out 8 and walking none.

Infact, there isn't a lot to report in terms of game action in this game BECAUSE it was such an insane pitcher's duel. Yamasaki was DEALING, but at the same time, while Kanuma was allowing scattered runners here and there, he ALSO wasn't giving anything up, until Chuo team captain and Hokkaido native Kenta Mima hit a solo home run into the left-field stands to lead off the 7th inning.

That was the ONLY run scored in the entire game.

Hirokazu Sawamura, who I'm at least a little familiar with, pitched the bottom of the 9th, and while Toyo managed to get Ryo Hayashizaki all the way to third base, he was left standing there as the game ended with a score of 1-0.

Here's the box score. I'm not making this up.

It wouldn't be hard for me to tell you all the baserunners in the game:

Chuo -
1st inning, Kei Suginuma, hit by a pitch on his back. Bunted to second, left standing there.
2nd inning, Yuki Murayama, walked. Left standing on first.
3rd inning, Kei Suginuma again, legitimate single to right (first hit of the game). Stole second, left standing there.
5th inning, Yoshihito Itai, doubled into the right-field corner. Made it to third on a grounder, left standing there.
7th inning, Kenta Mima home run. Yoshihito Itai single to left, Issei Endoh single through a diving 3rd baseman, also to left, advanced Itai to second, and they were left standing there.
8th inning, Kei Suginuma grounded to 3rd, but 3B Daichi Suzuki dropped the ball, recovered it, threw to first, and drew the first baseman off the bag for an error. Suginuma was bunted up, and a bit later Kenta Mima walked. They were both left on base.

Toyo:
7th inning, Takafumi Sakai singled to left. Stayed on first.
8th inning, Takumi Horikoshi singled to center. Was bunted up by Saika, left on second.
9th inning, Ryo Hayashizaki walked. Moved to second on a bunt, moved to third on a grounder, stayed there as Sakai struck out to end the game.

And that's it.

So, on that note, here are a whole ton of photos from the game instead. I feel kind of silly posting them when I'm so far behind on cropping my Tokyo Big 6 photos, but hey, this is my one Tohto game of the year as opposed to going to Big 6 fairly often, hopefully.

First, here is Yuuhi Yamasaki, the kid who was perfect for two-thirds of the game:








(The final one is shortly after Sakai got the first Toyo hit of the game, and the manager came out to the mound, probly to say "Okay, kid, your perfect game is gone, how do you feel?")

Next is Keisuke Kanuma, the Toyo starter, who was almost as ferocious, but not quite:








(He kind of has the "pile-of-arms-and-legs" thing going for him like Rikkio's Tohmura, but he isn't quite as tall.)

And last but not least, Hirokazu Sawamura, who pitched and won the entire game for Chuo on Tuesday, and closed out the 9th inning of this game:







He's quite distinctive-looking. You might notice I ran over to the 3rd-base side to take photos of him -- I really should have gone one inning earlier and also gotten Yamasaki from that side. Alas.

The rest of these photos are just in the order I took them, and not particularly organized:


Seiya Inoue, Chuo's somewhat large first baseman. He's 180cm/99kg, which is fairly big for a Japanese guy, but not quite as big as Okawari-kun at 175cm/102kg, or worse, Asia-dai's Ryoji Nakata, who weighs in at a whopping 115kg for a 171cm-tall frame. Nakata seriously looks like a sumo wrestler hiding in a baseball uniform.


Kei Suginuma getting hit by a pitch in the first inning.


Takeshi Saika catching a foul ball in the 2nd inning.


The aforementioned 2-hit Yoshihito Itai.


Suginuma, looking kind of determined.


Suginuma steals second. The throw was wide and ricocheted off Toyo captain and second baseman Shuhei Kojima, who had to scramble to recover it. (He's the one with his butt up in the air after falling over.)


Toyodai cheer girls. There were maybe 5 of them total. Tohto doesn't get quite the same attendance.


I think there were also about 5 people in their marching band.


The aforementioned captain Shuhei Kojima.


Takafumi Sakai, who would get the hit to break the perfect game.


Ryo Hayashizaki hitting a foul.


Toyo manager Akio Takahashi advises Hayashizaki about... something...? in the middle of his at-bat. Whatever it was, it didn't work as Hayashizaki struck out.


Yamasaki still has a perfect game through 6 innings (check out all those 0's).


High fives at the Chuo dugout after Kenta Mima's home run.


Chuo catcher Tesshin Samejima.


A Toyo runner? On first base? Is that POSSIBLE?


Tsukasa Tsuzuki. He was a teammate and classmate of Ryota Imanari's at Urawa Gakuin.


Inoue at bat... and you can see how full the Chuo stands are behind him.


Kenta Mima, not hitting a foul ball.


Mima again, not too happy about a called strike.


Inoue is the big guy at first, and the smaller guy is pinch-runner Yuya Oda.


Daichi Suzuki.


The Toyo dugout in the bottom of the 9th... a range of emotions from "Come on, we're still only down 1-0, we can do this" and "I can't freaking believe we're about to lose our SECOND series of the season already. We're not SUPPOSED to lose. We're Toyo Freaking University. Come on."


The teams bow to each other after the game.


Final score and scoreboard.


To be honest, I left this game feeling a little bit unfulfilled -- pitcher's duels are neat, but there's very little game action, and you don't get to see nearly as big a variety of players. When you only get to see a team once per semester, it's a little bit more sad.

On the other hand, I think most of the players I care about seeing right now in the Tohto League are not seniors, so there's always next year, in theory.

I came home and watched the Fighters game on TV in the evening (both yesterday and today they were broadcast on BS1, so I could actually watch). Something amusing happened during the game where at one point, they were doing the Inaba Jump, and simultaneously, my house started shaking. As it turns out, there was a Shindo 4 earthquake in Ibaraki at about that time. It was pretty freaky though, as for a second I couldn't tell whether the screen was shaking due to the Inaba Jump or due to the earthquake.

And on another note: I nearly cried when I saw all the stuff from Tatsunami's retirement ceremony. The fact that during the game, he started at 1st base, went 3-for-4, added another double to his already-career-leading total, now at 487... it just sounds perfect. I know I don't talk about the Dragons here much anymore, but I really do adore Tatsunami and hope he continues coaching for the Dragons for a long time. He is almost the exact definition of what a Hall of Fame player should be.

(And if the Dragons release a Tatsunami doage desktop background, it might finally oust the Masa 200 one from my desktop.)

Anyway, that was a bit of a digression.

I'm off to Sapporo on Saturday morning! If only the Fighters hadn't lost tonight I'd pretty much feel guaranteed to see them clinch this weekend, but now I'm not so sure. Grr.