Marinerds, etc.

As for Week 7, well, it sounds like Todai fought valiantly but fell 2-0 to Rikkio as expected, so Keio has to win Soukeisen for the league championship, which seems likely.

Meiji and Hosei were basically battling for 3rd place, as both went into the weekend with 2 Series Points, meaning they weren't going to catch Keio and probably not Rikkio.

Game 1

Saturday was Hosei's Tomoya Mikami against Meiji's Yusuke Nomura. It was broadcast on Sky A, and the usual suspect rebroadcast it on justin.tv. I watched it about 3 hours after the game actually happened, but kept myself from checking Big 6 scores until I got home, so it was "live" to me, which was fantastic.

The game itself was pretty good, too, for the first half at least. Meiji took first blood in the 2nd inning when Hiroki Nakashima hit a home run into the leftfield bleachers to make it 1-0. Hosei evened that up in the top of the 3rd when Mikami led off with an infield single, he moved up on a sac bunt, and then Kento Tatebe hit a double that scored him, 1-1. Meiji came back in the bottom of the 3rd when Takashi Uemoto led off with a single, stole second, moved to third when captain Ikuhiro Takeda reached base on an error by second baseman Junpei Morimoto (aww), and then Uemoto scored on a single by Hiroaki Shimauchi, 2-1. Hosei evened it up in THEIR top of the 4th inning when freshman Ryosuke Itoh hit a HUGE homer to right field, 2-2.

Itoh, for the record, hit 94 home runs as a high schooler at Shinko Gakuen, and is one of these "golden freshman" types; I saw him play at Koshien, and then when I went to Hosei's ground in the preseason, they were already making it clear he'd be cracking the real lineup ASAP.

Also, Shimauchi got injured running during the May 7th game; as a friend described it, "he ran to 1st base and when he got there, his leg kinda gave out and he stumbled." After the game they saw him going to the hospital in a taxi, and he sat out the rest of the Todai series. But I guess it wasn't too bad, because he played the weekend after that.

Anyway, the tie game didn't last long; in the bottom of the 4th, Yusuke Nomura led off with a single (BOTH pitchers got singles in their first 2 at-bats!), Yosuke Kobayashi bunted him up, he went to 3rd on a single by Masataka Nakamura, and then scored on an RBI single by Takeda. 3-2.

Hosei would never actually score any more for the rest of the game. Mikami only pitched 4 innings before sophomore Hirohisa Umeda took the mound in the 5th. Umeda pitched one decent inning, but then gave up 2 runs in the 6th, hitting Kobayashi with a pitch and walking Nakamura; Uemoto sac bunted them up and then Takeda got two more RBIs on a blooper fly kind of single to the infield which landed behind second base. 5-2. Kazuki Mishima finished out the last 2 innings with 3 strikeouts and no runs, though, so that was good.

Nomura only pitched the first 7 innings, while Takayuki Morita pitched the last 2 for Meiji, and he also got 3 strikeouts and no runs.

Game 2

Amidst a bunch of light rain, Hosei and Meiji met for their second game, with Kazuki Mishima taking the mound for Hosei and Gota Nanba for Meiji. All was normal through 7 innings; Meiji was up 1-0 on an RBI single by Nakamura. Kazuki Funamoto took over to pitch in the top of the 8th, and THEN in the bottom of the 8th, suddenly Hosei surged for 3 runs. Junpei Morimoto singled, and Taki hit a popout, but then Hasegawa got a single to center that put runners at the corners. During Naoki Harada's at-bat, a wild pitch scored Morimoto to make it 1-1, and Harada struck out. It was, of course, at that moment that Ryosuke Itoh hit his second homerun against Meiji, a 2-run shot to right, that scored Hasegawa and him, and made it 3-1. Shogo Shibata and Tomoya Kumabe (!) got the next 3 batters out to end the threat.

But they couldn't account for the WEATHER.

Meiji had 2 on and 2 out in the top of the 9th and the game got called due to rain, with Hosei winning 3-1.

So the series was tied at 1 game each.

Game 3

As mentioned in the short post before this one, Game 3 was where Mikami and Nomura had a rematch against each other. Meiji couldn't do anything against Mikami, amazingly, and Nomura gave up 2 runs in the 7th to Shohei Doi, a 2-RBI single. So Hosei won 2-0, and Nomura didn't get his 6th win of the year, but he DID get his 301th college career strikeout!

It's possible that he could get 6 wins in the spring and get to 30 wins, but kind of unlikely as he's never gotten that many in a semester before.


(BTW, in the time it took me to write up Week 7, Week 8 happened, and Keio did infact win the league! Hooray for Daisuke and Fukutani and Itoh!)

I'm the happiest girl in the world. I've now managed to get photos with 3 out of the 5 college seniors on the front cover of this semester's Shube college baseball magazine. (The other two being Sugano and Itoh. I doubt I'll ever meet Nakaushiro, and Nomura hates me.)

No, seriously, so Takahiro Fujioka is a tall lefty senior at Toyo University this year. And I've been a pretty big fan of his for a few years. I still remember the first time I saw him pitch, he was a sophomore, I was hoping to see junior lefty Masahiro Inui, I got Fujioka instead, and was like "...this guy is ninety times BETTER than Inui..." He pitched Toyo to the All-Japan victory last summer, too.

And well, I went to Hosei's field again on Thursday for their preseason game against Toyo. I hoped Fujioka would start, and I was delighted when he did, though I felt slightly guilty since I was ostensibly rooting for Hosei, yet taking a bazillion pictures of the opponents' lefty starter yet again (like I did for Shimabukuro when Chuo was there).

Toyo beat Hosei 4-2. Hosei starter Kazuki Mishima, who I also like a lot, had a pretty rough start, though I'm not really sure what exactly was wrong; he didn't look that different than I remember him. There were a whole bunch of scouts there watching Fujioka though, so maybe Mishima was also nervous, who knows.

So, some photos:






Fujioka in action.






Hosei starter Kazuki Mishima.


Ryoto Yoshikoshi finished out the game for Hosei.


Takuya Uchiyama (4th year, Urawa Gakuin, #18)


Junki Fujita (3rd year, Hamada, #15)


Kosuke Suzuki (4th year, Toyodai Ushiku, #16)




Shinko Gakuen's Ryosuke Itoh.




Here's Itoh sliding into third base after walloping a ball into the left-field wall. I thought it was a home run but apparently not.


Hideharu Satoh. The last time I saw him, he was wearing #9 for Teikyo HS and was their team captain at Koshien in 2009.


Yusuke Hasegawa getting tagged out at the plate.


This is probably the best photo I got of Daichi Suzuki, the Toyo captain, the shortstop on the left.


Catcher Shotaro Oka. Formerly from Nichidai San!


Hosei captain Masashi Nanba.


Crowd of people with radar guns and whatnot.


Final score.


Final bow between both teams.


And a bonus thing that I thought was cool:


This is that nice scoreboard, from the back. Can you see a little gold plaque on it? Let me zoom in for a second...


Yes -- the money for that scoreboard was donated to the club from Kazuhito Futagami and Hisashi Takeuchi. How cool is that?


I really enjoyed my day out at the Hosei ground this time! And after the game I hung out with a friend outside the Toyo side bullpen until Fujioka came out; in the meantime we ended up chatting with a bunch of Hosei players and a few of the Toyo players as well. Good times!

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 know that basically only two readers of this blog probably have any idea who Junpei Morimoto is in the first place, but he's going to Hosei next year! I was just idly reading their list of incoming freshmen for the baseball club and that name leaped off the screen for me.

Basically, he was Chukyodai Chukyo's ace pitcher this last year after Shota Dobayashi graduated. I saw him at Koshien last summer (wow... I never wrote up that game) and also at Senbatsu this spring. Shin and I were there calling him Hichori as a joke, because he was Morimoto and wearing #1.

(Of course, you might also remember him if you saw the landslide Sojitsu 21-6 Chukyodai game at Koshien this summer, where he was responsible for giving up 11 runs...)

Anyway, it's just kind of neat to me because the Chukyodai guys in Big 6 have notoriously been very interesting to follow; both Keio and Hosei have Chukyodai guys as captains (Hayata Itoh and Masashi Nanba respectively), Keio has Daisuke Takeuchi as an ace, and Hosei got Kanji Kawai as a freshman this past year, and I saw him hit a home run both at Koshien in HS and at Jingu as a college player! And Soma Uendo, while he still hasn't broken out as a player in league games, is also a really crazy guy with high aspirations. So we'll see.

Of course, I'm most likely not going to be around to see Morimoto play in college but I still think it's cool. Maybe I'll get to stalk him when I visit next fall.

Now, looking at Meiji's incoming freshmen list is even crazier, because this past week I not only went to a bounenkai with several guys on the Meiji team on Monday, but then on Tuesday I went to a bounenkai at Yuji Ohno's izakaya down in Tamachi. Yuji Ohno is a former Taiyo/Yakult/Yomiuri player, and his son is the cleanup batter for Yokohama Hayato HS, so they had a ton of Yokohama Hayato stuff up as well as all the stuff from Ohno's career. So I told him, "I saw your son's team play against Hanamaki Higashi! They lost... but the only guy I really remember is Imaoka-kun..."

Well, Imaoka-kun is going to Meiji next year, or so it seems! Wow! He was nicknamed the "Smiling Prince" for a bit there, Hohoemi Oji, though it obviously was not as big a media sensation as certain other Koshien princes.

The next most intriguing name to me on Meiji's list is Daiki Maehira, the cleanup batter from Konan HS, the team that won both spring and summer Koshien in 2010. I know a lot of the Konan boys are planning to go to college, which is great. Wonder if Maehira will develop kind of like Shashiki did (he also came to Meiji as a lefty slugging Koshien hero first baseman).

And they're also getting Junnosuke Takahashi from Nihon Bunri. I have to admit that it's interesting he's listed as a catcher; I remembered him as an infielder at Koshien in 2009 (there were two Takahashis on the team, and Yoshihito was a freshman at Tokaidai this year; Ken D was a big fan of his), as the Naoki-Naoki battery was the big story of that team.

Anyway, wow. That's really cool. Of course, who knows what'll happen to Big 6 in general next year. I had a long talk with Meiji's Kawashima-kun about it, and he was saying that pretty much all of the merchandising done in the last 3 years (calendars, baseball cards, t-shirts, etc) are all being discontinued now that Saitoh's gone, and instead, the teams have been asked to think of ways to get people to keep coming to Jingu without a big name. Which is really sad. Though, even the non-Waseda games last year drew several thousand people on the weekends, so you never know. Yusuke Nomura's a surefire draft pick next fall, as is Hayata Itoh, so one would hope people would at least come to see those guys play... and Shohei Habu and Keisuke Okazaki are sure to be hyped up next year as well.

On the other hand, hearing how stuff is already getting kind of crazy at Kamagaya because of Saitohmania, I'm somewhat glad I won't be around for that. Maybe I *should* be aiming to go to Yokohama more instead when I'm visiting next year...

EDIT> Photos to go with the stuff in this post:


Chukyodai's Junpei Morimoto at Koshien in the summer of 2009.


Ippei Imaoka, from Yokohama Hayato, at Koshien in 2009.


Kota Ohno, Yuji Ohno's son, batting cleanup for Hayato.


Year-end party with some of my Swallows cheering section friends at Yuji Ohno's restaurant (he's the guy in white on the right. I'm kind of behind him.)


"This is a really cool glass!" "They cost 600 yen each."


Yokohama Hayato stuff on the walls from their Koshien appearance.


Swallows jersey and other assorted stuff from Ohno's baseball career.