Marinerds, etc.

Yesterday they had a press conference to introduce the Fighters' newest ni-gun batting coach -- except he's not new to the Fighters at all, it's our very own Yukio Tanaka!


(image from Sankei Sports)

This is so cool. I hope that having the REAL Mr. Fighters, the true owner of uniform number 6, hanging around Kamagaya as a batting coach next year will drive some sense into Sho Nakata's brain about how to actually be a professional baseball player.

Also, it'll be awesome to maybe finally get to meet Yukio in person, as he was a big part of why I became a Fighters fan in the first place. I talked to the Kamagaya coaches a bit this year, so it seems likely that there'd be a chance next year too!

In other Fighters news...
Jason Botts and Ryan Wing are officially off the team. Wing is no surprise given that he got injured before the season and didn't actually DO anything for us. Botts, well, he spent most of the year at ni-gun, and I had a feeling he wasn't likely to come back next year, but you never know. I tried to chat with him a few times at Kamagaya but he generally wasn't that talkative, so I don't really know how he felt about the entire experience here.

Terrmel Sledge and Brian Sweeney are still good to go for the postseason, though what'll happen with them next year is still unknown.

(Sweeney, infact, got the win in the Fighters' game against the Carp yesterday in the Phoenix League.)

Rather than last year where the Fighters had an intrasquad game in Kamagaya to practice for the postseason, this time they're using time in the Phoenix League to keep their players in practice for postseason games. I got the following schedule of who is appearing from Ojisan:

10/12 - 18: Sakamoto
10/12 - 21: Tadano, Sweeney
10/14 - 16: Hichori, Iiyama, Naoto, Tsuboi, Nioka
10/14 - 18: Darvish, Fujii, Hayashi, Itokazu, Miyanishi, Ejiri, Yagi, Masaru, Kikuchi, Kanamori, Ohno, Tsuruoka, Murata, Konta
10/16 - 18: Kensuke, Kaneko, Sledge, Itoi, Koyano, Inaba
10/17 - 18: Hisashi, Tateyama

Dang, now I wish I could go to Miyazaki :)

The games schedule is on the Fighters site in Japanese here. It goes until the 22nd, so it seems likely that the normal ni-gun players will stil get in a decent amount of playing time after the Fighters' training camp there ends. (I am, however, a bit concerned that Ryota Imanari still hasn't made an appearance in a game -- wondering if he's still injured or what. I know he went there with the team, though.)

And in other fall camp news, Toshiyuki Yanuki is going to the Arizona Fall League along with 3 Giants players and with Hiroshi Katayama from the Eagles. Yanuki is blogging his experiences in the Arizona Fall League, although so far it appears the blog will only be viewable on the Fighters' mobile site. It seems that from looking at the Arizona Fall League official mlb.com site, he already made an appearance in a game yesterday, pitching two innings and letting both of his inherited runners score but not giving up any runs credited to him. In further amusement, the starting and losing pitcher of the game was Ryohei Tanaka, who I last saw at Lotte Urawa with the Marines farm team in 2008, but who spent 2009 in the minors with the Baltimore Orioles.

(Shameless self-plug: one of my Hiroshi Katayama photos is being used in an mlb.com article about the Japanese guys in the Arizona League - check it out! I also have a photo credit in the Onion A.V. Club last week as well, for the Mike Blowers call.)

Maybe Yanuki will pick up some English while he's hanging out in the US for two months and I can chat with him next year in Kamagaya! That would be fun.

I forget, did I ever actually mention here that Tomoyuki Oda and Takeshi Itoh retired? I saw both of them at Kamagaya a lot, at ichi-gun once or twice. Oda had a really fun ouenka, one of the last remaining ones with hand motions ("Right, left, center e"), but it was looking less and less likely that he was ever going to make any impact with the team again.

I'm going to be trying to keep tabs on what Yohei Kaneko (who won't have his contract with the Fighters renewed next year) does -- for now he's said he'll go to the fall tryouts for other teams, so we'll see what happens. I'm still pretty bummed about it. Would be nice if someone with an Eastern League ni-gun team picks him up, anyway, so we can see him again in Kamagaya.

It seemed fairly likely that Yukio would get his 2000th hit last night, as he was getting a start at first base and had 1999 career hits before the game. He had even said previously that he wanted to get it in the Tokyo Dome if at all possible, since that's where he played with the Fighters for 18 years before they moved to Sapporo. Heck, that's where I first saw him and became a fan.

I stayed up long enough for his first at-bat, where he struck out. I expected to wake up in the morning and find that he'd gone 1-for-4. Boy, was I surprised to see that he went 3-for-4 in an 11-6 loss to the Eagles, though! Of course, he was upstaged by Rakuten's Takeshi Yamasaki, who hit THREE home runs. The 38-year-old Yamasaki is a year younger than Yukio and experiencing the craziest late-career surge EVER, I swear.


(picture from Nikkan Sports)

Yukio's 2000th hit was a single to right off of Hiroki Yamamura in the 4th inning. And just for completeness, his other two hits were a single to center in the 7th inning and a single to left in the 8th inning.

He is the 35th player in Japanese baseball history to get to the 2000-hit plateau, and is the first member of the Meikyukai whose entire career was spent with the Fighters. Isao Harimoto spent most of his career with the Fighters and reached the 2000-hit plateau with them, but went on to play for the Giants and Orions before ending his career with 3085 hits. Yasunori Ohshima spent the end of his career with the Fighters and reached the 2000-hit plateau with them (he was also the manager before Trey Hillman). Katsuo Osugi left the Fighters before getting to 2000. There are no Fighters pitchers in the Meikyukai, although 200-game winner Yutaka Enatsu, who played for the Fighters for a few years as their closer in the early 80's, had been a member before getting involved in a drug scandal.

On the Fighters' official team website, there's already a Yukio Tanaka 2000 Hits section, with an AWESOME photo retrospective of him going all the way back to the godawful 1980's Fighters uniforms, some commentary from various bigwigs in the organization, and some really neat commemorative merchandise. By "neat", I mean "stuff I actually kind of wish I could buy", especially the t-shirt.

Anyway, I actually don't have any pictures of my own that I've taken of Yukio, mostly because when I've gone to Fighters games I've always sat way out in the outfield, and he's always either been in the infield or a pinch-hitter. So instead, here is a 10-second video clip that I took of the crowd doing the Yukio Tanaka cheer song in the Tokyo Dome back in September 2003, complete with the jump. This was one of the first player cheer songs I ever learned, because it was so fun!

Hmm. Now I guess the next Fighters-related thing to cheer for is Hichori Morimoto's current 21-game hitting streak...

Fighters 10, Eagles 2

Yukio Tanaka had 10 hits left to go for the Meikyukai entry goal of 2000 before today's game started.

Now, he has 9 left.

Today's hit was a pretty good one. The Fighters were already up 5-2 in the seventh inning, and Hichori Morimoto started things off with a single to center. Kensuke Tanaka bunted him over to second. Atsunori Inaba popped out to short after that, and Fernando Seguignol was intentionally walked for whatever reason -- I guess in theory to go after Shinji Takahashi, who was already 2-for-3 for the day at that point. Huh. So Takahashi hits the ball to third, and Jose Fernandez boots it, loading the bases.

Yukio Tanaka comes in as a pinch-hitter for Naoto Inada, and rather than singing his cheer song, which starts "Let's go, Yukio, home run!", I'm sure the Fighters fans were actually singing the "chance music".

Which is ironic, because Yukio took the second pitch he saw, a slider breaking low and inside, and walloped it into the first row of seats in left field for a grand slam home run!

It had been two years since Yukio last hit a home run, and the last time he hit a grand slam was August 13, 2001, back when the Fighters were still calling the Tokyo Dome their home. (Source: Nikkan Sports)

Maybe my estimate of late May for his 2000th hit was a little hasty after all; the old man undoubtedly just earned himself some more playing time with that blast!

(This reminds me of following the 2004 Mariners -- even though they sucked, you checked the score every day to see how many hits Ichiro got, in the Sisler chase. The Fighters are sucking it up this year so far too, but the first thing I check in each box score is whether Yukio played and got a hit. I also check every Dragons box score to see how Masahiko Morino did, but alas, Dragonbutt is finally settling into a comfortable low-300's batting average and not stealing Fukudome's fire anymore, sadly. Norichika Aoki of the Swallows also finally fell below .400; he was really starting to scare me, though if anyone in Japan right now had the potential to hit .400 for the season, it's him, for sure.)