Marinerds, etc.

A year ago, I was sitting in my house in Akabane liveblogging the finals of the All-Japan collegiate baseball tourney, which was Toyo vs. Tokai, Fujioka vs. Sugano, after seeing Tokai take down Keio the day before.

Just now, Toyo won their second consecutive championship as Takahiro Fujioka pitched yet another championship game gem. He and Keio's Koji Fukutani both went the distance, into extra innings, but then Toyo's Yuya Oda hit a 2-run sayonara homer to win the game 3-1 for Toyo. But now, I'm sitting in a house in the suburbs of Seattle. Nobody was broadcasting this game online that I could find, so I couldn't actually see it.

And it made me realize that I should actually declare that this blog is semi-officially on hold for a while.

I've been back in the US for a few months now, and I've been working for the last month at a software company in San Francisco, commuting down 4 days a week from Seattle. It's been a lot of fun and I'm really enjoying the job a lot and learning a lot. But on the other hand, I've barely been able to follow baseball at all. I've been to a few MLB games -- just hit a Giants-Reds one the other night, and was at Mariners-Yankees a week or two ago, things like that. But I don't really feel like I have much to contribute about those to the blogosphere. I still follow Japanese college baseball religiously, and check the NPB scores and stuff every day, but it's just not the same when I can't be there.

I'm going to try to go to North Carolina for the US-Japan collegiate tourney in 3 weeks. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't disappointed by the current player pool that's going. There's a lot of interesting guys on that list but a lot of my favorites won't be there; Daisuke Takeuchi isn't on the invite list, neither is Kazuki Mishima. (Well, Fukutani, Fujioka, Nomura, and Sugano all are, but...) Tokaidai's catcher Fushimi Torai just turned down his invite because he had a pretty lousy semester batting-wise, and I was looking forward to seeing him again. Keio's Hayata Itoh and Hosei's Hiroshi Taki are on the invite list, but... well, we'll see.

I'm not planning to completely abandon the blog forever; I hope to write about those US-Japan games, and I'm in the early stages of planning a trip back to Japan for sometime in the September-October timeframe. But for the time being, there's no sense in lying to myself about obligations here. What free time I have these days is going towards putting together Puzzle Hunt, which is my big commitment until September 10. I could probably attempt to do some short baseball posts in the interim, but I've never been any good at that. Maybe once my life gets back in order work-wise -- this SF-Seattle commute won't last forever. We'll see.

I really do want to thank everyone for their support over the years. In case it wasn't clear, my four years as "THAT gaijin" at hundreds of baseball games all over Japan was one of the best experiences of my life, EVER. I'm sure I have plenty of adventures in store in the future, they just won't be happening for a while. And I promise this isn't goodbye, just me realizing I shouldn't just trail off into dust without some sort of explanation why. I'll undoubtedly still post here (I've still got a Big 6 roundup draft to finish as well as the Nichidai San stuff) from time to time.

On Sunday November 9th, at the Tokyo American Club in Roppongi, Rob Fitts and Wally Yonamine will be doing a book reading and signing, for the book "Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball".

You can find more official details about the event on the Yonamine book official site, including a map and an official timeline of the event.

We've discussed the book a little bit on japanesebaseball.com, but since I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy yet here in Japan, I haven't read it and can't offer any opinion; I plan to buy a copy at the book event. Copies will be available there for 3000 yen.

I did read and review Rob Fitts's book Remembering Japanese Baseball a few years ago, and it was a great read. It also has a chapter with Yonamine's stories, but the new book is all about his life, instead of just a few selections.

If you don't know about Rob Fitts, he is largely known for being the biggest collector of Japanese baseball cards in the US.

If you don't know about Yonamine, he's often referred to as "the Jackie Robinson of Japanese baseball". He was the first American-born player to play in the NPB after World War 2, and despite being a nisei, a second-generation Japanese-American from Hawaii, he had to put up with a lot of resistance from fans, players, and people in general, for both his birthplace and for his playing style (he was known as a "dirty" player just for doing things like sliding into second base to break up a double play; but he was also known as a hard worker for hustling to first on a sacrifice bunt or an easy grounder). His contributions to the game make him one of the famous characters in its history even today.

I'm very much looking forward to reading the Yonamine book and, of course, to meeting Mr. Yonamine himself. Hope to see you all at the book event!

Just a post to say that if the blog looks weird for you, or is wreaking havoc with your RSS readers, etc, it's because I just finally got around to upgrading to the new Blogger layout stuff, and am still playing with it to try to make it happier.

I'm trying to update links and whatnot as well while I'm at it. I'd love to go back and relabel posts as well when I have time; we'll see.

On the other hand, I hope that this will make the blog more readable; I'll try to have less crap on the front page now that I actually have a "go back to older posts" option.

Craig Biggio got his 3000th hit!

Frank Thomas got his 500th home run!

Oh, and I'm moving to Japan in a month. I leave Seattle on July 30th. I'll be living in Tokyo, teaching English with GEOS. Come visit me!

(yes, that's the "crazy news" I had a month or so ago, but I couldn't make a real announcement until I told my boss and coworkers. No, I don't know what I plan to do with the blog. Any suggestions? Maybe it'll just have to become a different Marinerds of sorts...)

I'm in Canada for the weekend.

There will most likely be no updates to the blog until Tuesday.

I still like Gil Meche even if he sucks sometimes.

The Pacific League is beating the tar out of the Central League (14-7-1, assuming the Fighters win).

Oh, and I plan to go heckle DMZ at Third Place Books on Wednesday, and I'm trying to get another LL Night together for June 4th, Felix's next home start, if you want to come party with the party.

Oh, geez, I didn't even notice this, but Monday actually marked the two-year anniversary of me starting this blog.

Everything I said last year still applies, plus all of the awesome new faces I got to know around here in the last year.

Offhand, I think the highlights of Marinerds' second season were, generally speaking:
- pinch-blogging for Jeff at Lookout Landing
- playing fantasy baseball with the Phloggers (and placing 3rd!)
- getting more involved contributing at japanesebaseball.com (and being a wannabe Gary Garland during the offseason)
- the Fighters winning the Japan Series
- my trip to Japan for a few weeks last fall
- getting the Nikon D50 (and immediately attacking the A's with it)
- writing more song parodies and more player conversation parodies
- attempting to run the Seattle Baseball Book Club, even if it fizzled in the end (if anyone wants to restart it, let me know, I'll help)
- and of course, going to way too many games, some of which the Mariners even won!

I'm probably forgetting things. I need to sleep.

I have no idea what the future holds, nor whether I'll still be writing this thing in another year, but hey, thanks to everyone who's been along for the ride, and especially to those of you who left comments or emails to let me know when I was being particularly funny or stupid. You guys rock.

Sorry for the lack of substantial posts here lately, but I've been busy with a whole lot of stuff in Real Life (such as rocking out, Okinawa-style, among other things) and then when I've been doing baseball stuff it's mostly been trying to turn a few minutes of spare time towards projects I really wanted to have finished before the NPB season started, but apparently won't have them as finished as I wanted them to be.

Anyway, the two main projects I've been working on are:

• Automating translated Yahoo box scores -- hopefully when the season starts (Saturday at 1pm if you're in Japan, Friday at 9pm if you're in Seattle) I'll get to see if my Perl scripts that I wrote to work with the 2006 games work for the 2007 games. They still don't even have all of the new players for this year entered there, which is making me nervous.
  
  
• NPB Game Schedules complete with Google Maps to all the stadiums, and schedules of games by region, prefecture, and metro area. This is still sort of a prototype, though all of the schedules work and it should be at least marginally useful to some people. I've been working on a better web app along the lines of the baseball-reference "travel" thingy though. Hopefully I'll have it up before too long.
  
  The idea was basically for all of the people who post to japanesebaseball.com saying "I'm going to Osaka in late May, what games can I see?" and such, there'd be a way they could call up that information. But I want it to be more specific -- like for myself, I've printed up a list of all the Fighters and Hawks games in Tokyo, for example.
  

Anyway, I've been an utter failure at getting things done the last few weeks on this -- and now I'm suddenly realizing how close the MLB season is. While I look forward to getting to go to real baseball games again, and take cool pictures of players, and write funny game reports, I'm terrified at the implications for what'll happen to my free time :)

And it's a pretty interesting setup, at least to me.

Press Release, with PDF links to the schedules

For example, we play 7 games against the Devil Rays, 3 away and 4 here (and knowing my luck, I will still not get to see Scott Kazmir pitch in person).

We play 9 games against the White Sox, with 5 of them at Safeco, split into a 2-game series in May and 3 games in August.

We play 10 games against Detroit, but only 4 are in Safeco, right after the ASG.

We play in Cleveland as the second series of the year, and we play the Indians at home as the second-to-last series of the year.

Only one Yankees series yet again, and it's the second weekend in May, so if you want to see the Yankees, you'll need to lock down tickets early, as I think the only reason the Yankees didn't sell out quickly this year was because it was a weekday series.

Since the Mariners aren't actually in town on my birthday (May 7th), I'll either have to choose May 11th against the Yankees or May 2nd against the White Sox as my "birthday game", probably. Looks like the Phillies are in San Francisco the 4-6 weekend, too...

Amazingly, yet again, we get the first and last series of the year as home games. I think that's been the case every year I've lived here. Crazy.

Oh, and I forgot the best part! In interleague, THE PITTSBURGH PIRATES ARE COMING HERE!!!!!!!! Weekday series, June 19-21. I'll be at all the games unless something tragic happens. I went to college in Pittsburgh, so the Pirates are one of my "other home teams", though below the Phillies and Mariners. And there's a pretty good chance I won't get to see the Pirates when I visit Pittsburgh in April this time. Plus, I'm a huuuuuge Jason Bay fan (you know, there are a ton of awesome players from British Columbia, and none of them are on the Mariners...), though most of the other players I liked on the Pirates in recent years were traded elsewhere. Though one of them (David Ross) will also come here with the Cincinnati Reds, assuming he still plays for them next year. Yeah, I might be the only person out here who sees "The Reds are coming" and thinks, "Yay! David Ross! Scott Hatteberg!"

And on a last note, no, unlike the rest of you blogizens, I don't think the whole "Bavasi and Hargrove Return in 2007" thing is worth fussing over, which is why this is about the only mention of it I'm going to make for quite a while.

I'll be at Fan Appreciation Night tonight, up in section 334 as per usual. Look for the Phillies hat -- Jamie Moyer needs my karma...

I'd have a real update, but I ended up buying the aforementioned Nikon D50 last night from Kits Camera, and ended up spending most of the evening doing stuff like taking a hundred pictures of a Coke can at various settings to see how they compare. I just got the kit with the 18-55mm lens, and I can already tell that I'm definitely going to need a better lens for no-flash stuff. The store didn't have a 70-300 lens yesterday, but they just called me back and they have one in now, so I'll probly pick it up tomorrow.

Anyway.

While a bunch of people have told me they'd like to get to book club on Saturday, not enough have told me that they want to go to the game beforehand (or have said they have tickets already, etc). So I'm not sure exactly what my plan personally is for the game, and may infact depend on how well my camera works today, or whether any last-minute stragglers tell me they want to go. Either way, if you're thinking of showing up to talk books, please do -- Elliott Bay Book Co downstairs cafe, about 30 minutes after the game ends, and we'll talk about Fantasyland and fantasy baseball and other fun stuff. I think Conor Glassey is looking for advice for his keeper league, too.

In case you don't already know, Seafair is happening this weekend, and I-90 will be closing for part of Saturday and Sunday afternoons, apparently from 12:45pm-2:40pm both days, for the Blue Angels performances. Remember, the Mariners games are both at 1:05pm, so BE EARLY or you'll end up stuck on the wrong side of the lake. Traffic will be sort of wonky due to Seafair in general, so leave yourself plenty of time to get to the game, and carpool or ride a bus, if you can.

By the way, I do feel I'm required to give a good Phillies shoutout to Cole Hamels and Chris Coste for last night's game, as Hamels struck out 12, walked two, and gave up one run on two hits in 7 innings. And Chris Coste is now at a scorching .375/.419/.588 for the year after going 4-for-5 with two RBI last night. John Brazer had a fun blog entry about Coste the other day, complete with Coste's opinion of the movie Fargo.

(and in case you're wondering, yes, I am aware of some other things going on with the Phillies, but in respect for certain players, here's a clue: he can't say more either.)

Also, props to Jason Churchill for a perfect Deanna troll. HUNTER BROWN FOR THIRD!