Marinerds, etc.

On Saturday night, we saw Norichika Aoki get his 198th hit and 199th hit of the season... and get hit by a pitch in his last plate appearance. I said to Kozo, "Does this mean I have to come back tomorrow too? I'm watching ice hockey in Yokohama tomorrow with Simon..."

Naturally, Kozo said, "Drag him here too! Come late if you need to! We'll save seats."

So, that is exactly what I did -- Simon and I went straight from the Shin-Yokohama Skate Center to Meiji Jingu Stadium, with a brief stop to get raincoats, and we arrived at the top of section D right after the Chunichi Dragons scored their first run of the game on an RBI single by my favorite Dragons player, Masahiko Morino, aka Dragonbutt.

The important thing is, we were there for Aoki's first at-bat of the game. I had a feeling it would happen like this -- just like in October 2004 when my friend Brian and I rushed like heck to get to Safeco Field for Ichiro's first at-bat when he got his 257th hit of the year, and then broke the single-season record on his next at-bat. You just kind of know that if you're not there, you'll miss it.

Anyway, Aoki comes up to bat, he's the leadoff man for the Swallows. It's sprinkling rain, but everyone who has something 200-hit-related has their posterboards ready to hold up. So we're cheering and yelling and cheering and yelling, and on the third pitch, BLAM, Aoki hits a low line drive fly ball to right field. It's going, and going, and HEY IT ENTERED THE STANDS AND AOKI'S 200TH HIT OF THE SEASON IS A GAME-TYING HOME RUN!


Homerun!


People hold up signs and start high-fiving and getting out umbrellas for Tokyo Ondo and all.


They don't stop the game exactly but they do announce the feat and put this up on the board for a bit -- it says, basically, that it's honoring Aoki's achievement of hitting 200 hits in a season for the second time.


This is actually from the 7th-inning stretch but should give you an idea of some of the stuff people had prepared in the stands for this game.

After that, Ryosuke Morioka, a former Dragon, came up and got a hit, and was driven in by Jamie D'Antona to make the score 2-1.

Morioka also got a hit in the 2nd inning... and as the Swallows were preparing to take the field for the top of the 3rd, and the Dragons were getting ready to bat...

...the rain started falling a bit heavier, and the umpires called a rain delay.



Kozo apparently spent the entire rain delay singing pop music that was playing over the loudspeakers (he claims that he got in a good 10 minutes of "Don't Stop Believin"), while Simon and I chose to go wander around the concourse and eat food and talk about Yoshinori, who started the game for the Swallows.

The rain delay lasted about 30 minutes, and the game got underway again with rain still falling, but not falling particularly hard. We got the impression that perhaps they were going to do their best to get in at least 5 innings so the game would become official and Aoki's homerun and 200th hit would stand. (If the game got called, everything would be wiped from the records, and he would be back at 199 hits.)

Of course, the joke was that we needed to keep going "for Morioka's sake", to keep HIS two hits.

As it is, Yoshinori managed to pitch SIX PERFECT INNINGS after the rain delay, and handed the ball over to Chang-Yong Lim for the 9th... and with the score becoming 3-1 on a solo homer by Shinya Miyamoto in the bottom of the 6th, the Swallows hung on to win the game. Hooray.


Final score.


I like to title this one "God looks down on the masses". No, just kidding, it's Aoki's hero interview.


Tsubakuro butts in to take a photo with Aoki. Too cute.

I feel a little bit guilty cheering against the Dragons, but basically, I'm a Fighters fan first and foremost, and an anti-Giants fan. After that, I'm not that picky, and Jingu is my second home, after all. (And to be fair, I still sang Morino's cheer song even from the other side, much to everyone's chagrin.)

Also, while I'm at it, did I mention that we watched some hockey? Despite that Simon is too busy to update his blog, he's still pretty much up-to-date on what's going on in Asia League hockey. Me, I've become vaguely familiar with the players over the last 3 years, but since I'm not a hockey expert, it's hard for me to really analyze what the hell these guys are capable of, besides that I can clearly see some guys score more goals than others and some goalkeepers are more insane than others.

So we watched the Tohoku Free Blades take on the Nippon Paper Cranes (another one of those unfortunate company names like the Fighters, the company is Nippon Paper, the team is not the "Paper Cranes", appropriate as that might be). The Free Blades just formed last year in the wake of Seibu's ice hockey team going away, and they were horrible last year, but the team we saw this time started off strong and we seriously thought they were going to win -- they were up 3-1 at one point -- but then the Cranes, veteran championship team that they are, came back to win 4-3 in overtime.

It seems that basically the Free Blades added a few new foreign players, including a new Korean kid right out of college named Hyeok Kim, and also a few new players in general, in addition to picking up the Kawai brothers (Takuma and Ryuichi) mid-season last year, and now filling out the rest of the Tanaka Brothers Set (Go, Sho, and Ryo; Go is the team captain and he spent last year playing in Germany), and then had more time to train together as a unit... they definitely looked more cohesive than last year. And goalie Michio Hashimoto seems to be as solid as ever.

The Cranes seem to be the same team that have been beating up the rest of the Asia League for the last few years, give or take 2-3 players. Notably, I noticed that Darcy Mitani got released and is now playing for the Korean High1 team in Chuncheon. That kind of sucks. But other than that, they looked largely the same as I remember them, with Itoh and Obara and Chris Yule leading the way; Masahito Nishiwaki was in the game a lot but not nearly as aggressive as I expected. The Cranes' goalie this time was Kiyokawa instead of Ishikawa, too.

I didn't really take notes at this game, so I'm just going to throw some photos up that I took with my little point-and-shoot camera:


Face-off was supposed to be at 2pm, but there was some kind of Zamboni Error. Here a bunch of the Cranes players come out to see what's going on, as some staff try to fix the ice.


We were sitting right behind the announcers and scorers. I really enjoy being so close to the rink at games in Japan.


Free Blades line.


Cranes line gets ready on the other side.


Ceremonial First Puck. This kid was apparently the first person to enter the arena that day.


And a real face-off.


Here's the entertainment on the ice between the first two periods, some figure-skater dancer types.


Also during that first break, the Free Blades mascot was sitting a few rows ahead of us (it was technically a Free Blades home game even though we were in Yokohama instead of Tohoku somewhere), and a few people went up to try to get photos of the mascot with their kids, so I was like, "Simon, we gotta go up there too!"

So we did.

The dude behind Simon's arm is a guy from Washington DC, and he gave me a lot of crap for wearing a Flyers shirt, like "What the hell do I have to do to escape you bastards, I come halfway across the planet and I still find Flyers fans?" Rather than admit that I'm just Philadelphia-born, haven't lived there since 1994, and can probably only name like 3 current Flyers players off the top of my head, I just let Simon do the talking since he follows hockey and actually knows about the Capitals and all. But this DC dude actually yelled "Flyers suck!" at me when he saw me later. Sheesh. It's pretty standard to just wear any hockey gear you have at all to games in Japan, and I'm hoping to get up to Nikko later this year since they actually wear orange and black as their colors, so the Flyers shirt will fit in better there.


Blades are up 2-0 in the second period. Amazing.


The slowest penalty shot known to man.


A zamboni AND a remote-controlled blimp advertising the Xebio sports store chain! Whee!


Puck-throwing, which was the entertainment between the 2nd and 3rd periods -- a bunch of kids tried to hit a sign in the center of the ice. I dunno. We went off to get Simon outfitted in a Free Blades t-shirt at that point anyway.


Simon came back a bit later with this -- nori-covered shoyu dango sticks labelled as the "Tanaka Three Brothers" dango. And it had been signed by two of the three Tanaka brothers (Go and Sho; Ryo is the youngest so we're pretty sure he didn't come with the team this time). This is funny because of a song from a while back called "Dango Sankyodai" -- or "the three dumpling brothers", that was a hit in Japan about 10 years ago. I had no idea at the time that several years later I would meet the singer Kentaro Hayami at Kamagaya, when he started doing all of the Fighters songs for them. Go figure.

Anyway, the dango themselves were just average-tasting, but since Go Tanaka is the team captain, it was kinda cool that Simon got the signed label thingy. There are a LOT of brother pairs in Japanese hockey... it makes sense, really, that the most elite players would probably be kids who grew up skating together from a very young age. Like how Takuma Kawai says that at the age of 3 he just started following older brother Ryuichi to hockey practice, and grew up with the sport.


Cranes celebrate scoring a goal.


Tie game, two guys in the penalty boxes, and less than 2 minutes left on the clock. Oh, the suspense!


Cranes pileup right in front of us after captain Ohsawa shot the winning goal a few minutes into overtime.


Final score.


It really was a very close game, and Simon kept saying he was impressed by how the Blades looked out there. We figure they just ran out of steam, and the veteran Cranes team kept their momentum going and didn't give up when they were down a few points, but found a few openings and took advantage of them.

I'm hoping to do a few hockey roadtrips before I leave Japan this winter. Koriyama is a definite, and hopefully Nikko. We'll see. Nikko signed Yutaka Fukufuji this year, it would be kind of neat to see him play here.

I've taken some much better hockey photos in the past (like this set from the Seibu-Cranes championship Game 7 from the 2008-2009 season) with my real camera but haven't really put a lot of them online, usually due to timing. I should, at some point.

This movie is about hockey, not about baseball, but it does take place in Hokkaido, so maybe it's vaguely kind of sort of related to this blog?

Official Site - go-smilers.jp
Movie trailer on Youtube

It's Christmas. It's time for a feel-good story about Good winning another battle in the eternal struggle against Evil, with Love as the catalyst. Good has taken shape in the form of a rag-tag bunch of 12-year-olds in Hokkaido, a hockey team calling themselves the "Smilers". Evil is the "Thunderbirds", another schoolboy hockey team which dresses in black, moves like an army regiment, and is coached by an egomaniac.

Love... well, let's step back from this all for a minute.

Igaya Masaya is a professional hockey player who never smiles, for reasons we discover later on. It's Christmas 2007, and he comes back to visit the ice rink that he spent so much time at as a child. A few kids ask him for autographs, and then he sees a figure-skater on the ice. She's beautiful, graceful, and immediately reminds him of his first love, a figure-skater named Rena, who he met twenty years ago. He's transfixed by the skater on the ice, and gets lost in his thoughts.

Does that sound like a flashback to you? Sure does! We're whisked back to autumn 1987, where a 13-year-old Masaya is also watching a beautiful figure-skater on the ice at the same exact rink. She's beautiful, graceful, and he's completely struck dumb the way only a 13-year-old boy who has just completely fallen headfirst into a crush can be. The rest of his hockey team crashes into him and makes fun of him for staring at her like that, but she just smiles and skates off.

Meet the Smilers. They're just your average group of 12-year-old hockey players in the middle of nowhere in Hokkaido... kind of. We find out later that all of them have their own backstories and troubles; one of them has divorced parents, another has a sister stuck in a wheelchair, another has been endlessly bullied all through his life. Masaya's parents died in a fire when he was young. Undoubtedly their hardships is what brings them all closer together as a group.

Meet their coach. Shuhei (played by enigmatic screen and stage actor Mirai Moriyama) is an ex-tapdancer who moved up to Hokkaido to be with his girlfriend Shizuka (who, incidentally, is Rena's figure-skating coach). Shuhei wants to marry Shizuka (played by Italian-Japanese model/actress Rosa Katoh), but of course, there's a slight obstacle: Shizuka's stereotypically-strict father, who completely does not approve of a wacko like Shuhei. Shuhei says that he's come up to Hokkaido to be a teacher at a local elementary school, and Shizuka's father wants to know about his leadership skills -- and mentions that the ice hockey team's coach just quit, so Shuhei should take over. Shuhei replies, "Sure! Leave it to me, my hopefully-future-father-in-law!! I'll coach ice hockey!!" (Can he skate? No. Does he know anything about hockey? No. Has he ever coached a team? No. Does that matter? Apparently not.) Shizuka's father challenges Shuhei to have his team actually win a game and then maybe he'll allow the two of them to marry.

Naturally, Shuhei's lack of experience allows him to make "brilliant" decisions, putting the runt of the team in as the goalie, and coming up with offense plays based on tap-dancing rhythms. They win the game, and Shizuka's father says "I changed my mind. Win the CHAMPIONSHIP and I'll allow you to marry."

No problem, right? Well, as one of the kids points out, there is a very big problem: a hockey team called the Thunderbirds, who basically clean the floor with every team they face, every year. Their coach is a womanizing asshat named Tsurugi who is, of course, Shizuka's sempai from college and ex-boyfriend. He, of course, intends to get back together with Shizuka when his team defeats the Smilers and Shuhei is out of the picture. Meet love triangle Number 1.

Love triangle Number 2 sort of falls flat on its face early on in the plot, fortunately. See, there's a figure skater named Chinatsu who has a huge crush on Masaya, and she's really jealous of Rena. One day Chinatsu asks out Masaya, and he turns her down. As we find out, Chinatsu's ice skating talent is only matched by her ability to beat the living crap out of random guys who piss her off. So she punches Masaya's lights out, and he winds up in the hospital, and Shuhei invites Chinatsu to take Masaya's place on the team, where she can (and does) go beat up on opponents instead. Chinatsu is subsequently joined on the team by Shevchenko, a blonde-haired Russian exchange student who Shuhei recruits when he sees him Cossack-dancing in the hallway, and by Ichiryouta, a misfit from the sumo club whose size and skills work well for him on the ice. Yes, it's quite an assortment of characters.

While injured, Masaya runs into Rena at the hospital, which if you've watched enough Japanese doramas and movies, signifies that Rena has been diagnosed with Something Fatal and is Destined to Die by the end of the movie. However, Masaya doesn't know that, and so he finally gets up the guts to go out on a date with her. They date for a while. She becomes sicker and faints and has to go into the hospital, naturally right before the Big Hockey Tournament starts.

The team -- even Chinatsu -- comes to support Rena in the hospital every day, first by visiting and later by banging their hockey sticks on the ground at night and shouting her name. (At first this evokes the ire of a security guard who chases them off, but when he finds out what's going on, he even helps them find her when she's transferred to intensive care for chemotherapy.) Rena's bedside table has exactly two items on it: the music box Masaya gives her, and the tournament bracket with the Smilers' progression marked with it. By day, the team is working together, training together, winning together. Shuhei still never actually learns to skate, resulting in hilarious scenes every time he tries to run out on the ice to high-five his team.

You can pretty much guess the ending -- heck, if you saw the previews at all you should know what's going to happen before you even sit down in your seat at the theater. However, this movie is so funny and lively and wonderful and poignant all at once that it really doesn't make a difference. I laughed, I cried. I enjoyed every minute of it and encourage you to go see it too, if you are in Japan.

I meant to have some more Japan trip pictures up today, but alas, I got sidetracked yesterday by going to a Super Bull party. Right after that crazy kickoff where the Bears returned it for a touchdown, two more people showed up, so we rewound it on the Tivo before they got downstairs and were like, "Okay, let's all pretend we just started watching," except that when the announcer said something like "The Colts have had some problems blocking their kickoff returns this year," we all lost it and started cracking up.

Peyton Manning is kind of cute, but other than that, I don't recall much from the game besides all of the rain and the ninety billion fumbles and turnovers, which were entertaining on their own. I brought my Terrible Towel with me, as did another Pittsburgh ex-pat, and so whenever anyone came in to check on the game and asked who was winning, she and I would yell "GO STEELERS!!!!" and wave our towels around. I also did a cheer of "E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!!!!!" at one point.

Yeah, see, everything I know about football I learned from marching band. (Before you ask: baritone/euphonium.)

Anyway, the 2007 Community Projections have been kicked off today, and the first one we're attacking is Kenji Johjima. If you somehow read this blog but not Lookout Landing or USSM, read this post to find out more. It's a joint effort between the two blogs this year, in Google Spreadsheets, which is a somewhat surreal experience, as you can sit there and watch other people play with the numbers.

Let's see, what else is up...

Last week the Japanese newspapers were reporting that the NPB is adopting drug testing measures. The penalties may seem light (first offense is a reprimand, second is a 10-day suspension, third is a year, fourth is indefinite) but when you remember that in Japanese society, nobody ever forgets any dishonor to your name -- think Kazuhito Tadano -- a reprimand and the subsequent media circus could be more punishment than you think.

Thanks to Gary Garland starting up his news translations at Japan Baseball Daily again, I feel myself getting sort of lazy, but we'll see. The one wacky thing to me is that he pointed out two new catchers who are being compared to Kenji Johjima, the new Softbank catcher Hiroaki Takaya, and the Chunichi high school catcher Nagamasa Fukuda. However, from my own observation during the Koshien tournament and the Kokoyakyu movie, the one I would most expect to put up Johjima numbers in the future is the Hanshin Tigers draftee Ryohei Hashimoto, from Chiben Wakayama HS. He has a beautifully powerful swing, and it's just a matter of whether he can get his game up to the top level in time to take over for the aging Akihiro Yano, I think (but I also hope they don't rush him like the Lions did with Ginjiro Sumitani last year).

Bobby Valentine mentioned in his blog that Bobby Buckner is at spring training with Lotte. Yes, he is related to Bill Buckner -- it's his son, a high school senior who plays shortstop. Apparently Valentine was college roomates with Buckner, too. Small world!

Speaking of spring training with Lotte, it is apparently so damn hot in Australia right now -- around 100 degrees -- that their practices were moved to 4pm from 10am. My favorite submarine pitcher Shunsuke Watanabe is blogging about it on his website, although to be fair, he's mostly using the hot weather as an excuse to drink lots of Australian beer and wine. Can you blame him?

Speaking of weird spring training food stories, there were some funny recent Hawks pictures in Miyazaki, including Sadaharu Oh receiving a seafood gift (that katsuo fish is like half his height), and the Hawks rookies are learning to make hot dogs? And this is not about food, but Hiroki Kokubo is in ur trenchcoatz stalking ur rookiez. Okay, not really.

Also, I dislike the new Hanshin uniforms, though I think this picture of Fujikawa saying "You got my old number!" to Esteban Yan is pretty funny. And look, it is Ryan Vogelsong.

The Hiroshima Carp have been covering a different player in camp each day for photos. So far they've done Soyogi, Higashide, Arai, and Kurihara. Kurihara says he's going to hit like 40-50 home runs this season. I have no doubt he could do it if he stayed healthy for the whole year. I want to get excited about the Carp this year, I honestly do, but I worry that doing so will jinx them.

I feel kind of bad for Mike Matheny retiring, but alas, these things happen. If his case study helps to prevent and/or treat head trauma and concussions from catchers in the future, though, at least he'll be able to make some impact on the sport, no pun intended.

You know we're big George Sherrill fans around here, and I never did link to his recent article on mlbplayers.com about perseverance and working your way up out of the indy leagues. It's an interesting read.

And on another lefty bullpen note, happy 22nd birthday to Eric O'Flaherty! I'm betting his birthday wish is to break camp with the Mariners this year...

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.