Marinerds, etc.

As usual, I could either write about this one or post pictures of this one, and since I spent all my time on pictures...


(Sho Nakata hit a home run straight out of Kamagaya stadium at the preseason game against Chunichi -- it hit a drink machine by the training facility. So they put up a special Memorial Out-Of-The-Park-No-Really Home Run vending machine there with a plaque.)

On Monday, May 31, I went down to the Fighters minor-league stadium in Kamagaya to see a minor-league matchup between them and the Rakuten Eagles. Thanks to having to work Saturday and Sunday this coming weekend to help out at my JHS's Sports Day, I had a 3-day weekend last weekend, and the Fighters happened to have a rare Monday game going on. I prefer weekday games, but obviously haven't been able to go to many since I started working a normal 8-5 M-F job.

I spent most of this game socializing (while, of course, still taking photos and keeping score). I caught up with a few Kamagaya regulars that I hadn't seen in a while; met a guy who also is a huge Imanari fan AND a huge Tokyo Big 6 nerd and talked to him for an inning or so (he was like "I saw you at Jingu, you love Kagami, right?" which was both cool and freaky), sat with Ojisan for half the game, AND I also sat with Buddy Carlyle's wife and daughter for an inning or two.

After the game I also hung out and took photos with a bunch of players, got a few signatures, etc. It's nice on a weekday because it's less crowded. More on that afterwards (including how I stuck my foot in my mouth several times)

As for the game itself, the Fighters won 9-5. Both teams used a bazillion pitchers -- the Fighters used 8 guys and the Eagles used 5. Mitsuo Yoshikawa started for the Fighters and Ryohei Isaka started for the Eagles, not that it mattered as neither of them pitched more than 2 innings.

For the Fighters, 7 out of those 9 runs came from homers:
Takahiro Imanami hit a 3-run homer in the 1st inning off Isaka.
Atsushi Ugumori hit a solo homer in the 3rd inning off Ryuhei Terada.
Manabu Iwadate hit a solo homer in the 5th inning off Tomohiro Tsuchiya.
Atsushi Ugumori hit his SECOND homer of the game in the 6th inning, a 2-run shot off Kazuya Takahori.

For the Eagles, Taishi Nakagawa hit a homer off Masaru Nakamura, but that was it. The rest of their runs came in the 7th and 8th inning off some shaky fielding and whatnot.

You can see an English box score on the NPB site. I was away from my camera for a few innings, but I managed to catch most of the guys who pitched and most of the batters too at one point or another, so here you go.

I've organized this post into Home Runs, Eagles, Fighters, and After-Game.

Home Runs



Takahiro Imanami hits a 3-run in the first inning, and high-fives runners Murata and Sugiya and coach Kawana back at home.


Atsushi Ugumori stands in at the plate in the 3rd. I had specifically walked over to the 3rd base side to take photos of him...


Ugumori hitting his home run.


High fives back at the dugout (the little kid is Carlyle's son).


Manabu Iwadate in the 5th inning.


More high-fives back in the dugout.


Rakuten's Taishi Nakagawa.

Eagles Players

Tatsuya Shiokawa getting caught stealing second.


Ryohei Isaka.


Isaka again.




Ryuhei Terada.


Shoji Ohiro.


Jobu Morita... I am mostly amused by his name thanks to the movie Major League. "Jobu can't hit a curve ball..."


Koji Matsui, who the Eagles took in the ikusei draft, so he wears #121.

I actually saw Matsui play last summer for the Nagasaki Saints, too. Here's a photo from that game.




Tomohiro Tsuchiya, not to be confused with the other Tsuchiya on the team... oh wait, Teppei doesn't USE Tsuchiya as his name anymore.


Yasunori Kikuchi.


You know what is odd? I had a whole bunch of shots of Fuminori Yokogawa, but didn't end up including any of them here. Weird.

Fighters

Starter Mitsuo Yoshikawa.


Yoshikawa with batterymate Yuji Arahari.


Kenshi Sugiya.




Toshiyuki Yanuki.


A random crowd shot I took. It's sparse but actually pretty good for a weekday -- good enough to have an ouendan, even.


The Carlyle family on bat boy duty.


Buddy Carlyle.


His son as bat boy.


And as ball boy.


Yuji Arahari.




John Clayton Unten, the half-American kid from Okinawa. This was my first time seeing him pitch.




Tatsuo Kinoshita. Hadn't seen him in a long time.




Takahiro Matsuka, the Tokyo University graduate.


Final score.

After the Game
Went to hang out with the usual suspects, saw a whole bunch of players as they were finishing up after-game meetings and BP and all. I got manager Igarashi's autograph but no photo with him. Ojisan took the rest of these as I bugged him and the guys...


Seiichi Ohhira, OF/DH, #54

I actually couldn't remember if I have a photo with him before, so I figured why not.


Manabu Iwadate, IF/DH, #40

We got him from the Giants this offseason, I'm not sure why exactly. He's been playing first base while Nakata and Ichikawa and basically everyone else is injured. Seemed nice enough I guess, but I'm thinking if he doesn't make it to ichi-gun this year he'll get cut and retire. He did hit one of those home runs though.


Atsushi Ugumori, OF/DH, #65

Ugumori is awesome, actually. He is tearing up the Eastern League right now to the tune of .388/.435/.713 and leading the Fighters ni-gun with 6 home runs. Ugu also hit 20 home runs last year in like 77 games... he's also a pretty good outfielder and just an all-around good young player (and he's like 6'3", too!). There just isn't really a place for him on the Fighters ichi-gun team right now, sadly.


Yutaka Ohtsuka, pitcher, #14, 2nd-round draft pick this year

I got a photo with him and Ojisan said "She was a fan of yours in college!" and he's like "Uhh, really?" and I said "Yeah, I saw you at the All-Japan tourney last year... in the game with Soka against Fuji..." and he said "Shit, we lost that game." Everyone laughed, I was like "Oh crap... you did... but it wasn't YOUR fault, dude... you didn't START that game..." and he kind of laughed and ran off.

Later, I showed Ojisan that I actually had a photo on my phone of Ohtsuka from that game and Ojisan made me send it to him, he's like "Next time I see Ohtsuka-kun I will show him this picture and tell him that no really, you were a fan of his in college, this was on your phone, I think he'll be happy to hear that even if he seemed pissed off at you today."

Still, embarrassing.


Takahiro Matsuka, pitcher, #30

...and the fourth guy EVER to graduate from Tokyo University and actually play baseball in the big leagues here. I was really psyched about him coming to the Fighters in the trade this offseason. Though, he seemed a tiny bit weirded out by a crazy gaijin fan like me.

And this next one is the reason I waited around...



I have wanted a photo with Yukio Tanaka for freaking forever. He IS "Mister Fighters". He is a big part of why I became a Fighters fan, because my first game ever, 8 seasons ago now, when he was still a regular, I learned his ouenka and the Yukio Jump and it was so much fun. He played his entire 21-year career with them, got over 2000 hits, is in the Meikyukai, and now he is a minor-league batting coach, and the last few times I was at Kamagaya he was pretty much untouchable, he ran past everyone like "busybusybusy too busy to talk too busy busybusy", but today I was like "Please please please please please just one second a photo please?" and he relented, with kind of a "OMFG crazy girl okay!" reaction. The photo isn't very good because Ojisan screwed up my camera and took it at ISO 1600 instead of something sane, but -- I have a picture with Yukio Freaking Tanaka! How cool is that??

Actually, it was pretty good gyutan. I don't even like gyutan (grilled cow tongue), but when you go to Sendai, you're supposed to eat it. Our group went to a place called Tasuke.



Cow tongue aside, the rest of the weekend was more like cow pies. Went up to Sendai on Saturday morning (April 24th) and came back Sunday evening (April 25th), saw the Fighters lose two games, and came back with a really sore throat.

The only good part is that Buddy Carlyle threw me a baseball after pregame practice on Saturday. It was raining lightly, but I went up to the fence and watched people throw, and I yelled out a "hey, nice pitching, Mr. Carlyle" at him -- and so when the rain turned to SLEET, and I am not making that up, he actually came over and threw me the baseball he'd been practicing with! I was really surprised but I thanked him and also introduced myself like "I'm Deanna, I write a blog about the Fighters, hopefully I'll get to write about you sometime!" I dunno, I was kinda babbling. But he said "Nice to meet you, Deanna!" before running off.

My friends and I waited under the outfield bleachers for the sleetstorm to finish, and when it did, we came back outside. I got a few photos of Fighters players, mostly before the storm started:


Hirotoshi Masui. We just drafted him out of Toshiba last year and he's already started 3 games for us (and has 1 win. Given that the team also has a .333 winning percentage, that's not bad).


Buddy Carlyle.


Kazunori Yamamoto takes flight!

After that I wandered around for a while to check out all the new stuff around the stadium and the new merchandise that they have this year, especially the player-designed Animal Avatars.


Here's something explaining the goods:
Ma-kun is a lion.
Iwakuma is a bear. (His theme is "family" though, so it's a baby bear.)
Takeshi Yamasaki is a gorilla.
Teppei, because he is lame, has a human being as his animal avatar.
Satoshi Nagai is a skunk. (I think he used to be a penguin.)
Naoto Watanabe is a panther.
Daisuke Kusano is a dog. (The "Dice Ken".)
Yosuke Takasu is a stag.
Motohiro Shima is a zebra (a "shimauma").


Here's a display with a bunch of the stuff.


Here's a display of just Iwakuma stuff.


And one of just Ma-Kun The Lion stuff.


Lovely new Rakuten uniforms too. Not sure I particularly like or dislike them, to be honest.


The wall outside the players' parking lot has the new Eagles players and coaches listed. The latter two are Kenji Tomura (my favorite Rikkio beanpole) and new manager Marty Brown.


They set up a bunch of cardboard cutouts of players on a stage. I posed with them in a normal pose on the first day.


This is the "Brown Kan". They had some crazy lady with an afro interviewing a goya mascot with Marty Brown's face on it. Who comes up with this crap, I'll never know. (Goya is a vegetable that comes from Okinawa.)


Came back in time to practice Fighters' chants with the ouendan. We have a Sendai-specific set that only happen there because Sendai allows drums but not trumpets. Check out my post from last year that has a few videos of them.

The matchup for this game was Hisashi Iwakuma vs. Yu Darvish, which is what probably led to the English baseball vocabulary guessing game for the day being "pitcher's duel". It was convenient for explaining it, at least. The game was fairly well sold out because of this matchup, actually, and even the reserved seats were packed.

While I'm mentioning it, take a look at this awesome new screen they put in this year next to the scoreboard. It was awesome for displaying information and some video replays and whatnot, much better than the tiny thing on the scoreboard...


(In this picture, it's showing the pitching matchup.)


Now take a look at this. The batter is the Fighters' Atsunori Inaba. His stats are in the upper left -- number of games, homeruns, RBIs, runs scored, BA, RISP, OBP, SLG. And if he'd had any at-bats, the results would be listed next to those 1) 2) 3) things underneath. Then in the lower right corner, under the picture of Iwakuma, they have all of Iwakuma's pitching stats -- games, innings, strikeouts, wins, losses, ERA, saves, hold points, and most important for this game: the number of pitches he'd thrown so far, which in this photo was only 2.


Here's a version of it with an Eagles batter up there. Hijirisawa's stats are to his left, in the same place Inaba's were. The bottom is still pitching stats, this time for Darvish. Also, you can see that they list the speed next to the word SPEED: in this shot, 144 km/h (about 90mph). Seriously cool. I've often complained that the one thing I wish they'd show here is pitch count. Orix also has a great scoreboard in the Kyocera Dome.

Anyway...

Since this game WAS a pitcher's duel, there really isn't a lot for me to say about it. Essentially, the Eagles put up their first run in the 2nd inning off two errors -- Teppei had singled, stolen second AND taken third on an error throwing to second base. Norihiro tried for the squeeze, and he bunted to the mound... and Teppei was already off on the bat AND Darvish ended up fielding the ball and throwing it over catcher Tsuruoka's head, so the run scored. Whoops.

The other runs came in the 6th inning. With two outs he walked Teppei and Norihiro, and then Daisuke Kusano singled to center. Teppei scored, and the throw in from centerfield was relayed by Iiyama, only he threw it past third base and it got away and Norihiro also scored and Kusano got to third base. Whoops.

And well, that was really it. Both pitchers pitched complete games and struck out 6, but Iwakuma allowed 3 runners the entire game. Really. The Eagles won 3-0. Iwakuma and Kusano were the game heroes.



Oh, one last picture from that game: here is my group of friends on the big screen during the "Lucky 7" before the Fighters' half of the 7th inning. I'm the green Hichori sign being cut off at the upper left. All of the uniform towels are friends of mine.



And here we are setting up our place in line for Sunday's game. We had 10 people in our group Saturday, though only 6 were coming on Sunday. For lack of anything else to call our gang...


...we called it "Team 52", which is both due to Konta's uniform number (one of our friends is a big Konta fan, and her nickname is even Kon-chan) and also due to it being kind of like Team 26, only twice as good.

Since I'm an Imanari fan on the Fighters and wear a #62 jersey, and my favorite Baystars player is Yuki Takamori, who also wears #62, one of my friends was joking that "Deanna is really in Team 62..."

Anyway, our gang checked into our respective hotels and then regrouped at Sendai station to go out for a night on the town, which involved the aforementioned gyutan, and then 3 hours of baseball karaoke. I think in our 3 hours at Shidax we did everything from team fight songs (we did 11 out of 12 teams as they didn't HAVE the current Buffaloes song), to at-bat music (including pretty much every Fighters batter and pitcher, and also bizarre things like Hosokawa's "Kiyoshi no Zundoko Bushi" and Nemoto's Shuchishin, and I sang Kyuji Fujikawa's entry music ("every little thing every precious thing") and another friend sang Nishioka's at-bat music, and then we started in on ouenka, like Lee Jung Hyun's "Wa", used for Imae's chant... and then we moved onto chance music, as we put in things like YMCA and Dschingis Khan and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and everyone did the Fighters words to them instead.

It was a pretty good time.

Then we all retreated back to hotels to get a few hours of sleep before coming back to the stadium the next morning. I was the first to arrive at 10am; only the ouendan and a few other people were around at that point, but almost everyone else showed up by 10:30 or so. (The game was at 1pm and the gates opened at 11. This is entirely typical when you are sitting in unreserved seating, so that you and your friends can come in and grab a bunch of seats together.)

A couple of us wandered around outside before the gates opened, looking around at some of the attractions, such as a free miso soup tent that my friends took advantage of (I didn't, because the soup had shellfish in it and I'm vaguely allergic), and the Rakuten train, and a band playing and so on. We also took a few photos...


By the big signed ball.


This time I decided to stand in front of Mr. Yamasaki for my pose.

I wandered around a bit without them and got a Rakuten t-shirt, too -- the Teppen! 2010 Team one. I figure that I'm kinda trying to collect stuff from all the teams before I leave, and I liked this one because I didn't have to pick a player. (I was debating getting someone obscure that I like, like Miyade or Uchimura, but I only saw stuff like wristbands for them. And of course there's nothing for Kenji Tomura yet.) Also got chicken curry for lunch which was FANTASTIC. If you see a Sakura Garden truck outside the stadium, I highly recommend their food.

Anyway, I watched pregame practice yet again. It was sunny, and I went to the fence to watch and maybe try to talk to the other foreign players, but was unsuccessful. I wasn't really sure what to say, to be honest. Brian Wolfe was just standing there when everyone else was throwing or running, and one of my friends said "Why isn't he practicing?" so I yelled out in English, "HEY BRIAN, WHY AREN'T YOU OUT THERE RUNNING?" but he either didn't hear me or ignored it. I also yelled "Go get 'em, Bobby!" at Bobby Keppel as he ran by, but again, no response. Alas. I didn't see Carlyle again.

On the other hand, my friend and I waved hi at Yamamoto and he smiled and nodded back at us.

So here are some of the guys I saw out there...


You probably recognize this guy.


And here's Darvish sitting down with Tateyama and other pitchers, after throwing.


Inaba, running for a fly ball (and missing)


This guy, we kept trying to figure out who he was. One of my friends who goes to almost every Fighters game no matter what city it's in, she told me his name was Matsu. I looked him up, and Nobuyasu Matsu is indeed an interesting lefty batting practice pitcher. He was with the Hawks for a couple of years as a pitcher, then became a Baystars BP pitcher, and then moved to the Fighters as a BP pitcher in 2008. He was also a BP pitcher for the Japanese teams in the WBC and Olympics. Neat, huh?


Bobby Keppel had to do some training with throwing a big heavy ball. Not sure what was wrong with him though.

Anyway, so, this game featured Masahiro "Ma-Kun" Tanaka starting for the Eagles, and Masaru Takeda starting for the Fighters, so the stadium wasn't quite as packed, but it was still plenty full.

Things were tied at 0-0 until the bottom of the 3rd inning, when Motohiro Shima started things off with an infield single to short, being safe on a headslide (doh). Akihisa Makida followed that with a single to right, and Ryo Hijirisawa singled to third, with an iffy safe call at first. So, with bases loaded, first Naoto Watanabe hit a sac fly to center -- and the problem is, not only did Shima score, but Makida moved to third. 1-0. Then Takasu hit a sac fly to left, so that scored Makida. 2-0. A groundout ended the inning.

In the top of the 4th, with two outs, Itoi reached base on an error (Watanabe pretty much ate the ball), advanced on a Nioka single, and then Koyano hit a pop fly to shallow center. A bunch of fielders converged on it... and nobody CAUGHT it! So Itoi scored and Nioka made it to third. 2-1.

Miracle of miracles, the Fighters actually GOT A LEAD for a little bit in the 6th! Shinji walked and Itoi singled, and then Nioka went to bunt them up... and POPPED THE BALL UP over the plate for an out. Oops. But Koyano hit a ball into left-center for a single, and Itoi scored, 2-2! Shota Ohno walked, and that loaded the bases... and then Takayuki Takaguchi also walked! Oshidashi! 3-2!

In the midst of us still doing the "UTTE UTTE UTTE UTTE _____!" chance theme, Kensuke lined out and Hichori grounded out, but hey, the Fighters were actually ahead! OMG!

Well, it didn't last long. In the bottom of the 6th, Takeshi Yamasaki singled with one out, and was replaced by Teppei in a fielder's choice. Norihiro Nakamura singled, moving Teppei to third (he's a flighty little sucker) and well, Kusano walked, loading the bases, so Masaru Takeda came out of the game to be replaced on the mound by Hisashi Takeda.

Which didn't work out so well as Hisashi gave up a hit to Motohiro Shima, a long hit which bounced against the back wall behind Hichori, and scored Teppei and Norihiro. 4-3. Shima himself ran and ran and ran, and rounded third, and then the relay from left came to short, and the relay from short came home, and Shima was out at the plate. I don't know what he was thinking running home like that, but whatever. The Eagles had taken back the oh-so-temporary lead from the Fighters.

A 19-year-old lefty kid named Wataru Karashima pitched the 7th and 8th innings, an aside from a hit to Itoi, got everyone else out. Closer Tsuyoshi Kawagishi finished the 9th in a 1-2-3 fashion and that was it for the game as yet another Fighters chance went down the drain. The only neat thing was getting to see Masaya Ozaki's first ichi-gun at-bat in two years, since he was fresh up from the farm team.

Shima, Karashima, and Kawagishi were the game heroes. I mostly only remember Karashima, they asked him something like "You're only 19 years old but with your poise you're becoming a major part of the Eagles staff already, huh?" and he's like "Uhh... no! I'm uh... I'm just doing my best! Uhhh..." and the entire stadium started laughing.



Anyway...

A few more photos and I give up on this post as it's already a week late.


Balloons.


Scoreboard during Masaya Ozaki's first ichi-gun at-bat of the year.


Hanging out behind the Inaba banner with the ouendan.