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sunday of sports of various sorts
Can't sleep... typical Sunday jitters I suppose, plus it is raining and the rain is LOUD.
I have to be up in 4 hours for school though, so that sucks -- going to be a long Monday. At least I can sleep when I get home, I suppose. I have very little planned for this week before Mike arrives on Thursday, in theory so that I can spend time cleaning.
Today was a pretty great day though. I started off by going to Shin-Yokohama to watch hockey with Simon, who I hadn't seen in almost a year. (Which is nuts. We used to be pretty close friends and watch baseball and play boardgames and whatever together, but then he got a full-time job this year for real and has been really busy.) We saw 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 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 today 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. We figure that the Free Blades added a few new foreign players, including a new Korean college graduate, and also a few new players in general, in addition to picking up the Kawai brothers (Takuma and Ryuichi, who both spent parts of 2009 playing hockey in North America) AND the rest of the Tanaka brothers (Go, Sho, and Ryo; Go is the team captain now 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 when it was like, some dudes running around on skates and Michio Hashimoto as goalie. Hashimoto is still solid as ever, at least.
The Cranes are the same team that has been beating down the rest of the Asia League for the last few years, give or take 2-3 players. Notably, Darcy Mitani got released and is now playing for the Korean High1 team in Chuncheon. That sucks. But other than that today looked largely the same as the Cranes did last year, with Itoh and Obara leading the way; Masahito Nishiwaki was in the game the whole way but not nearly as aggressive as he was last year. The Cranes' goalie today was Kiyokawa instead of Ishikawa.
Between periods at one point, 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 shit 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 from Philadelphia 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 the NHL, 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.
But yeah, in general we had a good time. And it was a good game, very close.
Also, amusingly, one of the foods Simon got from the Free Blades "Fukushima food" table, was nori-covered shoyu dango sticks... with a "Tanaka Three Brothers" label on top of the plastic. 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". The dango themselves were just average-tasting, but since Go Tanaka is the team captain, it was kinda cool to get 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, really.
After that we booked it to Jingu, stopping in a convenience store for raincoats and the ATM, and getting there literally at like 6:10pm... as the rain was starting to fall lightly, and the Dragons were already up 1-0 on the Swallows when we got to our seats. BUT the important part is that we were there for Norichika Aoki's first at-bat, where he cranked a homer into the right-field stands in front of us. That home run was his 200th hit of the year, making him the only player in Japanese baseball history to get 200 hits TWICE. Even Ichiro never did that here (though he played in slightly shorter seasons).
After that it was just a matter of everyone praying that the game would actually go to at least 5 innings so it would count. The joke was that Ryosuke Morioka really needed the two hits he got in the first two innings, but no, we wanted Aoki's home run and hit to stand. The rain got pretty awful after the 2nd inning and it went into a rain delay, so Simon and I went and got food and hung out in the concourse for a while. Kozo apparently just stood outside singing all the pop songs on the loudspeaker in the rain, because he is weird like that.
In the end, the game did go 9 innings and the Swallows won 3-1. Hooray.
Now I have absolutely no voice whatsoever from yelling the last few days, and I still feel like I can't sleep. Ugh.
I have to be up in 4 hours for school though, so that sucks -- going to be a long Monday. At least I can sleep when I get home, I suppose. I have very little planned for this week before Mike arrives on Thursday, in theory so that I can spend time cleaning.
Today was a pretty great day though. I started off by going to Shin-Yokohama to watch hockey with Simon, who I hadn't seen in almost a year. (Which is nuts. We used to be pretty close friends and watch baseball and play boardgames and whatever together, but then he got a full-time job this year for real and has been really busy.) We saw 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 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 today 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. We figure that the Free Blades added a few new foreign players, including a new Korean college graduate, and also a few new players in general, in addition to picking up the Kawai brothers (Takuma and Ryuichi, who both spent parts of 2009 playing hockey in North America) AND the rest of the Tanaka brothers (Go, Sho, and Ryo; Go is the team captain now 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 when it was like, some dudes running around on skates and Michio Hashimoto as goalie. Hashimoto is still solid as ever, at least.
The Cranes are the same team that has been beating down the rest of the Asia League for the last few years, give or take 2-3 players. Notably, Darcy Mitani got released and is now playing for the Korean High1 team in Chuncheon. That sucks. But other than that today looked largely the same as the Cranes did last year, with Itoh and Obara leading the way; Masahito Nishiwaki was in the game the whole way but not nearly as aggressive as he was last year. The Cranes' goalie today was Kiyokawa instead of Ishikawa.
Between periods at one point, 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 shit 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 from Philadelphia 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 the NHL, 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.
But yeah, in general we had a good time. And it was a good game, very close.
Also, amusingly, one of the foods Simon got from the Free Blades "Fukushima food" table, was nori-covered shoyu dango sticks... with a "Tanaka Three Brothers" label on top of the plastic. 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". The dango themselves were just average-tasting, but since Go Tanaka is the team captain, it was kinda cool to get 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, really.
After that we booked it to Jingu, stopping in a convenience store for raincoats and the ATM, and getting there literally at like 6:10pm... as the rain was starting to fall lightly, and the Dragons were already up 1-0 on the Swallows when we got to our seats. BUT the important part is that we were there for Norichika Aoki's first at-bat, where he cranked a homer into the right-field stands in front of us. That home run was his 200th hit of the year, making him the only player in Japanese baseball history to get 200 hits TWICE. Even Ichiro never did that here (though he played in slightly shorter seasons).
After that it was just a matter of everyone praying that the game would actually go to at least 5 innings so it would count. The joke was that Ryosuke Morioka really needed the two hits he got in the first two innings, but no, we wanted Aoki's home run and hit to stand. The rain got pretty awful after the 2nd inning and it went into a rain delay, so Simon and I went and got food and hung out in the concourse for a while. Kozo apparently just stood outside singing all the pop songs on the loudspeaker in the rain, because he is weird like that.
In the end, the game did go 9 innings and the Swallows won 3-1. Hooray.
Now I have absolutely no voice whatsoever from yelling the last few days, and I still feel like I can't sleep. Ugh.
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Go Flyers!