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[ainori] random stalking of former members
This is just kind of funny. So there's a site with former Ainori members blogs, and I noticed that Umi had one. He was this guy from Kagoshima who was in the background for a while, then out of nowhere was thrust into the foreground, confessed to Momo (one of the many) and got turned down, a few months ago.
But they had mentioned he was a star baseball player in high school and that had been in the back of my mind...
So I'm reading back in his blog (he's a Giants fan, haha) and he mentions going to Soukeisen, bizarrely one day before I was there! And... he was there to cheer for his former teammate from high school...
...Takeshi Hosoyamada, Waseda's catcher. Who was just drafted by the Yokohama Baystars a day or two before.
Anyway, the upshot is, knowing that he was a classmate of Hosoyamada made it REALLY easy to stalk him... since his blog name is Kazuhiro Shigeta, and I know that Hosoyamada went to Kagoshima Jousei HS (鹿児島城西高校), I found an old Koshien list from that school -- this one from 2004, and sure enough there's a guy named 重田和海.
What a bizarre way to spell Kazuhiro (I would have read that as Kazumi and thought it was a girl's name). But it explains why his Ainori name was Umi, at least, he says his nickname is "Island Man Umi" basically in Japanese.
Not that it really matters, but it's kind of neat anyway.
I kind of wonder if there's actually an online database somewhere of every guy who ever played at the Koshien tournament, or if this sort of thing requires you to normally go pouring through old books upon books, being as almost 900 guys play in the tournament each year (49 teams of 18 guys each) and there are 90 years worth of tournaments...
But they had mentioned he was a star baseball player in high school and that had been in the back of my mind...
So I'm reading back in his blog (he's a Giants fan, haha) and he mentions going to Soukeisen, bizarrely one day before I was there! And... he was there to cheer for his former teammate from high school...
...Takeshi Hosoyamada, Waseda's catcher. Who was just drafted by the Yokohama Baystars a day or two before.
Anyway, the upshot is, knowing that he was a classmate of Hosoyamada made it REALLY easy to stalk him... since his blog name is Kazuhiro Shigeta, and I know that Hosoyamada went to Kagoshima Jousei HS (鹿児島城西高校), I found an old Koshien list from that school -- this one from 2004, and sure enough there's a guy named 重田和海.
What a bizarre way to spell Kazuhiro (I would have read that as Kazumi and thought it was a girl's name). But it explains why his Ainori name was Umi, at least, he says his nickname is "Island Man Umi" basically in Japanese.
Not that it really matters, but it's kind of neat anyway.
I kind of wonder if there's actually an online database somewhere of every guy who ever played at the Koshien tournament, or if this sort of thing requires you to normally go pouring through old books upon books, being as almost 900 guys play in the tournament each year (49 teams of 18 guys each) and there are 90 years worth of tournaments...