Day 83 - March 30

I've almost caught up with the updates!

So today, Tuesday, was the school-sponsored baseball game trip.  Well, it wasn't so much a school trip, more like the school subsidized the cost of the tickets so we could go to the game for 1/2 price.  The baseball game was between the Yokohama Bay Stars and the Tokyo Giants.  Since the game was in Yokohama, we were rooting for the home team. 

I must say, I don't think I'll ever be able to go to an American baseball game again.  I have never experienced a sporting event with so much energy in my life before this game.  It was only one of the first games of the season, or even pre-season (I don't know about these things), but everyone in the (packed) stadium was acting like it was the finals in the World Series.  I took some video footage with my camera to show how insane this was, but I doubt it was able to capture the energy in that stadium.

Since Temple bought the tickets all the Temple students were clustered together to create our own gaijin section.  I do believe the two guys behind Li and I were drunk by the time we got there.  They were good guys, but a little too extroverted in their drunkenness.  Sitting smack in the center of the Bay Stars territory, they were rooting for the Giants just b/c they shouldn't have been.  They were funny enough baka-gaijin so that most of the people around just laughed at them, but there were still some who you could tell did not like it.  In between innings they would put the jumbo-tron camera on different parts of the stadium for different themes.  Once or twice it was a "Dance Contest" so of course the more rambunctious of the two got out into the aisle and started dancing like crazy, at one point very nearly stripping.

Another amazing thing about Japanese baseball games is the food service.  Aside from the beer girls (of which there are enough of so that one walks past every several seconds) there are also girls selling popcorn, soba, udon, and other assorted foods.  Not the kind of things you would see at an American baseball game haha.  Of course, the area under the stadium was just like an American one; chock full of food shops and gift shops.  Possibly my favorite thing for sale here was the can of self-heating sake.  I screwed it up on the one that I bought so I had to drink it at room temperature, but I figured it out afterward.  Still though, that is pretty freaking awesome.  I also bought a 2010 Opening Series Bay Stars baseball hat which was 3,500Y.  Very expensive, but I think it was worth it as a souvenir.

As for the game itself, it was deadlocked at 0 until about the 4th inning when the Giants got a home run with no one on base.  In the 6th inning the Bay stars got 3 runs, but then at the top of the 7th the Giants managed to get another two runs.  They were both tied at 3 and it looked like they would go into extra innings until the top of the 9th when the Giants barely managed to get one run in, thus putting the Bay Stars a run behind.  Now, I'm not entirely sure, but I thought that when there are two outs and a runner reaches home before the batter gets tagged out at first the run still counts.  Well, this is exactly what happened to the Bay Stars.  It was the bottom of the 9th and they had men on 3rd and 2nd with two outs.  The batter hits a line drive between 1st and 2nd, 3rd makes it home right before they tagged the batter out at first.  The crowd was going insane by this point and Li and I both cheered even harder when this happened because we both thought that was how the rules worked, but apparently not since the stadium went fairly quiet moments later.

The two drunk guys had been cheering on the Giants the whole time and asked a friend how to say "we won" once the game was over.  As everyone was gathering their things these two were standing on their chairs (as they had done often throughout the game) cheering "we won" in Japanese.  Most people ignored them, a few drunk guys were laughing at them, and a couple young guys several rows down yelled out "go home fuckers!" as they left their seats.  I was very embarrassed for us since this was just taking it too far.  Those guys also took several pictures with the beer girls and were trying to talk to them.  The lesser drunk one knew some Japanese while the more drunk one knew absolutely none.  As one of them walked away after serving them he was calling out "kawaii" to her, which sounded a lot more like "kowai" to me.  The former means cute and the latter means scary; there's kind of a difference. 

Despite the fact that we lost, this was an amazing experience and I am extremely happy that I decided to do it.  If I ever go to another American baseball game any time in the near future I will be very disappointed lol.