Baseball

I went and watched a couple of baseball games today. It's a free day for the trip schedule, so I took a trip out of Shinagawa to a big sports complex. I can't remember the name of the area, but it was next to the 1964 Olympic stadium. Yes, I have video of the stadium, too.

Originally, I had planned to meet some representatives at Waseda University. The downside of that is that we had to cancel the meeting. Waseda was involved in some very big front-page news this morning and is very busy trying to avoid the massively negative PR. Their representative still met us at the hotel as promised, but we could quickly tell he only came to save face for Waseda.

Greg quickly spun together an offer to cancel the meeting and the Waseda rep was incredibly thankful. I felt sorry for him and the situation he was in, but I was also impressed that he still made the original meeting. Ironically, the only reason we didn't cancel the meeting earlier was to save face on our part. After we got here, we realized Waseda didn't even use the equipment DeMarini makes and that all the equipment we had was for a different form of baseball altogether. We wanted to cancel the meeting on that part, but held it to maintain the relationship between Waseda and Portland State. Now I guess it's the best for both because there was no way we'd have gotten any information today. One of the coaches is in Okinawa and the others are all so busy trying to figure out what's going on that we could only have met with the student managers in the first place.

So instead we made our way to the fields and then ventured to the batting center (batting cages) nearby to interview some people. Luckily for us, there were some English-speakers there practicing rubberball. They're all in the rec league and set us up with some information about their team. They even tested our bat for us and were willing to go out and buy it because they liked the feel and performance so much. Score one for us! One of the guys does the voice of the announcer on Iron Chef, by the way. He was a very interesting character and tried to impress us by shouting catch lines from the show that, ironically, none of us have ever seen.

Right now I'm on my way back up to my room to start packing because we leave tomorrow and I want to be ready. I'm going to try to go out with some people later tonight and will try to keep you up to date on what happens there.

Keep in mind that I might not have frequent access to internet next week. Forgive me in advance for infrequent updates. すみません.