Rubberball

As some of you might know, my grad school exit project involves studying rubberball baseball in Japan. Rubberball is played with the same rules as regular baseball, but with slightly different equipment and smaller fields. The balls are made out of rubber, so you can't throw or hit them nearly as far as the typical American hardball. This helps facilitate the creation of multiple fields in a country where land is expensive and you have to cram as much as you can into as little space as possible.

While I was in Tokyo, I spent all of my free time either visiting sports shops to compare equipment, visiting batting cages to test equipment and interview players, or looking for sports fields to watch games. It was incredibly fun, but is also the reason I didn't get to see as much as Japan as I had wanted to. Here's a video from one such game that I watched while I was in the area:



This video clip shows several important things about rubberball in Japan. First: the player hit the ball far enough that it flew into a neighboring field. The other game had to pause so our game's players could field the ball and finish the play. I also have a video of the neighboring game hitting a ball into our field, too. To maximize land use, the baseball fields come in sets of four and are extremely close together.

Second: although the player hit the ball far enough to have made a home run, he was unable to run past third base. You can hear one of my colleagues jokingly suggest giving him a cigarette after the play at the end of the clip. This particular league is comprised of moderately competitive individuals who played in high school or other youth leagues. While they're in infinitely better shape than I am, they don't train nearly as hard as some of the higher leagues and big plays like this usually result in one or more player collapsing on base. Unlike American sports where he'd probably be yelled at for not trying harder, though, you can hear everyone laughing it off in the background. If I remember correctly, he made it home shortly after this play.

I'll put more videos up online later, but I'd really appreciate someone pointing me to a better program to do my video editing. Windows Movie Maker just doesn't offer the quality I'm looking for...