Tokyo Dome and Hall of Fame

This week I made a trip to the home of Japanese baseball, the Tokyo Dome, home of the Yomiuri Giants. They're the most popular team in Japan, so much so that I read 50% of Japanese people identify themselves as Giants fans. The other 50% hate them. Pretty clearly the Japanese Yankees, so that's one strike against them already, but I'm giving them a fair shot.

The Tokyo Dome is part of a huge entertainment complex, complete with a mall, a spa, an amusement park, and a bunch of other stuff. In the basement, it's also the home of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. Once I decided I couldn't figure out the off-track horse race betting, I plunked down 500 yen and headed in.

I've been there once before, but I was completely illiterate in Japanese at the time and there's very little English. Now I can read like a 2 year old, so I got a little more out of it. They had a nice room full of baseball history, all the way back to the stuff I play. Now that I can read a little, I know that this is the rules of the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in 1845, in Japanese.
I also figured out that this is the Cincinnati Red Stockings. They had a bunch of these pictures(Knickerbockers, Wesleyan, etc.) and I got a kick out of deciphering each one. Looks like I found the place to contact about starting up a vintage base ball team.
There were big sections on baseball in the Olympics, history of NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball), and the World Baseball Classic, and I strolled through them all before heading into the Hall of Fame. There was a giant ball right in the middle, where a couple of years ago they got all the players to write something, like a yearbook. My favorite was from Julio Zuleta.The hall of fame was pretty cool, except I've never heard of most of the players. It was interesting all the same to read their whole career distilled down to little 2 sentence blurbs. I took a bunch of pictures to remember some guys I wanted to look up when I got home, but haven't got to it yet.

I left, at a burger, met a guy from Vancouver, and went shopping before heading in. At the games I've been to so far, a hat and a decent quality jersey seems to run somewhere around $50-$70. The only reasonably cheap jerseys they had were literally T-shirts printed like jerseys. I decided I've come this far collecting them, so I sucked it up and dropped 10,000 yen on an un-numbered jersey.

Like I said, the Giants are really popular, so the only seat I could find was way up in left field. I was actually looking down on the foul pole.
It was the Giants vs. their cross-town rivals, the Yakult Swallows. Sort of like a Yankees-Mets game. It turned out to be a really good game. The Giants lead off hitter hit a home run, and it was non-stop fireworks from then. The Giants fan clubs were going crazy, and the pulled out a huge banner in the 5th to show it.

Not to be outdone, the one section of Yakult fans did their famous "Umbrella Dance" after every Swallows run. And there were a lot of them. By my count (I didn't check the box score) there were 8 home runs, which might be more than I've seen in the previous 10 games put together. Came down the the bottom of the 8th, and the Giants manage to take the lead, 9-8. They brought out their closer, Marc Kroon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Kroon). He walked the first 3 hitter he faced, but they left him in and he somehow battled back to get a save the hard way, 1 inning, 6 batters, no hits.

The Tokyo Dome is an air-supported dome, like the Metrodome, so the entire building in at a slightly higher air pressure the the world outside. It's only about 0.3% higher, but it holds up the roof pretty well. To keep that air pressure in, you enter through revolving doors. This works great on the way in, when people are showing up at different time. On the way out, though, there's a huge logjam at the 1-at-a-time revolving doors, so they open up the fire escape normal doors. They put some ushers there to guide people out. These poor people have to stand at the door while the air rushes out.

Well, that's 11 down, 1 to go. I'm heading to Saitama to watch the Seibu Lions in a few weeks, then I'll finally be able to pick a team to cheer for next year. Not that I'll be here to follow them, but it will be nice to root for someone.