Sendai

Now that I'm all rested up from Golden Week, it's time to start heading to the closer places. This week, I decided to head up to Sendai, about an hour and a half north, to watch the Rakuten Golden Eagles. Game time was 2:00, so if I wanted to do any sightseeing at all, I had to get started early. I sacrificed my Friday night and got on the 7:45 train Saturday morning.

Sendai is a nice modern city, and compact enough that I could just walk to most of the places I wanted to go. My "it's somewhere over in this direction" navigating style cost me some time, though, and I only got to one of the historic spots, the mausoleum of Date Masamune. He was a feudal lord around 1600 who basically founded the city, and his ancestors ran the show for a few hundred years. Also, he had a cool helmet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_Masamune

There was some sort of ceremony going on when I got there. Since it's a mausoleum, I assume its some sort of memorial, but I couldn't tell for sure. Cool building, though. It and the 2 other Date mausoleums on the site had this great, bright primary color paint job. I couldn't believe the paint could stay so bright for 400 hundred years, then I read that the sight was destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt in 2001.

I alternated looking at the ceremony and checking my watch, then I had to go. I wanted to eat lunch before the game, and it was already noon.

Every town in Japan seems to have a local dish they're famous for. In Utsunomiya, it's gyoza (Chinese dumplings), and I eat them all the time. In Hiroshima and Osaka, it's okanomiyaki, my favorite Japanese food. In Sendai, it's gyutan. I want to try the local food everywhere, so I decided to suck it up and order the cow tongue. Turns out it's pretty good, just really chewy.

After my tasty cow tongue, I jumped on the train for the stadium. Couldn't quite tell if I got off at the right stop.

It says "Rakuten" and "Baseball Station" all over the place. I guess there's nothing else there.

As usual, I got there an hour or so early to check out the scene around the stadium (by the way, it's called Kleenex Stadium Miyagi). For some reason, the Eagles have a sort of wild west theme going. Lots of country music, all the stadium employees have a sort of cowboy hat on, and a big cowboy theme stage was set up. I couldn't track down the mascot, but I got this instead. Fair trade.

I went in and found my seat. In most stadiums, the home team is on the first base side. I wanted to sit in the fan club area, so I bought a ticket for right field. Little did I know, Rakuten is the exception to the rule, and the fan club is in left field. I was just below the visiting fan club section. Apparently everyone else knows that this isn't the place to sit. This is about 5 minutes before game time.
They do some nice, "baseball for kids" things before a lot of the games here. For instance, a couple of times I've seen them set up kids in all the positions for the first pitch, then when the players are announced, the run out an give the kid a ball and replace them in the field. Here, they even had a kid throw out the first pitch. But before all that, while they raked the infield, a whole herd of kids and parents came running out to the outfield for some "catch ball". Just a bunch of kids and parents playing catch in the outfield for five minutes with a whole stadium (17435 announced attendance) watching them.
As usual I got a pretty good seat. Right in home run territory. Luckily, they put up this helpful sign to keep us safe.

Says something about "Home Run Ball". Apparently they come in from the side.

The Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles are a really new team. In 2005, the Orix Blue Wave of Kobe and the Kintetsu Buffaloes of Osaka merged, forming, you guessed it, the Orix Buffaloes. This left the league with 11 teams, and the 2nd best players on both teams without a job. The players have a union here, and this caused the first and only strike by professional baseball players in Japan. The strike lasted 2 days, and the result was the formation of a new team, the Eagles, who got bought up by some internet company, Rakuten, and based in Sendai in the Tohoku region. Don't know where the Golden comes from.

As a result of being such a new team, they don't seem to have the same hardcore fans other teams have yet. There's a certain percentage of people who have adopted them as a home team, but there's others who are sticking with their old team. This leads to a lot of mixed couples.
Now, I can understand the couple in front of me. They probably both had a favorite team before they met. But up front there's a guy and a little (sleeping) kid. That kid isn't old enough to pick a team, and his dad is obviously a Baystars fan, yet he was completely decked out in Rakuten gear.

Anyway, it was interleague play, and the Eagles beat the Baystars 2-1 in some really crappy weather. That puts the home team at games I've attended at 3-1, and puts the Baystars at games I've attended at 0-2. By chance, that's 2 games in a row I've seen the Baystars, and coincidentally, they're the next team I was planning to go to.

By the way, the Yen is so strong against the dollar now, I can get the luxury chips.