Golly: Hanshin Tigers Baseball Lash Weekend 2007

well... i sit here on a tuesday arvo in my BOE, still tired from last weekend's lashing. the beer monkey definitely came out victorious. It all started Friday evening when i drove down to Flinty's for some pre-match beers with some of the usual crowd. i wish they couldve told me when i got there they werent drinking that much because after a lovely bottle of Kobe wine and a few beers, i was in quite a festive mood. Woke up the next morning hungover and with a killer headache. hehe. but that was until most of the boys and i decided to crack open a beer (like any normal person would at 10am) and slowly get into the festive spirit so we could have some great baseball banter. The thing is every year there are two teams, the Hanshin Tigers and the Orix Buffaloes, who have pre-season baseball camps in Kochi and while they are here, they have a couple of exhibition matches both in Aki City (where we went) and in Kochi City. Hanshin (balck and yellow) is usually the stronger of the two teams.

So anyways... once we arrived, we got our tickets from joel and then proceeded with the gun show! Can u feel the burn!

i reckon we had the best view in the stadium, just not the best seats. look behind flinty and i and see how steep the slope was that we were sitting on. we also had to climb up that once the beer was flowing quite regularly. surprisingly enough noone stacked it too badly. hehe.

theres matt, coutney, kaz ad paul (in the black shirt with his ninja armband... ooh scary.. hehe)

here are some of the other JETs who came to watch. they also helped us cheer on Lin and the tigers... well everyone except for arniel. I swear the entire crowd there were going for Hanshin except for arniel (and he copped a bit of shit but he was a good sport about it).

an action shot of the Hanshin Tigers batting ( i think this was Lin). If u look toward the left of the sign u can see a guy dressed in white leading the unsuspecting crowd in the hanshin dance. he was such a spanner but provided all us JETs with some comedy entertainment once the baseball was boring.

there were flag wavers and everything. that old guy almost had a heart attack. get this tho, he is a member of the Private Cheerleading Team for Hanshin. how comedy is that.. damn silly ojiichan.

during the sixth innings before hanshin were to bat, it is tradition at all hanshin games to blow up these big penis shaped balloons

like this

and then they all let go of them. when there are more people around, it looks amazing!

Unfortunately though, Hanshin ending up losing (and the day after in Kochi as well i heard) but for us foreigners we stayed there until the end of the match seeing as tho most Japanese Hanshin fans were all pissing off home with 2 innings to go.