Fraters Libertas

Banzai Baseball

The Rocket Man from Powerline has returned from his two week trip to the Land of the Rising Sun and posts a review (including video) of his attendance at a Japanese baseball game, between the Yomiuri Giants and Hanshin Tigers.

It's great stuff and really captures the excitement of the game. I've always been intrigued with Japanese baseball, something about their child like enthusiasm for the sport is really endearing. And refreshing, you'd never see it from fans in the US. The players seem to have a commitment to the fans, a sense of responsibility toward them that is alien to the US sporting scene. Which is probably why you'll never see the fans react in such an unrestrained, uncynical manner here.

I've never been to Japan for a game (or for any other reason), but last year the St. Paul Saints had a Japanese guy running around the stands, leading cheers and singing songs all season long. I think he was an exchange student and an intern in their promotions department and the team capitalized on his cultural perspective to bring some of the Japanese baseball experience to Midway Stadium. Since the Saints had him alternately dressed in a karate outfit and a kimono, not sure how authentic it all was. But the guy was a great sport and it was funny stuff.

FYI - the St. Paul Saints home season starts tonight. They probably won't bring back the Japanese guy (I imagine he graduated, or was deported, or was rescued by Amnesty International's cultural stereotype sweatshop division). But in terms of unbridled enthusiasm and camaraderie between the fans and players, independent minor league baseball is probably as close as you'll find to Japanese baseball.

Rocket's post provides another direct parallel between the two, drinking and jostling in the stands:

My companions drank a number of beers .... The chanting and singing continued non-stop, and when the home team took the lead in the bottom of the seventh, the stadium went crazy. My camera work got a little shaky because I was knocked over, briefly, by a woman behind me who, in turn, was knocked down by someone else.

One of my favorite Saints game memories was from 7 or 8 years ago, where JB Doubltess and I botched two 20-ounce beer hand offs within 30 minutes. No doubt this was on account of being jostled by the frenzied fans around us, but the tragic-comic end result was that we accidentally poured the entire contents of each gigantic cup down the back of the guy sitting in front of us. Understandably, he wasn't amused the first time and was enraged the second time. But by any standard of comedy, for everyone not getting the Summit Pale Ale Shower, this is hilarious. Only through a Herculean effort were we able to stifle the laugher long enough to apologize to the poor SOB and assuage his rage by buying him his own free beer before it all degenerated into fisticuffs. As the noted philosopher Homer Simpson once said, "To alcohol, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."