There are a few things about the fan’s baseball experience that I will never be able to understand, and the presence of on-field promotions is one of them.
Only slightly related:
I realize the importance of events and stunts in putting butts in seats, and I can’t deny their entertainment value nor can I say that I am not amused or interested when they occur. However, I go to a baseball game to watch the baseball game and could do without what sometimes becomes an unnecessary delay of the game.
Two weekends ago, I headed to Osaka to catch a pair of doubleheaders, two day games featuring the Orix Buffaloes and the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles at Kyocera Dome and a couple of nightcaps at Hanshin Koshien Stadium with the Yokohama BayStars visiting the Hanshin Tigers.
Orix and Hanshin take about as opposite an approach to fan entertainment as can be seen in Japan. Hanshin is often compared to the Red Sox, constantly playing second fiddle to Nippon Pro Baseball’s Yankees, the Yomiuri Giants.
The comparison is not quite as valid now that Boston wins and has a following that has long since passed the threshhold of mildly annoying. However, the Tigers have one of Japan’s oldest ballparks and a rabid fan base that packs the stadium for every single home game, so they are similar to the Red Sox in those respects.
The park is always full and the fans fall in love with whoever dons the black pinstripes, memorizing their fight songs and shaking the foundations of the old yard with every new batter and fine defensive play. There isn’t much need for on-field gimmicks, and though they employ two ridiculous Tiger mascots, their antics are quite tame and limited compared to the mascots of other Japanese teams.
Simply put, Koshien Stadium is a lot like Dodger Stadium; you go and there’s not much else to do besides watch the baseball game in the way that the local fans do. Which is arriving late and leaving early in Los Angeles and elbowing your way into the non-reserved outfield seats and staying and singing until the ushers kick you out before the last train in Nishinomiya.
Orix, on the other hand, does not enjoy the long tradition and strong fan base that Hanshin does, and they only play the Yomiuri Giants four times each season, so half of the country is not interested in them by default. They have to work harder to attract fans to the park.
I think the Buffaloes are the best entertainment yen in the Pacific League and second in Japanese baseball to the Hiroshima Carp. Orix seems to be all about getting kids on the field and on the scoreboard and sending the fans home with armloads of Buffaloes junk to go along with the sore backsides they’ll have after sitting on those hard plastic Dome seats.
Last weekend, however, every promo they tried somehow went sour, sometimes to an embarrassing degree.
In the Pacific League (the less popular of the two), I’ve noticed that the visiting teams’ mascots and entertainment staff travel with their clubs and get a significant amount of attention and air time at the opposing team’s park. Personally, if I was all Go-Go-Buffaloes, I’d be annoyed at how much time they take up, and either way it just seems much too friendly to me.
The Eagles brought a giant bitter melon (called “goya” in Japanese) with them and turned him loose on the field after lineup cards were exchanged and before Orix took the field for the top of the first inning.
Like all Japanese “characters,” Goya had a back story and twinkled with awe at being in the big city after growing up in Okinawa. His mock excitement and jokes about the Osaka accent wore thin on me pretty quickly, and the throng of 10,000 or so was similarly disinterested in the gigantic squash hopping around behind the pitcher’s mound extolling the virtues of the Eagles.
He told the fans to put their hands together for him as he was about to sing the Buffaloes’ fight song, and nary a fan clapped or made a noise. His Fan-o-Meter had run empty. In a panic, the PA announcer flipped on his microphone and begged the fans to show some support for the goya, and they responded with a lame round of applause.
The familiar strains of Orix’s song blasted through the speakers, and Goya began singing the words a little late and out of rhythm. At first, it seemed like a joke, but as the song continued and Goya fell further behind and more off the beat, I realized that the guy in the suit simply could not carry a tune or keep the beat.
Oh, was it painful to listen to! I don’t know if it stood out to others as much as it did to me, but nobody was laughing or enjoying themselves. I’m sure that 10,000 strong joined me in a silent prayer that the techies would hit the crossfader before the second verse kicked in.
The PA Announcer finally asked Goya to stop in a bit that could have been scripted, but Goya took it way too far with his “Hey, I was great, wasn’t I? Not a single mistake, eh?” shtick. At that point, I was so desperate to see him leave that I was actually looking forward to seeing the ceremonial first pitch.
Every pro game has a ceremonial first pitch, but they go about it in such strange fashion. The starting pitcher gets on the mound, throws one or two warmup pitches, and then the event staff interrupts him with the ceremonial first pitch. On Saturday, the ceremonial first pitch crew was ready to go but stood out there next to the mound until the starter had thrown a couple of warmup pitches.
The leadoff batter for the visiting team jumps in the box and is supposed to swing and miss at whatever the guest on the mound throws.
Of course, there are jokers out there who swing at the first pitch and make contact, and Tsuyoshi Shinjo has even said that he wants to park the first pitch some day.
The opposite happens on occasion, as when the batter in the 1964 All Star Game didn’t swing at the ceremonial first pitch because he was shooting the breeze with the catcher when it came floating in.
On Sunday, the man on the mound wound up and fired a fastball behind the Rakuten leadoff hitter’s back, and I understood it as retaliation for Saturday’s bevy of brushback pitches. The teams had thrown at each other all day, adding to the sluggish pace of the game.
Saturday’s final was 11-5 Rakuten, and there were well over 20 hits between the two teams. Pitchers couldn’t get their signs straight and couldn’t throw strikes, and we were only spared from reaching four hours by a few baserunning gaffes. The game was every bit as bad as the promotions that took place in its middle innings.
After the third inning, a weird-looking duck slash monster came roaring onto the field on a minibike from the left field gate, revving its tiny engine and waving to the fans. The PA announcer introduced him as “Karasuko,” and I didn’t catch the back story, but it was probably as silly as an enormous cucumber from Okinawa following a baseball team around Japan.
Karasuko stopped in dead center field and proceeded to do a couple of handsprings leading into a backflip, which he failed to pull off, landing on his belly. Dazed and possibly hurting, he made his way back to the bike but couldn’t start the thing. After trying in vain to kick-start the bike with his comically oversized foam shoes, he had no choice but to give up and push the bike off the field. An eternity passed before he gathered momentum on the thick carpet, and he waved a beleaguered goodbye as he reached the left field gate.
Given Saturday’s performance, I can understand the look on this guy’s face.
Unbelievably, Karasuko and Goya each made a second appearance on Sunday. This time Goya set up his pregame anthem by saying he would treat us to the Eagles’ fight song and acted surprised and angry when the Buffaloes’ song poured into the Dome. He missed the first line and I thought Orix’s event staff had gotten this one right, but no, he began to squawk again and it was every bit as excruciating as the day before.
They had to turn his microphone off to get him to exit the field on Sunday. Karasuko rode onto the field from left field again, but continued all the way to the right field gate and left his bike there. Then he ran back to center field and did a slightly better backflip before sprinting off the field to the quiet murmurs of an unenthusiastic crowd.
When an Orix player hits a home run, a staff member wielding a park mic goes through the crowd in search of someone who wants to try their hand at calling the home run like a TV announcer. They play back the image on the scoreboard and have the fan make the call in their own way. It’s a neat promo and they can usually get two fans in before the half-inning break is over.
On Sunday, they found a pretty college girl to do the first call and, much to our dismay, informed us that Goya would handle the second call. The person explaining the gimmick was not an Orix staff member well-versed in the intro but the Rakuten PA announcer. What in the world was HE doing in Osaka? If the Eagles are spending that kind of money on their promotions, I want to scout for them!
He took a little too long to explain the setup, and he had barely handed the microphone off to the college girl when the home run was on the screen and being hit in front of our eyes. The girl, perhaps shy, perhaps dense, looked at the screen, looked at the Rakuten announcer, and asked, “Is it time yet?” She stood there silent as Greg LaRocca’s colossal upper deck home run smacked into an empty seat without a voice to describe it.
The Rakuten guy grabbed the microphone from the girl and handed it to Goya, who proceeded to talk about how great the Eagles pitcher was all the way through the second playback of LaRocca’s home run. It was not funny at all, and we were left with one very unsatisfied and confused fan and 9,999 others who were not entertained.
As I said, Orix usually has some of the best promos in Japanese baseball, but they tanked on that weekend. It was extremely poor execution, and almost all at the hands of the visiting team’s personnel.
I had time to pay attention to all of this because I was watching two uninteresting starting pitchers for the third time and nobody threw strikes or put guys away after getting ahead in the count. It would have been nice if the rainwater storage facilities on the roof of the Dome exploded and washed the game out. At the very least, it would have been more exciting.
