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For those who don't know, Chiba Marine Stadium is located right next to Tokyo Bay. After six innings in Game 1, the Marines were leading 5-1 over the Hanshin Tigers. Then the fog rolled in off the bay. The Marines scored 5 runs in the bottom of the seventh, including home runs from both Benny Agbayani and Tomoya Satozaki. I may not be remembering this correctly anymore, but I think that the outfielders were having difficulty locating the balls hit into the fog. The umpires ended up calling the game after seven innings (not sure if they actually played the entire bottom of the seventh or not), so the Marines ended up with a 10-1 victory. They scored 10 runs again in Games 2 and 3, then squeaked out a 3-2 win in Game 4 for the sweep.
Since BBM's Nippon Series sets always feature pictures from the actual games, a couple of the cards show the fog. Notably the cards for Benny Agbayani (#25) and the MVP card for Toshiaki Imae (#55):
But the best picture from the set was actually on the back of the box, showing the umpires conferring in the fog:
The weather forecast for Chiba this week does not include fog, so there shouldn't be a repeat this year.
4 comments:
After the Giants won and Meulens earned his WS ring (albeit as a coach), I was wondering if anywhere there was a list of players who had won championships in both MLB and NPB? Hideki Matsui comes to mind, but I figure there are bound to be others.
Hmm, interesting question. So Taguchi comes to mind along with Matsui (who I'm pretty sure is the only guy to be MVP of both the Nippon Series and the World Series). Have to do a little research if I can find the time. I'm sure there's a bunch of others.
After thinking about for a few more minutes (and poking around on Baseball Reference), I also came up with Tadahito Iguchi, Hideko Okajima and Daisuke Matsuzaka.
I suspect the gaijin list is going to be harder to come up with...
Obviously, I meant HidekI Okajima...
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