Trip Overview Part 6 - Day 8 - Koshien

My main agenda for Saturday, May 18th, involved one place - Koshien Stadium, the home of the Hanshin Tigers.  Koshien is the oldest ballpark still in use in Japan, having opened on August 1st, 1924, and predates the Tigers by over ten years.  It was built for the annual national high school baseball tournament which had started in 1915 and had become popular enough that it outgrew the smaller ballparks used for the first several tournaments.

I had tickets for the Tigers game against the Swallows at 1400 that afternoon but I was heading over much earlier than that.  The Koshien History Museum, located beyond the left field stands outside the ballpark, offers tours of the Stadium and I was going to do two of them.  My first tour was at 0920 so I was aiming at getting over to the ballpark by around 9.  

I caught the subway near my hotel for the short trip to Hanshin Umeda station to catch the train to the ballpark.  

I was pretty sure that I found the right train:

It's about a 20 minute ride from Umeda to the Koshien stop.  You exit the station onto a large plaza with a straight shot directly to the ballpark:

One of the odd things about the ballpark is that there's a highway that passes overhead right in in front of it.  You need to walk underneath the expressway to get to the stadium.  It's kind of amazing how close the road is to the ballpark:

It was odd when I went to a Tigers farm team game at Koshien back in 2019 - there weren't many people at the game and there wasn't a cheering section so it was quiet enough in the ballpark that I could here the traffic on the expressway outside.

I walked around the left side of the stadium to the museum.  When I had been here in 2019, the museum was built into the stadium itself.  It's now split into two parts - part of it is still inside the stadium but the rest of it (including the admission desk) is in a building across the street that is connected to the ballpark by an elevated walkway (and this is a terrible picture but I didn't get a better one showing where the museum is):

 I waited in line for a few minutes before it was my turn.  I had already paid for the tours but I had a QR code from my confirmation email that they needed to scan to issue my tickets.  The tickets themselves were pretty attractive.  This is the one for the first tour I was doing:

The ticket shows Yuki Saitoh striking out Masahiro Tanaka (I think) to win the 2006 Koshien Tournament for Waseda.  Here's the ticket for the 1100 tour - it shows manager Senichi Hoshino celebrating the Tigers clinching the pennant in 2003:

While getting my tickets, the attendant asked to verify the country I was from.  It turns out that guests from America get a special gift - a Koshien clear file:

It came in handy to hold a bunch of brochures and flyers I picked up through the course of the day.

The meeting place for everyone on the tour was inside of Gate 16 at the ballpark.  I made my way over and lined up with the rest of the group:

I was the only Westerner on the tour but I think there was someone from another Asian country.  The tour guide came over to both of us and made sure that we had the webpage for the tour in our native language available on our phones.

I should explain which of the several available tours I was doing.  This particular one was called "S3" and would visit the third base dugout, the third base bullpen (viewed from above) and the interview space under the stands.  If you follow the link above, we saw items 4, 5, 8 and 10 (although not in that order - it was more like 4, 8, 5, 10) - note that items 1, 2 and 3 were preliminary things that our tour guide went over before we left Gate 16.

Our guide led us back outside the stadium and down towards the infield seating section.  We came back into the ballpark and wormed our way through some hallways before emerging into the seating section and coming down to the field.  She led us onto the field and over to the third base dugout (which I'm pretty sure is the visitor's one).  We got to spend about 15 minutes milling about in and out of the dugout.

As you can imagine, I took about a billion photos.  I'll just share a few of them here:

Our guide then led us through foul territory towards the third base "Alps" seats (so named because of the steep grade of the seating bowl).  On the way, I caught sight of Makoto Imaoka, former Tigers player and now a coach for the team, working out in the outfield:

Of course I took some more photos of the ballpark as we climbed up into the seating bowl:

We went back under the stands to a hallway where there were a couple food stands on the one side and a set of windows with metal shutters on the other.  To be honest, I don't think I would have even noticed the shuttered windows if I had just been walking by during a game.  The guide pressed a button which opened the shutters, revealing a view of the third base bullpen from above:

She had a couple large photos that she held up while talking about the bullpen.  You can see the images at the tour's website.  The first one showed that this bullpen's space had at one time been used for an indoor swimming pool while the second one showed that the first base bullpen space had been used as a gymnasium for judo, kendo and basketball.

The last stop on the tour was the interview room in the bowels of the ballpark.  They asked us not to take pictures of any celebrities we might come across as we made our way there but I couldn't resist taking this photo of Randy Bass:

We all lined up and got our pictures taken in front of the screen that you see for all the Tigers' post-game hero interviews:

Once we all had our photos, our guide led us back out of the ballpark for the end of the tour.  The next tour I was doing was at 1100 so I had 45 minutes or so to kill.  I went into one of the Tigers' stores, looking for souvenirs for the ballpark.  I ended up settling for a keychain.

I decided to go to the portion of the museum that was inside the ballpark.  This section of the museum was pretty much dedicated to the high school tournament.  I had seen a lot of this on my previous visit to the museum so I kind of walked through it quickly.  What I was more interested in was the one thing I wasn't able to do in 2019 - the Back Screen View.  This is an area where you're able to go into the stadium under the scoreboard in center:

After leaving the museum, it was back to Gate 16 for the 1100 tour.  This wasn't really a tour so much as our group was simply going to be going into the stands to watch the Tigers take batting practice.  I got the same guide as I'd had for the earlier tour which amused both of us.  She again led us back out of the stadium but this time she took us all the way to the entrance behind home plate.  We went back inside and up the stairs to the main concourse and then out to the seating bowl:

The whole group of us were led to seats behind home plate.  The guide and the other attendants passed out sheets with the Tigers' roster on it so we could identify who was batting:

I don't know everyone that I saw batting but I do know I saw Ryo Watanabe (#25), Ukyo Maegawa (#58) and Fumihito Haraguchi (#94).  I'm not sure I'd do this tour again but it was nice to be able to sit in the shade and just enjoy being in the ballpark.  The view was excellent:

The Museum offers another batting practice "tour" that includes commentary from an OB Tigers player.  Since I figured I wouldn't understand it, I decided not to pay the extra 500 yen for it.  The group doing that tour the morning I was there was sitting over behind the Tigers' dugout on the first base side:

If I translated the sign at the Museum desk correctly, the OB Tigers player that particular day was Shunsuke Fujikawa (aka "Shunsuke") who had a twelve year career with Hanshin from 2010 to 2021:

We watched batting practice for about a half hour before our guide led us back out of the ballpark.  The gates were going to open for the game at noon so we needed to clear out.  

There were a lot of people outside the ballpark getting ready to go in.  I kind of followed the crowd around the right side of the ballpark past the "Memorial Wall" with plaques for the three players who have had their numbers retired by the Tigers - #23 for Yoshio Yoshida, #11 for Minoru Murayama and #10 for Fumio Fujimura:

There was also a big monument for the ballpark's 100th Anniversary:

I bought a bento box for lunch and ate it while sitting in "Mizuno Square", a small patio-like area surrounded by various monuments:

I made a kind of major mistake at this point.  I had finished eating right around noon and decided that I should go ahead and go into the ballpark - roughly two hours before the game started.  

Let me explain why this was a bad idea.  I had gotten my tickets for almost all the NPB games I went to through JapanBall Tickets (which has unfortunately had to shut down last month after running afoul of a prohibition on reselling tickets) and the only seat they were able to find for me for this day's game was in the Swallows cheering section in the left field stands.  Which would have been fine for a night game but for a day game, it put me in the sun on a hot day for roughly five hours.  I would have been a lot better off if I'd killed some time going back to the museum - I never did see the Tigers exhibits in the new building so I missed out on seeing the 2023 Nippon Series championship flag.

I also made a mistake on how I got to my seat.  I was in row 48, about four rows from the top of the ballpark.  I came out into the seating bowl at field level, which meant I had to climb up all 48 rows to get to my seat.  And those rows were steep!  These seats weren't officially the "Alps" but I think these seats have a similar grade as those seats.  Had I realized where I was, I could have taken stairs under the stands that would have been a lot easier on me.  But the view was pretty impressive:

I eventually went under the stands for a while to get out of the sun for a bit.  I got some Dipping Dots ice cream (in a Tigers helmet bowl) to cool off some.  By the time I went back to my seat, the crowd had filled in some.

I took a photo of the scoreboard - you can see poeple in the Back Screen View area from the museum.  I'm pretty sure it's closed during the game:

As you'd expect since JapanBall had had difficulty getting seats, there was huge crowd at the game.  The official attendance was 42,600 which was the biggest crowd for any game I went to on the trip.

The game itself was kind of anti-climactic by the time it finally got started.  It was Jeremy Beasley on the mound for the Tigers and Miguel Yajure pitching for the Swallows.  Both pitchers had pretty good days.  Beasley only went five innings but he struck out seven and didn't give up any runs.  Yajure pitched into the seventh and only gave up one run.  But that one run was enough for the Tigers that day.  Beasley and four Hanshin relievers held the Swallows to just three hits while striking out 11 batters.  The Tigers only had four hits but one of them was an RBI knock by Yusuke Ohyama and that made the difference in the Tigers 1-0 victory.  Here are the game highlights:

This was the second time I'd seen the Tigers on this trip and the second time they had won by a 1-0 score.  

The one bright spot for me with the Swallows was getting to see Tetsuto Yamada bat.  He'd been hurt when I got to Japan so he wasn't in the Swallows game I went to at Jingu earlier that week.  He batted late in the game but unfortunately he struck out.

I had bought a cheer towel for him earlier in the game to drape over the back of my neck so it was fun being able to wave it while he batted.

I had originally had plans to go to either Kokoyakyu Machonochi Memorial Park (the site of the first ever National High School Championship in 1915) or the site of Fujidera Stadium (or both) after the game but after spending eight hours at Koshien and baking in the sun for most of the last five, I was pretty much done for the day.  I followed the crowd back to the station and caught a packed train back to Umeda station.  I grabbed dinner at a CoCo Ichibanya restaurant over by Hankyu Sanbangai Mall and then headed back to my hotel to crash.  I did some packing up that evening though, as I'd be on the road again the next morning.