My day started, however, with an unpleasant discovery. I'd been staying at Toyoko Inns on this trip which have a number of benefits - not the least of which is that they provide a free breakfast. Now, to be honest, what they provide for breakfast is somewhat inconsistent between different hotels and sometimes even at the same hotel but after spending some 27 nights in ten different hotels in five different cities between this trip and my 2019 one, I'd not had any issues finding something to eat at my hotel.
Until this morning.
I'm not a particularly picky eater (as you can probably tell by looking at my gut) but I'm not a big seafood fan and I'm really turned off by a fishy taste in my food. Unfortunately, the only thing that the hotel I was spending my last four days in offered for breakfast was rice cakes wrapped in seafood. I tried one that had some sort of pork filling and it was way too fishy tasting for me to be able to eat. So I downed a cup of coffee and a couple rolls and headed off for Tokyo Station with the intent of grabbing breakfast somewhere before too long.
My original plan had been to catch the Kodama No.711 Shinkansen heading west at a little before nine but I got to the Station early enough to get a seat on the train leaving a half hour earlier. That put me into Odawara, my first stop of the day, around 9 o'clock. Odawara is one of the gateways for travelers heading to Mt. Fuji and I caught my last glimpse of it on this trip from the train shortly before we arrived:
I was stopping in Odawara to go to the Mint Odawara card shop. The store didn't open until ten which gave me about an hour to walk over and check out Odawara Castle which is not far from the station.
On the way over, I stopped in a Lawson's and grabbed a late breakfast. I'd end up doing something similar on each of the last couple days of my trip.
I didn't realize that there was an entrance to the castle grounds not far from the station and I ended up walking a bit to get to one of the entrances on the east side of the grounds. This took more time but I got to see a little more of the grounds than I would have if I gone in on the north side. I crossed a bridge over the moat to get onto the grounds - the moat had a bunch of koi in it that I think were expecting me to feed them.
I walked around the grounds a little before climbing the stairs up to where the castle itself was:
If I'd had more time, I would have gone into the tower itself but I needed to catch the west bound Shinkansen at 11:05 and it was getting close to when the Mint store was going to open so I had to walk back towards the station. Luckily at this point I discovered the north entrance so my walk back wasn't anywhere near as long the walk from the station had been. As it turned out, I didn't spend quite as much time at the store as I expected so I might have had time to do the tower also. Something to think about for my next trip.
I spent probably a few more minutes at Mint Odawara than I might have otherwise because it was the last card shop that I expected to do much set building at. I kept staring at boxes, trying to will singles from sets I was trying to complete in existence. No complaints about the store - it was just that at this point, I had pretty much found all the stuff on my want list that I was going to find on this trip.
I caught the 11:05 train as expected - all of my travel this day was using unreserved seats, by the way - and was on my way to my next stop - Shizuoka.
You'll frequently hear people say that there's only four stadiums that Babe Ruth played in that are still in use by professional baseball teams - Fenway Park and Wrigley Field in the US and Jingu and Koshien Stadiums in Japan. Due to NPB's expansion of their farm leagues, there's now a fifth one - Kusanagi Baseball Field in Shizuoka, home of the expansion Kufu Hayate Ventures of NPB's Western League. It's actually just one of several home fields for the team.
The ballpark opened in 1931 and played host to one of the most famous games from the 1934 MLB Tour of Japan - the game in which 17 year old Eiji Sawamura took a no-hitter into the fifth inning while striking out Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx in succession at one point. Gehrig homered off of Sawamura late in the game for the only run in the MLB team’s 1-0 victory - it was the closest the Japanese All Stars came to winning on the entire tour. The ballpark is used for baseball at all levels - high school, college, industrial leagues as well as NPB "country side" games - but I don't think a team regularly called the ballpark home until Hayate came around this year.
I had stopped off here in 2019 to see the statues of Sawamura and Ruth that were erected outside it in the early 1990's but I was interested in seeing a game here if I could. I was pleased that not only was Hayate home but they were playing at this particular field. Up to this point in the season, most of their games had been played at Shimizu Ibara Stadium in Shizuoka which was a few miles away and not particularly convenient to the trains - the team actually runs a shuttle bus from the JR Shimizu station to and from the ballpark. From what I can tell now looking at their schedule, this was the last of only six games the team played at Kusanagi this season.
I had been a little concerned about the weather and had been messaging Deanna the day before to see what other options I had for seeing a game. There was some collegiate games for the Tohto League being played at Jingu Stadium and a corporate league tournament going on at Ota Stadium just north of Haneda Airport. I had also considered going all the way to Nagoya to try to see the Dragons ni-gun team again but Deanna pointed out if the weather was going to an issue in Shizuoka, it probably would be a problem in Nagoya too (and I discovered that I had misread the schedule - the Dragons were actually playing in Kyushu!). As it turned out, the weather was overcast but there was no rain and the game in Shizuoka was on.
I got into Shizuoka around 11:45 - about a 40 minute trip from Odawara - and headed for the ballpark. As was the case in 2019, I needed to catch a light rail train out of the Shin-Shizuoka Cenova Mall a few blocks north of the station. What was different this time is I realized that I could descend to a mall under the streets just outside the station and get there a little faster than being on the surface. I popped back above ground just a block or two away from the mall and was on the light rail pretty quickly after that. The ride to the stop near the ballpark - the imaginatively named Prefecture Sports Park station - only took about ten minutes. I wasn't the only one going to the game so I followed the crowd to the ballpark - it's a short walk through a nearby underpass.
I had to wait in a short line to buy my ticket outside the ballpark - I got a general admission ticket for 1500 yen. There were some food trucks set up outside the ballpark and - since I didn't know if there was food for sale inside the park - I bought some fried chicken, french fries and a soda from one of them.
I also took a quick picture of the Sawamura and Ruth statues:
Once inside the ballpark, there were a couple tables set up with a bunch of Hayate merchandise. I briefly looked at it to see if the team had issued baseball cards but, as I expected, they had not. I didn't see anything else that I was interested in picking up.
I've got to say that the game itself was a bit of a snoozer. The Tigers scored a run in the top of the fourth and I have absolutely no memory of how they did it. That would be the only run in the entire game and the Tigers won 1-0. Oddly enough, this was the third and last time I saw the Tigers on this trip - both of the other games involved the top team, not the farm team - and the Tigers won all three games by the score of 1-0.
I still had a good time at the ballpark even though the game was dull. I moved around several times during the game and took a ton of photos. Here's some of them:
You may have noticed there's a section of seats below field level on both the first and third base sides. I'm not sure how it worked but you needed a special ticket to sit in that section on the first base side which probably explains why there's almost no one sitting in it.
I was surprised and amused when I returned home and discovered that I had inadvertently taken a picture of the ballpark that was similar to the one Wayne Graczyk had used on the cover of the 1979 edition of his "Japan Pro Baseball Fan Handbook". He'd taken his photo at the final game of the Cincinnati Reds' 1978 tour of Japan on November 21st of that year:
The bullpens were located in the outfield corners. I was amused to see that the players came out of the bullpen to watch the game from the last few seats in the sunken seats. On the third base side this meant that some of the Hanshin fans could sit very close to the Tigers pitchers. Since the first base section was more restricted due to needing the special ticket, the Hayate pitchers didn't have any fans particularly close to them>
The Tigers' starter that day was a familiar name - Haruto Takahashi. I had seen Takahashi beat the Giants at Koshien back in 2019 but I hadn't been tracking his career much since then. He'd missed the 2022 season due to Tommy John surgery and 2023 due to shoulder injuries. He had been released by the team last year and re-signed to a development player contract (which is why he has a three digit number on his uniform):
Takahashi pitched three innings in the game while striking out four. He'd be registered to the Tigers' 70 man roster two months later and would be back with the ichi-gun team a month later, shutting out the Carp over five innings in his first game at the top level in three years.
Takahashi wasn't the only familiar player on the Tigers roster. I had completely forgotten that Teruaki Sato had been demoted to the farm team so I was surprised to see him here. He went 0-3 with two strikeouts and a hit-by-pitch. I took a bunch of photos of him:
The game ended a little after 3:30 and I retraced my steps back to Shizuoka Station. I got back there in time to grab an unreserved seat on the Shinkansen heading back to Tokyo at about 4:40. The unreserved car I was in had a lot of people in it when I got on and got progressively more crowded during the hour-long trip. At one point a group of foreign tourists got on board and had to take whatever seats they could find which left one woman not real happy to have to sit next to a sweaty, over-weight American. She left as soon as another seat became available which made both of us happier.
Once back in Tokyo, I headed for a restaurant that I had visited on the last night of my 2013 trip. I'd had a really good meal there then but I was kind of disappointed in the meal I got on this visit - enough so that I'm not going to mention the restaurant by name. Afterwards, I headed back to my hotel but I made a stop on the way to a place I had learned about since my last trip - Nihonbashi bridge.
The original bridge over the Nihonbashi river was build in the 1600's although the current bridge only dates from 1911. Traditionally this was the location that all distances from Tokyo were measured from. It used to be possible to see Mt. Fuji from the bridge but a highway overpass was built over the bridge as part of the "improvements" to prepare Tokyo to host the 1964 Olympics. The overpass is being replaced by a tunnel but the project won't be completed until 2041.
I took a bunch of photos but I'm not entirely sure what everything was. It probably would have been more interesting in full daylight - it was getting dark by the time I got over there. I think this marker is where the measurements were made from - it used to be in the center of the bridge but it's on display off to the side on the north side of the bridge now:
Here's some of the stuff on the bridge itself:
I got to see this for the first time here as well:
Ryan explained this to me when we saw another group like this a few days later - apparently dressing in costumes and riding around on go-karts is a thing that tourists are doing in Tokyo. This is really something I have no interest in doing.
My hotel was just a few blocks from Nihonbashi so it wasn't long after this that I was back in my room. I only had two days left in my trip and while I'd wouldn't be taking any more Shinkansen rides, I'd still be traveling outside of Tokyo.
