While in Osaka I went to see the Hanshin Tigers beat Yokohama Baystars. The Tigers play at the Koshien Stadium:

This is where the high school baseball tournament I mentioned in an earlier post is played. The Tigers feature Kosuke Fukudome formerly of the Cubs. He didn’t really do much for the Cubs and was part of that awkward period when they had a number of good younger players but no stars to really kick the team into gear.

The game was notable for two reasons. First of all, every time a pitching change was made a little car came out to drop off the replacement pitcher. It then drove off around the aforementioned Fukudome (who looked rather non-plussed) and backed into the bullpen area.

The second thing was that there was a little boy with his two parents sat next to me. At the top of the 7th inning I came back from a wee break only for him to hand me a balloon. Everybody else had them as well. They had a plastic thing on the end to allow the air to escape slowly. It was apparent that everybody was going to release these balloons at in the 7th inning stretch. Here is a picture of me with said balloon:

During the top of the 7th inning everybody proceeded to inflate their balloons; however, the Baystars managed to get a man on base and gradually the balloons all started to deflate. On getting a strike away from the end of the inning everybody started to get excited and to blow up their balloons again only for the batter to work himself a walk. The balloons started to deflate again. It was all rather phallic. Anyhow, eventually during the 7th inning stretch a balloon song was sung at the end of which the following happened:

In the end the Tigers won and it was high fives all round with my new found friends.