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Our Day at Chiba Marine Stadium: The Prequel

July 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The point of this post is really just to start an open thread and give our readers a chance to offer some input while it’ll still really make a difference.

Like Michael Westbay of Japanese Baseball.com and Deanna of Marinerds, etc. before us, we here at the Tsubamegun have been invited to spend a day at Chiba Marine Stadium. Tomorrow.

In addition to a tour, watching practice, and taking in the game, we’re slated to conduct brief audio interviews with Marketing Director Larry Rocca, as well as some of the Marines’ foreign players and coaches, including the big man himself, Bobby Valentine.

If you have any cracking good ideas for questions we should ask, now would be the time to let us know – just leave a comment below. (And we’re not interested in the Mets. Thanks anyway.)

If you come up with a good question that we wind up using in an interview (which will be released as a podcast on TPR), we’ll get in touch with you and send you something (kind of) nice as a thank you gift.

Thanks. We look forward to seeing what you come up with.

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  • David C

    Question 1: Bobby, may I call you Bobby? What’s the average IQ of your foreign players? I heard they were having trouble counting to 10.

    Question 2: So Booby, why aren’t there any women on the team? In the UK, so I’ve heard, baseball is similar to rounders, a girls’ game.

  • http://www.transpacificradio.com/ Garrett DeOrio

    I don’t know if those questions will really get us in good with the club, but thanks for the input anyway, David.

  • Jeremy from New Jersey

    Yo Bobbie… big fan of yours from New Jersey! Before Matsuzaka left for the U.S. you mentioned in an interview that he may have arm trouble due to his delivery. His motion was finished and then his arm swung around putting a lot of stress on it. Do you think he will continue to have problems with his arm due to this reason? How would you change his motion?

    Good luck on the rest of the season and I hope to see you managing the Yanks someday.

    Regards,

    J from NJ

  • http://r-f-d.blogspot.com Dan

    Valentine has a reputation for being fairly progressive with regards to statistical analysis. I’d follow up on your discussion of sacrifice bunting with some questions. How does he make in-game decisions – individual stat cards like Earl Weaver used to have, his impressions, who’s “hot,” etc.?

  • http://www.transpacificradio.com/ Garrett DeOrio

    I like it, Dan. That could be juicy.

    By the way, I like your blog, too. Thanks for stopping by.

  • http://marinerds.blogspot.com Deanna

    Oh, good for you guys. Larry is a great guy (and so is Bobby of course!) and you will definitely enjoy seeing all the stuff at Chiba Marine Stadium and will probably even be pleasantly surprised by a lot of the renovations they’ve done. And Bobby Burgers are still available in the Lotteria there, too!

    You could ask Bobby about his younger pitchers, like Ohmine and Karakawa, but he might talk your ear off about how awesome they are. And tomorrow you get to see Yuta Ohmine pitch against Ramon Ortiz. I dare you to ask Ortiz about his mad haircutting skillz :)

  • http://www.transpacificradio.com/ Garrett DeOrio

    Good idea, Deanna. We should get some of those picnic tables and have a yakyu blogger confab or something like that sometime this summer.

    And next year during interleague play, of course.

  • http://jhockey.wordpress.com/ simoncurrie

    Wow cool, have fun and get some neat stories!

    I’m not dedicated enough to my blog or baseball (or to hockey either actually, my interests may be wide in breadth but often shallow), not sure what I’d do if I was offered to spend a day at Marine Stadium being part of the “media”.

  • http://www.japaneconomynews.com/ Ken

    Jeremy,

    Do you think even Bobby could help the Yankees?

  • http://www.npbtracker.com npbtracker

    Must say I’m jealous of you guys. :) If I were there, I’d ask if Bobby would have Barry Bonds on his team (nudge to the post I just wrote).

    btw, I like your blog a lot. This is this the first time I’m commenting but I read all the time.

  • Jeremy

    dude, we’ll take help from anybody! Maybe he can replace Hal.

  • http://www.transpacificradio.com/ Garrett DeOrio

    Well, it’s now the day after and we had a ball yesterday. We’ll get a post up soon with some photos and a rundown of what happened. Audio will come a bit later, once we edit everything together and send a copy to the club.

    Basically, Larry Rocca showed us around and we interviewed Benny Agbayani, Jose Ortiz, Brian Sikorski (I thought Chris was going to cry, he was so excited – Sikorski’s still popular in the Tsubamegun), and Bobby Valentine – all were much nicer, friendlier, and more accomodating than they needed to be and we highly recommend the Marines for all your Pacific League needs.

    Hours after the game, as our buddy Ken and I were having a tipple or three, Ken looked up every once in a while, smiled, and said, “Dude, we met Bobby Valentine today. That’s pretty cool.”

    It was that kind of day.