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Fan Appreciation Day Tomorrow

November 22, 2010 by 3 Comments

The Swallows plan to hold their annual Fan Appreciation Day at Jingu Stadium tomorrow. The team, and its various sponsors, have various events planned for the day. If you have the day off tomorrow for Labour Day, Fan Appreciation Day might be worth your time.

The day will start at 9:00 when the Jingu field will be opened for fans. You’ll have a chance to walk on the field and also sign up for 2011 Fan Club membership. For those of you looking for Swwallows swag, the team will have various items for sale, including Swallows fukubukuros. More booths will open up at 10:00, mostly for sponsors shilling their wares. 10:00 will also be the start of the Tokyo Mascot Collection event, in which Tsubakuro will be joined by 15 other mascots that represent everything from Tokyo Tower to Hino Cable television.

The players will join the festivities at 11:00 with a short opening address. After that, players will man various booths, and you’ll also have the opportunity to play catch with select players. Keiichi Matsuoka and Kyohei Muranaka’s family business, will also have booths selling their wares. The field will be cleared off at 12:30 in preparation for the main event which will begin at 13:00.

The Main event will be a show on the field that will most likely feature some field day activities like tug-of-war and some cross-dressing karaoke. For Americans from the South, imagine high school football pep rallies with professional ball players. The actual details of the events are sketchy, but should be a good time for all ages. For reference witness Genki Nitta, Rafael Fernandes, and Koji Tsukamoto glaming it up at last year’s Fan Appreciation Day.

The events will end at 15:00 giving you plenty of time to celebrate Labour Day. The event will continue under light rain conditions, but will be canceled under heavy rain. The determination of whether to cancel the event will be made around 7:00 tomorrow morning. Check the Swallows website, or our Twitter feed for any news on the events’ cancellation. If you plan to walk on the field do not go wearing high heels, and if you plan on playing some catch bring a glove.

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About Kozo

Kozo Ota is a third-generation Swallows fan that grew up on Montreal Expos baseball. When he's not at Jingu, he works as a freelance translator/interpreter to make enough money to go to Jingu.

  • Mac

    Was lots of fun. However, Fukubukuro was not as good as last year’s. Shook hands with a few players, got on the pitch, signed up for fan club and got the free rucksack and micro kasa. Sum total of the day was really the acquisition of significant quantities of Swallows merchandise to go with my existing ridiculously large quantities of Swallows merchandise.

  • http://marinerds.blogspot.com Deanna

    It was lame that there was no signkai this year. I guess I was there late, so I have no real excuse, but still. My favorite part was Keizo Kawashima dressed up as a beer boy trying to “hide” in the stands. Yoshinori got stuck in drag again this year, too…

    Oh yeah, and the guest appearance by Shingo Kawabata’s sister was cute too, in their nanshiki baseball game. She hit a pop fly out and Keizo caught it… then was told “no, you dummy, you were supposed to DROP it!” So he did. Two batters later, the entire team swarmed Takagi for some reason and undressed him and left him on the field in just his shorts. Ikeyama also pinch-hit a bit later. It was pretty bizarre.

    • Kozo

      Video of the Takagi undressing is already up on Youtube.