The Eagles Have Landed.

The season has pretty much finished and Rob & I caught the last regular season game of the year, apart from a few rain-delay games. They played arch-rivals Softbank Hawks tonight, who were playing for First place in their division. The Rakuten Eagles have been out of it since August, not their best season at all.

Regardless, we got to see the Eagles win 8-3 including 2 home runs landing about 40 feet to either side of us. Here are some highlights of the game (sort of.)

But the real highlight of the evening was the denouement when the Hawks were presented with their First place trophy. Only a handful of people had left and the entire stadium (15,000 strong) gave a 20-minute standing ovation and cheer for their opponent cheering on their rivals as they enter the playoffs. This kind of respect is something that is never seen across the pond. Astounding end to the evening. 

Here are some pics of my absolute favourite part of the game, the releasing of the blown up condoms!
Scratch that: Stupid blogger is giving me a hard time downloading pics right now, so I'll add them tomorrow. I'm too sleepy to bother with it tonight! Oh, it seems to be working again. Here are the pics...
Nope. Scratch that again. Still having a hard time uploading MY pics. Trying to resolve. Getting a stupid "server rejected" message. Trying to resolve. Did some research, I had to switch to my infrequently used Mozilla to upload them but it seems to have worked!
SO: Here are some pics of my absolute favourite part of the game, the releasing of the blown up condoms!

Finally, I picked up a couple of really cheap souvenirs for 100 yen a pop (regularly 7X that much). A couple of mechanical pencils and an eraser of pitcher, Hisashi.
Update: I found an article on the game with more info and a better picture of the Hawks.