Spring Koshien Day 10: Underdog win

Another short one because of work, although I had enough time to welcome spring to Cologne this morning with a short walk through the neighbourhood. Only a few minutes away is the Japanese Cultural Institute in front of which there are a lot of cherry blossom trees.

Spring Koshien Day 9: Best 8, Hotoku and Seiho come through

Just a short one today since my holiday is over. From today on there will only be two games each day as the tournament enters its final stages.

Spring Koshien Day 8: Surf’s up for Narashino, Rifu advance

The last day with three games on one day and we are getting closer and closer to the final rounds of the tournament. I am still completely astonished by yesterday’s stellar performance of PL Gakuen’s Nakano. And because of that I forgot to inculde the link to the wonderful inning-by-inning reports of Goro Shigeno. He’s doing a great job keeping all of us up-to-date it’s almost as if you are listening to a radio broadcast.

Spring Koshien Day 7: Close calls

Three games which all ended with a one run lead, now that’s what I call exciting. And it gets even better when in one game one pitcher delivers a wonderful performance only to lose the game in extra innings. As a character in “H2″ said it absolutely right: “Let me show you the benefits of a game without a time limit”.

The Knuckleball Princess strikes out her first victim

I believe ever since women and men started competing in the same sports there has always been talk about how women would fare against male opponents. This led to such strange suggestions that women football players such as German international Birgit Prinz should sign a contract with a male football team.  While that will be impossible because of the deficits women have when they play against male competition, a young japanese girl is competing against men in an independent league in the south of Japan.

Spring Koshien Day 6: The Last 16 round is complete

When watching the repeat broadcast on the MBS site the most annoying thing to me at the moment ist the commercial for the new “Full Metal Alchemist” movie at the end of each half inning. I really loved the series when it came out a few years ago, but this is getting on my nerves quite a bit. Well, it’s just that, so it shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Good news for the semifinals and the final game as the MBS site announces that there will be live coverage for those three games for free. Unfortunately that won’t make a difference to me as those games will start in the middle of the night over here.

Team Germany at the next WBC in four years?

According to this article in the New York Times Blog “Bats” the MLB plans to expand the number of participating countries for the next WBC in 2013. And to my surprise one name on the list was Germany.

Spring Koshien Day 5: Narashino beats out Hikone in a very close game

I know I have been a little sloppy over the past few days and I sincerly apologize for that. Part of that had to do with a flu that got me right for the start of my holidays which began on Monday, so I was lying in bed most of the time. The other part is that it took me until yesterday evening to figure out how the MBS website worked this year around (just click the inning and that’s it. Duh!). Yup, that’s how dumb I was. I tend to but all the blame on my illness, but I guess I was just blind.

WBC Final: Japan once again!

Well, so many people have been raving about this game (1, 2, 3) I guess I should throw in my own two cents (although I wasn’t able to watch it at all because of the time difference). That was one of the biggest annoyances to me, by the way. Why did those games have to take place at the west coast? I know the answer (the time zone is closer to Asia), right, but that made it impossible for me to watch any of the 2nd round games there.

Spring Koshien Day 1: What a start!!

Finally just right for the start of this year’s spring tournament at Koshien Stadium the fresh air of spring time came to Cologne at last. And not a day to soon. There wasn’t any way for me to watch any of today’s games and I am still not quite sure whether there is a live stream link on the MBS site or not. But I believe I missed out on a great start to the tournament.