Japanese Baseball

There is a heck of a lot I could write about baseball in Japan. As anyone who knows anything about baseball knows, the Japanese love America's past time. It seems that it is a law here that citizens must be fans of Matsui and Ichiro. I swear, every time I'm at the gym one of the five stations on TV has either a profile on Matsui or Ichiro or at least two commercials with them in a span of ten minutes. But that isn't the point of this entry.

It is baseball playoffs in America as well as here in Japan. One big difference between the two playoff systems is that in Japan, the conference champion is spotted a 1-0 lead in the conference championship series. To put this in American terms: The Yankees would have been up one game on the Angels before the first pitch in the first game. That would have meant the series would have ended when the Yankees won their third game in Anaheim and thus wouldn't have won the series in the Bronx. To me, I don't like this idea. It makes it extremely hard for an underdog to win a series since they already start in a hole -- and as anyone who knows which sports teams I like, my teams are almost always the underdogs.