Foreign Dreams vs. Japan Dreams

The starting lineups for the Charity Dream Game on White Day (March 14) have been announced.

For the Japan Dreams:

1 CF Akahoshi Norihiro (Hanshin)
2 2B Ibata Hirokazu (Chunichi)
3 DH Matsunaka Nobuhiko (Softbank)
4 1B /players/player.jsp?PlayerID=5">Kiyohara Kazuhiro (Giants)
5 C Johjima Kenji (Softbank)
6 3B Iwamura Akinori (Yakult)
7 RF Shima Shigenobu (Hiroshima)
8 LF Tani Yoshitomo (Orix)
9 SS Nakajima Hiroyuki (Seibu)
- P Takahashi Hisanori (Giants)

For the Foreign Dreams:

1 LF Benny Agbayani (Lotte)
2 3B Tony Batista (Softbank)
3 CF Tuffy Rhodes (Giants)
4 DH Tyrone Woods (Chunichi)
5 1B Alex Cabrera (Seibu)
6 2B Greg LaRocca (Hiroshima)
7 RF Alex Ochoa (Chunichi)
8 SS Eric Almonte (Nippon Ham)
9 C Satozaki Tomoya (Lotte)
- P Chih-Chia Chang (Seibu)

As mentioned above, the game will be held at Tokyo Dome and proceeds will go to helping the survivors of Typhoon #23 and subsequent earthquakes that hit Niigata last October and the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean. Special uniforms (tops) will be worn and go on auction at both Rakuten and Yahoo! (Softbank owns Yahoo! Japan) after the game to raise additional money for the disaster relief fund.

I'll be covering the play-by-play via Internet radio here. The game will be replayed (if all goes well, this is new territory) a number of times thereafter.

After some experiments with a MS Windows guiny pig (user), I've decided to stick with MP3 streams instead of Ogg streams. MP3 doesn't require any additional codec downloads and/or installation. I was also unable to get Ogg to play with iTunes on OS X (10.2.8) by default. It appears that Ogg is only available by default on media players for Linux and the *BSDs.

I hope a few of you can tune in.

The Japan Dreams defeating the Foreign Dreams by a score of 5-3. It was a very good game, fast paced, and with a number of great plays, especially by Kosaka and Kawasaki.

You can download the entire 2 1/2 hour game in MP3 format here (52 17MB). Hopefully your media player will play it while it's downloading. As an alternative, you may tune in to streaming reruns of the broadcast available here entitled 20050314live CharityDreamGame. The reruns will restart every four hours, starting at 0:00, 4:00, 8:00, 12:00, 16:00, and 20:00 JST Reruns will be broadcast continuously every day for the time being. I'm not sure how long I'll keep them going.

This was my first attempt at broadcasting. It is not a professional job. I hope to improve with time. And I would appriciate any constructive critiques toward that goal.

[Updated on Mar 16, 2005 1:17 PM JST]

[Updated on Mar 27, 2005 10:16 PM JST with reduced audio file size.]

Michael,

I was one of the listeners to your "historic" first broadcast. Personally, I found it much more enjoyable than reading the typed-up ones you usually do.

I realize that this was your first broadcast but I found that you paused a bit too long in many places - to the extent that I began to wonder whether you were still on air. When I have listened to cricket commentators in New Zealand they have managed to keep up a constant stream of info. But then they have all been doing it for years and this was your first go.

Otherwise, the broadcast was better than being there! I am looking forward to your next broadcast and hope that other Pro Yakyu fans will take the chance to hear the Commish live!

Dewa mata (Japanese for "See you later").

Simon A. Timms