My first Baseball experience

My first Baseball batting and M-chan batting

The pitcher and Our Baseball Group

Recently, I had an opportunity to try playing baseball, a new sport in my repertoires of sports. To play baseball was a fascination that I eagerly awaited since I arrived in Japan. In fact, I knew little of the game before coming to Japan and always thought of it as a variant of cricket in this part of the world. In the initial days I never bothered to know it seriously until a friend from Cuba, another nation hugely popular in baseball apart from Japan and US, explained the rules of the game. Baseball, as a game is so popular in Japan as is cricket in India. Though the game tools are similar to cricket (bat&ball), the rules of the game are quite different. Unlike in cricket where the bat is flat, baseball bat is a cylindrical stick which is swung horizontally to a fully tossed ball. A batter should however, not only make contact to the ball but also has to hit in the right direction to score runs. Look here for more rules. My first experience of playing it was quite good. A baseball game was organized as a send-off event to one of our lab member. It was good fun as we had included even the kids of a member of the lab staff. I was glad to make the opening score for my team.