Women's Pro Baseball

Last Saturday we had planned to go to women's professional baseball game. That's right, women's baseball. We had never seen women's baseball, so we were intrigued, plus I like supporting women's pro sports when I can, so we decided to go.
The Girls Professional Baseball League was started last year, and consists of two teams. That's right, they just play each other all summer long. Chelsey thinks that would be terrible and just feel like practice. They did at least go with the Japanese penchant for somewhat bizarre English names, so we were set to watch the Astro Dreams vs. the Swing Smileys.
It's the rainy season and has actually rained a lot in the last couple of weeks, but it wasn't raining midday Saturday, so we decided to go. We found the stadium and it had a poster of the league out front, so we knew it was the place. We were a few minutes early, so we went to get some food at the food fair that was conveniently next door. Octopus was the flavour of the day; almost all the booths had octopus something-or-other. Unfortunately, when we went back, there was no game and people packing stuff up. I guess they had already called the game off, even though it wasn't raining at that point. It did start raining pretty good a couple of hours later.
There were two people outside the gate that explained to us the game was canceled. We suspect they were team officials of some kind. They seemed pretty interested in how we found out about the game and wanted to encourage us to seek out another one. They made sure we knew they were playing the next day in Kobe. One of them asked where we were from. When I said I was from Canada, he started talking about the World Cup of Women's Baseball. Canada are three-time medalists at that event, but he pointed out that Japan is the two-time defending champion. I astonished Chelsey by noting that the next edition is in Edmonton. (Summer 2012, Edmonton blog readers!) Two years of marriage and she is still be surprised by the useless knowledge I can pull out.
As a consolation prize for the lack of a game, they gave us each a pair of baseball cards. The women talking to us spoke a little English and asked if we'd ever seen women's baseball before. We hadn't, so she told us the players are small, but very quick.
Since we had a bit of time, we went for a walk around Akashi castle ruins park. It was a nice day to walk around the park, at least before the rain. We also saw a bunch of turtles in the moat. Some people were tossing food in, but the turtles didn't get much. In fact, they seemed a bit lucky not to get pummeled by the carp that were gobbling up the bread.
-Jason