It's Spring Somewhere Else

Hey, so "camp" has started for Japanese baseball teams! No more of this "29 days until spring training" stuff for me!

Even better, the Hiroshima Carp are broadcasting a video feed of their camp from Okinawa.

It's dorky, but it's better than nothing. It looks like it'll be starting at 9am Japan time (4pm Pacific) every day -- I'm not sure how long it goes, since when I first loaded the page there was a note saying "Camp is over for the day, we will rebroadcast at 17:00", and well, I just tuned in, and they're showing stuff. (5pm Japan time is midnight Pacific.)

To be fair, it's just a bunch of Carp players running around the field, pitching, hitting a little, fielding, doing drills, but, hey, baseball! Spring training! I've just had it going in the background on my computer while I write this. Occasionally a player or two even comes over to the camera to say hi. Whee! Besides, the Carp uniform looks sort of like the Phillies or Reds... if they had their mascot Slyly (who looks like a blue Philly Phanatic) there, I'd almost be doing a double-take.

http://www.carp.co.jp/camp/index.html

Huh, I even see one of the foreign pitchers, Juan Feliciano, taking drills with everyone. Neat.

I don't see any other team with major amounts of footage online. Some teams don't even really have camp pages yet, but some have pretty good ones.

Fighters: camp page with two clips of them arriving in Nago (the one of Shinjo is pretty funny)
Marines: camp page with info about Geelong (they're in Australia for camp!)
Hawks: camp page with clips of the opening ceremonies in Miyazaki
Rakuten: camp page with lots of pictures and some funny blogs from players.

Yakult also has some players blogging spring camp and the Giants currently have a camp page with a picture of a grumpy-looking Tatsunori Hara.

Well, anyway. Happy February!