My First Baseball Game In Japan Was Crazy!

I can't talk a whole lot about it. I set a new velocity record. That happens after every win. We've made a ball. I mean, that's the best starting Pokemon there ever has been. Apparently someone showed up at nine o'clock last night. Oh no, I didn't know I'd find Eric Sim in Japan. Look at this. My shoulder didn't feel good at all. And it wasn't really the shoulder. Noon today, I have another signing with the fans. I'm only gonna sign for 200 people because since I announced it yesterday, we're expecting a lot more people than that to show up. For those fans that I can't sign for today, they can join my official Trevor Bauer fan club. I'm gonna have a lot of interactive events throughout the season, playing catch and stuff like that. So if you haven't already, check out the link in the description. So it's gonna be a busy one. Well, update, it is 8.15 in the morning on a Sunday. And apparently there's already more than 200 people that have claimed a ticket for the signing event. So they're already turning people away at 8.15 a.m. I'm gonna have to tweet something out, let people know not to show up. But first day that I got here, I was playing catch, did normal long toss. And then on a couple of the last throws that I made, I felt something kind of weird in my lat. Didn't think anything of it. But the next day when I played catch, so the second day, my shoulder didn't feel good at all. And it wasn't really the shoulder. It was kind of in the armpit area. So I got an MRI and it turns out that it was a strain of the teres major. It's an internal rotator. Grade one strain, there's three types of strains. Grade one is the least serious. Basically just like an overstretched muscle. So didn't throw for a little bit. Built back up in weighted balls. I can't talk a whole lot about it. And I can't show a whole lot about it. All the treatment that I'm doing for it is taking place in the training room. Out of courtesy to one of the trainers, the two of the team, and three of the other players that are in there, I can't show a lot of that. But I can talk about my timetable and recovery process. Typical day for rehab for me right now. I get to the field, I eat breakfast, I do my checks in the training room. Can't show those. Then I go and I do foam rolling and activation in the weight room. That's some pulley exercises, some band exercises. Make sure everything is loose, turned on, and firing. Then I do shoulder tube, and then I go out to throw. Today I'm going to have a radar gun on me so that I can see how hard I'm throwing so I know when I jump to catch tomorrow, I can start at the level that I've already built up to so I don't waste any time and I don't go too far ahead of myself. So that's the plan. 87? I don't know if I can go up to 87. Boom! 89. 89? And it was what, up to 80 with the five ounce? The yellow? Yeah. Yeah, 80. Okay, let's go sign for some fans. These people apparently were here since they started lining up at what, like 6 a.m.? Now it's about noon. They've been waiting all day. It's pretty cool. So I found a couple things out in the autograph session. Number one, apparently someone showed up at nine o'clock last night to wait and get a ticket. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, I appreciate whoever it was that did that. I appreciate you as a fan. Number two, in America, when you sign a ball on your own, you sign on the sweet spot, which is between the two seams on the ball. Over here in Japan, they want to sign it in the horseshoe area. I guess it's because it's a little bit bigger, but one person did say when he displays it, he can see the logo of the Bay Stars on the sweet spot, and then my signature there, so you can see both of them. Lots of people with Bauer shirts, lots of people with Bauer jerseys. You can get one of those at the Bay Stars website. The link will be in the description. If I see you in one of those at a game, I will come over and sign it and give you a fist bump or something. Hey Ryu, can I borrow some cash? And we're off to get some dinner. We're gonna check out the Tokyo Tower first and then get some sushi. Ryu, what is this place? What is the, what would this be called first off? Is this like a castle? It's not a castle. A temple. There's Rachel doing Instagram. So our first thing is a clam broth soup, which is supposedly good for your liver before you drink. Which you will not be getting. I will not be having sake, but Rachel. Sign me up. You just pour a little, right? You gonna shoot it, Rachel? Yeah. Kanpai. That's good. First course of the night, Toro for Rachel. I see. So good. It's the best sushi I've ever had. Traditional sushi, you go with the hand, not the chopsticks. Oh no. Okay, okay. Oh no. Second try. It is that hard. Yeah, I agree with you. That's really, really good. Maybe I would have been better off using my chopsticks though than my hands. Ah, embarrassing. One thing that already stands out is the attention to detail, like you put one drop of lime in the sauce and the fish, and then you can definitely taste it. Like two drops of lime would be too much. And this is like the perfect amount. Incredible. We just found out why our sushi is so good. Our chef has been making sushi for 40 years. He is 86 years old. Experience definitely matters. Throwing plan for today. I'm gonna throw as far as I can. Plan is to have a pocket radar out behind me. We'll see how much distance I can throw at like 83, 84 miles an hour. Okay, a great day of throwing in the books. Felt completely healthy. What did we learn? Well, number one, I got out to about 260 feet. 260, 280 feet is about my normal day of catch. Tomorrow, I'm gonna take a little bit of a down day because we've had two days of increased intensity. I got up to 89 two times on pull downs at the end. Whatever this little thing was, it seems to be mostly gone. So moving right along, should be back up in a game action soon, which is super exciting. So I'm gonna get my lift in, get my conditioning in. Should be it for the day. Today's workout includes a little bit of BFR or blood flow restriction. So the purpose of blood flow restriction is to restrict the amount of blood flow to the limb. And then that sends a trigger to the brain that there's damage being done to the muscle. But because you only do it with very light weights, you don't actually do damage to the muscle. So the brain gets tricked into sending all the muscle repair hormones and vitamins and blood flow and all that stuff to the area. So you get increased recovery and you also get increased size. So you can grow the muscle quicker. The machines check what my blood pressure is and then they cut off half of it. Usually you go 50% for the upper half, 80% if you're gonna do BFR on the legs and it gets super tough. Carry my BFR machines with me everywhere I go. Big day today, it's my first bullpen since being here in Japan, which is super exciting. Let's get to the field, get warmed up, throw a bullpen. On its second week of use, this driveline green plyo ball is... So I've been talking to some of the guys about cutters and splits and how to throw them. We've made a ball, black dot, where your finger is supposed to go on a split. And then the red is where the ball is supposed to spin. So if you can't see the red when the ball's spinning or if you see the red spinning kind of like this, where it's on the ball sometimes and not on the ball other times, then you know the axis isn't right. But if it's spinning like this in one spot, like a big red dot, then you know that you got the axis right on a split. Kind of a cool moment for me, knowing that people are actually listening to what I have to say and that some of the information is, I guess, valuable in some way or hopefully valuable. Just got done with my bullpen, went really well through, I think, 22 pitches up to 89. All my pitches were okay. Command was really terrible. When I was warming up, I noticed that when I would have both eyes open, my mechanics felt good. When I would have just my left eye open, my mechanics would feel good. But when I would have just my right eye open, I felt like I was completely off balance. So clearly there's something going on in my mechanics. It's not quite right. My body's like, I don't know what's going on, but there's something going on. So I got to figure that out. We had some designers come up with different ideas. We struggled for a while because now our outage, B-O, is known more as body odor than... Ah, body odor outage. And then someone, one of the designers, came up with this, like, this is an O and that's like a B. That's kind of linked together. I made this little cut in here to differentiate a bit. I'm about to go into some meetings for a couple hours, but since we're here at a Baystars game, Rachel's going to take the vlog over and show you around the stadium from a fan's perspective. So here's Rachel. It's very close. We are going to tour the stadium a little bit, see what it's like. Fans are just starting to come in. I don't know if I'm allowed to be where I am, but I think this path gets me around the club. We will see. So purple food. Some food they have. Got a freshness burger. Long potatoes. Looks good. Wonder if like drinking beer is big at these games, like it is in America. Pizza. Looks like they have some beer. Okay, so you can see right there, everyone's getting towels. Those are the rally towels. Everyone gets them when they come in the stadium. All right. They've got Baystars beer. Hi. My name is, yes. Trevor Bauer? Yeah. No, yeah. Wait, are you kind of like Trevor Bauer's friend or something? I'm his agent. That's good. No. This is his vlog. Really? Oh my gosh. No. Thank you very much, Trevor. We are very welcoming you to come in here. We are very excited to see the Saiyan feature in this stadium. Is it actually his own YouTube? Yeah, this is his vlog. This is his vlog. Is he going to watch me? Yeah, he's going to see you on this vlog. Oh my, thank you, Trevor Bauer. I love you, Bauer. Yeah. My name is Ayano. Kirin. Photo okay? Yes. The skyline for a stadium is ridiculously cool. Are those the beer vendors? What uniforms for the beer vendors? That's crazy. Okay, so the fans that are leading these chants, I found out something about them. They're supported by the team. Team gives them their spot. That's kind of their area. And I guess these fans work all off season to make enough money where they can go to all the games. So they travel on the road, but they see 143 baseball games a year. They sit there with drums and thunder sticks and they like get the chants going. And the whole stadium just starts singing and chanting. Like if you've never been to a game here in Japan, you should go. There's nothing like this in the States. So I've heard that there's a pretty crazy celebration when the closer comes out. It's currently 4-0 going to the ninth. I think the closer is coming in. So let's see what we got. We're in a suite on the third floor and you can feel the entire stadium like shaking and jumping and stuff. 4-0 win for the Bay Stars, which makes me want to know at Bay Stars games, which is great. Keep that undefeated record going as long as we can. Post game ceremonies, a little bit different here. There's actually a post game ceremony. So another thing that's different here is they have a hero interview after the game. So they turn off all the lights and they bring the heroes of the game out to the stage and a reporter interviews them and they talk directly to the fans who all stay around to hear the hero interview. This place is still packed. Look at this. So Ryu is asking me to keep my answers short so he can translate them properly. What a healer. Yes. The heroes get to hold the stuff they have to hold or they like get to keep it? They get to keep it after that. So what if you're the hero like 20 times a year? You get 20 stuff? So I'm going to have to get a separate room for all the stuffed animals. Hopefully. So after a win, after the hero interviews, the whole team comes back out and throws like little squishy like giveaway balls to the fans. It's now about 20 minutes after the game ended and the stadium is still packed. It's like the fans come to the stadium to party and have a good night and they just don't leave. They're just still hanging out. Now the heroes are going for rides on the cars. Heroes over here going like, that's so cool, a dark stadium with the skyline in the background, like light show. Yay! That's so cool. Wow. Love it. That happens after every win. You treat the fans right, Shu. While I was at the game, I ran into a US Navy service member named Tyler. Been here for five years. He's leaving this weekend actually to go back home to the States to enroll in college. Just wanted to give him a shout out on the vlog. Thank you for your service. He started a clothing company called Registry and he gave me this really cool jersey so they make their own baseball jerseys and then on the back, pretty darn cool, high quality stuff with the striping on it says Registry. He's gonna go back to school at Baylor for business administration. Anyway, shout out to you, Tyler. I wanted to say thanks again for your service and good luck back home and back at school. Let's talk about differences and similarities between NPB and MLB games. Let's start with the similarities. The baseball is pretty much the same. There's pitches, there's hits, 90 feet. That's about where the similarities end. The experience of being at the game is so much different. The level of energy in the stadium tonight, crazy. Like the sustained level of energy. I've been a part of a World Series, a crazy World Series at that and the stadium in Cleveland was so loud in game seven but it wasn't loud the entire game. From the first inning till like 30 minutes after the game, the stadium was super loud. It never took a break. The band that they have playing out in right field, they have a different song for every single hitter that comes up. When you get called up to the big leagues and you become like a mainstay in the big leagues, like you get your own song from the fan base. It's only for hitters, pitchers don't get it. The way they utilize the lights, they turn the lights off and on. Lights will go off and then everybody will have these blue and white lights that are going, which makes it really cool. They use fireworks. I guess there's fireworks show after every single win. That's different than in the States. They're giving away towels, handouts, there's thunder sticks going, people waving towels. There is a level of fan entertainment though that is different in the United States than here in Japan. And in my opinion, I think maybe a little bit better. Stadium itself is the entertainment. Like the game itself is the entertainment. At a big league stadium, you have these massive like fan entertainment areas. You might have a little blow up cage where you can throw to see how hard you throw. Like in Cleveland, you have like the corner bar down in the right field. There's not really any of that here, at least at the Baystar Stadium. But on the other hand, you want people watching the game and being invested in the action on the field. And there's just no question that everybody in the stands here was more invested in what's going on on the field than happens in America. The game itself, when I'm on the field, when I'm playing is gonna be very similar. I think the way the game plays and is managed and stuff like that is gonna be similar. But I've just never played in an environment that's like as crazy as that outside of my 2009 experience here in Japan with Team USA. So I'm really looking forward to that and I can't wait to get back out on the field. If there's anything else you wanna know about it or highlight, have me highlight, let me know in the comments. And since it's an off day and I have a little spare time on my hands, I'm gonna go check out one of the most important cultural historical landmarks in Japan, Chalupa. Where are we going? The Pokemon Center. Chalupa, why do you think that this is one of the most important historical landmarks to visit while in Japan? Because when I think of Japan, I think of Pokemon. When you think of Japan, you think the most important place to visit is Pokemon. There's three places. Kyoto, Hiroshima, and the Pokemon Center. That's quite the list. Okay, Chalupa, what are you most excited for about this? What are you expecting to see here? Real life Pokemon. Which one? Of all the Pokemon that you collect, you can see one in person. You chose Mewtwo? You don't even like Mewtwo. I mean, if you're asking me, first it's gonna be Pikachu, iconic, you know, very cliched, but after that, I got a roll with my boy Charmander. I mean, that's the best starting Pokemon there ever has been. No, that's not true at all. Original red version, Game Boy, before you were even born, Chalupa, back in the day. There he is. Squirtle's good, too. Bulbasaur is the worst starting Pokemon ever. PVP, is that player versus player? Oh, that's because you play Pokemon Go still, right? Yep, add me. I didn't know I'd find Eric Sim in Japan. Look at this. There he is. Don't do this. I feel like they should make you order with actual Pokemon cards, because she gives you a deck of all the different meals, and then you should go through and you just have to play your card or on the table of what you want. Snorlax, please. Kindle my inner Eric Sim. That makes two of us. And I got a latte. Which Pokemon are you gonna get? I don't know. They're featuring the new Scarlet and Violet, and I don't know those. You literally get to choose any Pokemon for lattes. I have to redo it. A Lickitung. You're not gonna go for, what was the lame Pokemon that you said, Mewtwo? Mew. The carrots are cut like Zs. Eric Sim with a belly full of rice. Look at this. We got a Gengar grape smoothie. I mean, if you're asking me, first it's gonna be Pikachu, iconic. You got to meet a real-life Pokemon, Rachel. It's all I ever wanted. Are you gonna go up and give him a hug? If I'm allowed to. Where are you guys from? California. It's a special Boltunday, because it's my last Boltund before I will be able to face hitters in live VP in three days. So that means I'll be throwing pretty hard. And I bet a lot of you at home have never stood in the box against someone throwing 89, 90, 91, something like that. So I'm gonna try to put you guys in the box so you can see what it's like to face a big league pitcher. Well, I think today went about as well as it could possibly have gone. Threw 30 pitches. It was 89 to 91 all pen. The last two pitches I threw were 93. No pain, no issues, no restriction. So that's a good check right there. I was throwing on the mound that they have here with force plates in it. And they have a motion capture system, like cameras mounted on poles above the mound. So we were measuring how hard I was pushing off the rubber or how hard I was landing on my land leg. I set a new velocity record for motion capture. They've never captured anyone above 92. They've only had the system for like, you know, less than a year. I'm sure they'll get plenty more people to throw harder than I do, but interesting. My land force, my lead leg landing force is very, very high. But also my push off force off my back leg is very high. And I don't think about pushing off the rubber at all. And I think that's because when you understand how to utilize gravity, I just think about dropping all the vertical force and that turns into horizontal force and I don't have to think about actively pushing off the rubber. If you can transfer that up to the upper half, then you throw hard. Let's play a little game. Let's see if you guys can identify which five pitches these are from a righties view and which five pitches these are from a lefties view and comment down below what you think they are. Check it out. That's what hitters are dealing with every single game, every 20 seconds, or maybe, you know, every like eight seconds now in America, but pretty hard to tell the difference, right?