Where's your lunch money?
SEATTLE (AP) -- The majority owner of the Seattle Mariners has lined up a good seat, right behind home plate, for his first-ever baseball game.
Hiroshi Yamauchi will be in the stands when Seattle opens the major league season March 25 in Tokyo against the Oakland Athletics, Mariners chairman Howard Lincoln said Thursday.
"This will be the first baseball game he's ever gone to, his first major league game and his first Mariners game," Lincoln said. "He told me he doesn't want to sit in a suite. He's going to be sitting right behind home plate."
Yamauchi, president of Nintendo Co., watches his team play on a high-definition television at his home in Kyoto. Every Mariners game has been broadcast in Japan for the past two years.
"He doesn't profess to be an expert in baseball or a baseball fan," Lincoln said
The Mariners are extremely popular in Japan. The roster includes Japanese stars Ichiro Suzuki, Kazuhiro Sasaki and Shigetoshi Hasegawa, and the clubhouse at Safeco Field is crowded with Japanese reporters after every game.
"We have a host of rabid Mariners fans in Japan," Lincoln said. "Even though we're going to be the visiting team, something tells me there's going to be a lot of Mariners supporters in the Tokyo Dome."
Among them will be Yamauchi, who rescued the Mariners from what seemed a likely move to Tampa Bay before the 1992 season.
He anchored a Seattle-area ownership bid, buying the team for $100 million. At the time, Yamauchi called the decision a gift to residents of Washington for their receptiveness to his Nintendo interests.
"It's wonderful that the fellow who single-handedly kept the Mariners in Seattle in the dark days of 1992 is, after 10 seasons, finally going to get a chance to walk behind the batting cage and see his players hit the ball," Lincoln said.
Nintendo America is based in Redmond, Wash., a Seattle suburb.
Yamauchi will attend only the opener of the two-game series against the A's, skipping two Mariners exhibition games against Japanese teams. He dislikes travel, Lincoln said, and hasn't visited the United States since 1989.
None of you are necessary!
That's pretty funny. As an M's fan, I would hope that the majority owner would actually go out of his way to watch a game, (come on you're super rich and you can't fly to Seattle for a weekend?), but since the game is in Tokyo it seems that he's going just for the convenience. Oh well, I have a friend who is a big A's fan, so hopefully it will be a good game for us to watch.
Sausage
What a dick. (Yamauchi I mean...)
Sorry about that. I respect the man, but, come on.
I mean really.
Do you prefer dogs or cats?
I think the whole thing's kinda funny.
It's like the emporer is making his annual trip out to one of the provinces that he forgot he had.
Bad Mother****er
Pixel Twister
I don't know. It's not like he lives down the street. How many baseball games are there in a season now? 400? Is he supposed to hop on a jet every other day?
TRUE 11 years is a long ass time not to have come ONCE, I'm sure he was in town to visit NOA and maybe could have stopped by but...it's his business, he can do what he wants.
I'm sure Seattle fans couldn't care less.
If he wasn't even seeing them when they were in Japan, then that might be something that'd upset me.
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