Japanese Baseball

Baseball is huge in Japan. It is by far the most popular sport, with soccer coming a distant second. Personally, I find baseball to be incredibly boring, but I thought that because it's so popular here it would be interesting to see what the fans are like during a game.
Today was a holiday and there was an exhibition game in Kurashiki, about 20 minutes west of Okayama. Okayama does not have its own professional baseball team. The closest teams are in Osaka and Hiroshima, about 40 minutes by bullet train to the east and west, respectively. The game today was between the Hiroshima Carp and the Hanshin Tigers (from the Osaka-Kobe area). Both teams are extremely popular here, but the edge definitely goes to the Tigers. I went with my buddy, Aki, who is a huge Tigers fan. He brought a Tigers hat and hapi (sort of similar to a jacket) for me to wear during the game.
The fans are separated according to which team they support, so we of course sat in the Tigers section. Throughout the game there's a lot of yelling, cheering and banging of hollow plastic bats (like the one Aki's holding in the first picture), and almost everybody gets really into it. There's even fans playing drums and other instruments (trombones, I think) to get the crowd excited.
After the Tigers at-bat in the 6th inning, all the Tigers fans had these long balloons that they released at the same time, so there were literally thousands of these balloons shooting around the sky above us. To be honest, it looked like a sea of multi-coloured sperm, but I didn't mention that because I didn't want to ruin it for them. The Carp fans then did the same thing after Hiroshima had their 6th inning at-bat.
And when it was over, there was good news - the Tigers ended up winning 8-3.