Thanks to these baseball-loving ladies,  even people who don’t care about sports are cheering for their team.

After several middling years, Hiroshima’s professional baseball team, the Carp, have turned into something of a powerhouse. Between 1996 and 2015 the club never finished better than third in the six-team Central League, but in 2016 it captured its first league championship since 1991.

It’s not uncommon for Japanese baseball teams to fall into a slump after a strong season, as the stars who brought them their success get lured to the American Major Leagues where the levels of competition, fame, and money are all exponentially higher. But the Carp came back strong in 2017, which was great news not just for fans of baseball, but also of busty swimsuit models.

Nanoka, the Japanese gravure model with the golden-ratio bust (and also a contributor to the Full-Sized Breasts photo reference book), is a native of Hiroshima Prefecture, and makes no secret of her passionate support for the local team (whose female fans refer to themselves as “Carp Joshi,” or “Carp Girls”). Last season, as the Carp closed in on clinching the Central League championship, Nanoka commemorated the club’s important wins with celebratory snapshots of herself in bikinis, lingerie, and other revealing tops, and she kept the tradition going this year.

The photo above comes after the Carp’s 77th regular-season win, which gave them a magic number of 10 to secure the league championship. The next salute came two wins later, when the magic number dropped to 8.

▼ Magic number 7

In almost every photo, Nanoka is wearing some shade of red, seeing as it’s the primary color in the Carp’s uniform.

▼ Though it’s unlikely she got too many complaints about going with basic black here.

The 28-year-old Nanoka was all smiles when the Carp wrapped up their 83rd win, putting them just one step away from locking up a first-place finish…

…and when the Carp took down Osaka’s Hanshin Tigers on Monday by a score of 3-2, Hiroshima claimed back-to-back league championships for only the second time in the team’s history (and the first time since 1979/1980), prompting Nanoka to share a photo of herself covered in, and wearing a top decorated with, confetti.

Nanoka isn’t the only gravure model getting caught up in the excitement, either. Anri Sugihara, also born in Hiroshima Prefecture, used multiple copies of sports newspapers covering the Carp’s victory to (barely) cover herself with a bikini made from the pages with related articles.

Next up for the Carp is the Central League Climax Series, in which they’ll play the winner of a playoff between the league’s second and third-place teams. Win that, and it’s on to the Japan Series grand championship, something the team hasn’t won since 1984. Baseball fans across Hiroshima will be cheering for them, as well as people with no particular interest in sports who just want to see more of Nanoka and Sugihara.

Source: IT Media
Featured image: Instagram/nanoka0707

Follow Casey on Twitter, where all this talk of Hiroshima has him craving some okonomiyaki.