Baseball is America’s pastime, but given the success of Japanese players in our major leagues, you may be aware that the sport also is big in Japan. You may not know that Mazda is the largest shareholder of its hometown professional baseball team, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, a team that plays in Zoom-Zoom Stadium and is owned by descendants of Jujiro Matsuda, the founder of the Mazda Motor Corporation. So when the Carp made it to the finals of the Japanese equivalent of the World Series last year, the city of Hiroshima held a congratulatory parade for the team. And of course, the parade vehicles would have to be Mazdas, so the company provided the extra-special cars pictured here: two roofless Mazda 6 sedans and an open-topped Mazda RX-8. The project to create these unique Mazdas was undertaken by Mazda?s Engineering and Technology division, and as you might expect, it wasn’t as easy as simply chopping the roof off a standard Mazda 6 sedan and a RX-8 sports car. In fact, the creation of the three parade-prepped cars, comprising a white Mazda 6, a white RX-8, and a 6 in Soul Red (natch), took six months. Besides adding structural reinforcements to the body, the Mazda team also reshaped the rear seats and the floor of the car and added a B-pillar roll hoop to accommodate passengers standing and waving to the crowd. Of course, the Mazdas were also adorned with images of the Carp logo for this celebration, while the Carp players rode in the back seats, wearing thei...