The SoftBank Hawks had Japan’s best offense, but while they posted a Japan-best .338 wOBA this year against right-handers, they were tied with Hanshin for second best against lefties with a .316 wOBA behind DeNA’s .319.
On Wednesday, for the second straight night, the Hawks sent seven left-handed hitters against a lefty and got similarly poor results, when the BayStars’ starters brought their “A” games.
In Game 4, Anthony Kay threw seven shutout innings, and Tyler Austin homered to lead the CL’s third-place club to their eighth postseason road win, 5-0 over the Pacific League champion Hawks on Wednesday to even the Japan Series at two games apiece.
After dropping Games 1 and 2 at home, the BayStars are 2-0 at the Hawks’ Mizuho PayPay Dome in Fukuoka. Including the postseason, DeNA is now 34-39 at home but 45-34 on the road.
“There’s no explaining it. It’s weird,” said Austin who is battling a foot injury as DeNA’s DH. “The noise, and things like that, doesn’t bother us.”
On the heels of seven innings of one-run ball from DeNA ace Katsuki Azuma on Tuesday, Kay held Japan’s top offense scoreless for seven innings.
“This was the first time I faced these guys, so I just went after them, and it seemed like they didn’t really adjust to the off-speed stuff, so I just threw two-seams and four-seams inside and sliders and cutters off of that,” the left-hander said.
Kay easily retired the first nine batters he faced, striking out six of them, and Austin gave him a 1-0 lead with a fourth-inning home run off Hawks right-hander Shuta Ishikawa before DeNA broke the game open in the seventh against SoftBank’s bullpen.
With Ishikawa out of the game, Toshiro Miyazaki homered to open the big inning. Masayuki Kuwahara, who homered to break up a 1-1 tie in DeNA’s 4-1 Game 3 victory, doubled in two, and Austin completed the carnage with an RBI single.
Austin, who has been hurting since fouling a ball off his foot in Game 1, singled in the second and opened the scoring in the fourth with a good swing on a fastball that ran onto the barrel of his bat, launching it into the dome’s “home run terrace” in right for an opposite-field homer.
Ishikawa allowed four hits and walked none while striking out four. With the exception of Austin, he had little trouble negotiating the BayStars’ lineup and left when the DeNA designated hitter came up with two outs and a runner on in the sixth.
Reliever Shuto Ogata struck out Austin to end the inning, and rookie Yoshiyasu Sasagawa singled to open SoftBank’s sixth, when Kay issued a one-out walk and looked vulnerable for the first time. But Kay stranded two runners, retiring PL home run leader Hotaka Yamakawa with a changeup.
“I only threw him one fastball all game and he hit it pretty hard,” Kay said. “I was lucky he hit it into a glove.”
Game 5 will be in Fukuoka on Thursday before the series returns to Yokohama on Saturday for Game 6.
Kay, who said his first innings this year were his most difficult all year, struck out the first four batters he faced and fanned six through three perfect innings.
“This was the first time I faced these guys, so I wanted to get a little bit of a feel for how they would attack me, and so I kind of just went after them,” Kay said. “It doesn’t seem like they adjusted to the off-speed stuff so well, so I kept throwing the two-seams and four-seams inside and sliders and cutters off of that.”
“It usually takes me a little while to lock in and get in a groove,” Kay said. “They had a lot of lefties and that helped to lock me in a little more.
The 29-year-old southpaw, primarily a reliever in MLB and the United States minors since 2022, had an up-and-down first season in Japan, going 6-9 with a 3.42 ERA for the third-place BayStars, although he did strike out 119 batters in 136-2/3 innings.
“The last couple of years I was either hurt or relieving,” Kay said. “I think I went into it a little blind this year, but being with Andre (DeNA starter Andre Jackson) the whole year, he helped me a little bit, figuring out the routine in between starts.”
In the postseason, however, Kay has now delivered for DeNA in two of his three starts. He won the BayStars’ final-stage playoff opener against the Central League champion Yomiuri Giants. He started the clinching victory but did not make it out of the fourth inning.
“I hit a little bit of a wall in September, but the postseason gets that adrenaline flowing, so I have been getting locked in,” he said.
Against the SoftBank Hawks, he looked like a textbook starting pitcher, making a statement early with good command and life on his fastball, and then bedeviling batters with his secondary stuff.
“Kay was terrific,” BayStars manager Daisuke Miura, a former pitcher himself, said. “His fastball had good movement, and his command of his breaking pitches was also good.”
