All posts by Jim Allen

sports editor for a wire service in Tokyo

NPB news: June 23, 2024

On Sunday in Japan, a rookie pitched in when a veteran teammate was sidelined and did well in a game where Giants outfielder Elier Hernandez, whose defensive misadventures had raised eyebrows a week earlier did it all with his bat and his glove. Elsewhere, another rookie tied a record, while Lotte blew a ninth-inning lead on what Marines manager Masato Yoshii called a “little league play,” which also showed how far Japan’s umpires are now going to ignore their own rules.

Meanwhile, the Orix Buffaloes reached 1 million in attendance the earliest in franchise history – which of course dates back only to 2005, not because that was the year they merged with the Kintetsu Buffaloes, but because prior to 2005, attendance figures were just made up out of thin air and called records, so NPB doesn’t even count them anymore.

Sunday’s games:

Buffaloes 4, Lions 1: At Osaka UFO Dome, Seibu ace Kona Takahashi (0-8) allowed two runs on one hit over three innings, when manager Hisanobu Watanabe’s patience ran out. The Buffaloes loaded the bases in the second on two walks and a hit batsman and took the lead on Yutaro Sugimoto‘s sacrifice fly. Two no-out walks in the third set up another sac fly, by Kotaro Kurebayashi. Leandro Cedeno hit his eighth home run, leading off the fourth. Orix scored in the fifth off Bo Takahashi on a single, a two-base error, and a Ryo Ota sac fly.

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Japan’s collision course

On Sunday, the Hawks-Marines game ended in a tie after a ninth-inning play in which a run scored at the plate after the catcher’s tag was applied because the ball inadvertently came out of the catcher’s glove, but had this been six or seven years ago, it might not have mattered because of Japan’s difficult experience with enforcing and not enforcing the obstruction rule at home plate.

In Japan, catchers once didn’t even need to tag the runner. Until 2015, they could block the plate entirely without the ball, catch it and curl up around it. When the runner touched the catcher’s body, the balled-up catcher might roll a few meters from the play, produce the ball, and the ump would call the runner out – even if the ball arrived after the runner and the catcher made no attempt to apply a tag.

Once NPB adopted an MLB-style collision rule in 2016, a fielder with the ball in hand was not allowed to breath on the base line if a runner on third even thought about coming home, because the ump would call him safe and even signal him to leave third base and proceed to the plate–on review of course–since virtually no umpire in the history of Japanese pro baseball has ever ruled a runner safe for obstruction.

Continue reading Japan’s collision course