I missed Saturday’s news post with so much to do at the day job, and Sunday was much the same, so I’m going to take a different tack today, and talk about an important anniversary, in what is being touted as the important 150th anniversary of baseball’s introduction to Japan, although it’s an anniversary Nippon Professional Baseball prefers you not know about.
It’s the kind of post I tend to reserve as paid content, but I suspect you’ll like it.
We also had games on Saturday and Sunday, when the Yakult Swallows and Yomiuri Giants completed a slug fest series. We also had a record for Japanese home run hitters, and some coronavirus news so let’s get to it.
For all those people who said Sunday, “Roki Sasaki only needs three more outs for a perfect game,” I give you the Lotte Marines offense. The Marines failed to score in nine innings for the right-hander, added another scoreless inning that afternoon before losing in 10, and then were shut out again on Tuesday.
There have been 94 regular-season no-hitters in Japanese pro baseball, there’s never been one that ended 0-0.
In other fun stuff, we had a fascinating left-handed matchup in Osaka between 41-year-old Hawks veteran and last year’s PL rookie of the year, 20-year-old Hiroya Miyagi, where Shuhei Fukuda proved he could use his head, while the Nippon Ham Fighters tried to extend their longest win streak under manager Tsuyoshi Shinjo to four games.
