Nobody’s perfect in Japanese pro baseball, not the Lotte Marines dropped their home opener Wednesday following their weekend sweep of the SoftBank Hawks, and not the Yomiuri Giants’ Hayato Sakamoto. Perhaps the greatest shortstop Japan has produced, Sakamoto, we learned Wednesday from reports, has been caught in a rundown with tax officials over some of his deduction claims.
Wednesday’s games
Buffaloes 3, Marines 2: At Chiba Marine Stadium, Masahiro Nishino made up for a costly error with a tie-breaking two-run homer after the two starters, Orix’s Ryuhei Sotani and Lotte’s Yuji Nishino pitched six entertaining innings apiece. The Marines opened the scoring in the third on a one-out walk, Nishino’s throwing error and a beautiful safety squeeze from Akito Takabe. Kotaro Kuribayashi’s two-out RBI infield single tied it in the fourth.
Nishino homered in the top of the seventh, Neftali Soto singled in a run in the home half, when Orix reliever Seiryu Kotajima left the bases loaded. Andres Machado allowed a leadoff single in the ninth but struck out Soto to end it.
Swallows 5, Carp 4, 10 innings: At Jingu “Tokyo’s sacrifice to corporate greed and governmental malfeasance” Stadium, Yakult won its home opener on a walk-off to end its perfect winless streak.
Jose Osuna singled in a run for Yakult in the first off Daichi Osera and set up two more as the Swallows overturned a three-run deficit. New Hiroshima import Sandro Fabian put the Carp in front with a two-run second-inning homer and Shota Suekane‘s two-run homer made it 4-1 in the sixth. Domingo Santana, robbed of an RBI double in fifth on an outstanding play by Carp center fielder Shoichi Futamata, singled to open Yakult’s eighth and Osuna doubled to set up Yudai Koga‘s game-tying three-run double.
Swallows reliever Naofumi Kizawa inherited and survived a one-out bases-loaded 10th-inning predicament and got the win after Osuna doubled to open the home half and Kazuya Maruyama singled in the winning run.
Giants 2, Dragons 0: At Nagoya Dome, Yomiuri’s Iori Yamasaki struck out seven over eight innings. Yuya Yanagi had a hit but also allowed two runs over six innings, a big total for this team’s offense to overcome. Kazuma Okamoto singled in Raito Nakayma in the first inning, while Trey Cabbage went 3-for-4 and scored on Elier Hernandez‘s sixth-inning double. Raidel Martinez earned the save, his first against his former team.
Fighters 3, Hawks 1: At Kitahiroshima Tax Payers’ Burden Field, SoftBank starter Jun Maeda, the 122nd player taken in the 2022 draft, allowed the first two runners to reach in three of his five innings, and the third time did the trick for Nippon Ham as Yuma Imagawa‘s leadoff single and a walk were followed two errors and an RBI groundout in the Fighters’ two-run fifth. Rookie Kengo Yoshida, whom Nippon Ham lifted from SoftBank in December’s active-player draft, hit his first career homer in the seventh.
BayStars 6, Tigers 6, 12 innings: At Osaka UFO Dome, DeNA overcame a three-run eighth-inning deficit on Yota Kyoda‘s two-run pinch-hit double. Jeremy Beasley allowed three runs over 5-1/3 innings in his season debut for Hanshin, while Shota Morishita went 4-for-5 with a walk, two runs and an RBI double, and Yusuke Oyama doubled and tripled, the latter making it 6-3 in the seventh. Oyama led off the 12th with a walk only for Taisei Irie and his electric fastball to end it with a strikeout to strand the winning run at third.
Sakamoto tagged out by tax officials
Yomiuri Giants shortstop Hayato Sakamoto is facing back taxes and penalties worth around 100 million yen or about $650,000 according to multiple media reports Wednesday.
The back taxes are due because Sakamoto reportedly was charged with an error for deducting 240 million yen he spent dining out with and entertaining teammates as business expenses.
You wouldn’t know about this story if you depended exclusively on the Yomiuri Shimbun, or its sports daily, the Hochi Shimbun for your news, as they were silent on the issue. When I worked for the Daily Yomiuri, our world pages were prohibited from running stories on news Yomiuri preferred not to transmit.
Because it and the Japanese media were huge fans of Peru president Alberto Fujimori, the first sign of his ouster from power in our paper was the day he was removed from office, since there we had not been allowed to report on the months of nation-wide protests against him. The same with the huge protests in Japan against George W. Bush’s warlike intentions before his invasion of Iraq. The Yomiuri didn’t report on them because it supported the invasion.
The funny thing about working at the Yomiuri then was the company’s stance that the internet was some kind of fad that would go away if we ignored it, and that if we didn’t print news, that news didn’t exist to sully the “correct” world view the company touted.
It was wild.
