Masahiro Tanaka won his 196th big league game in his season’s longest outing, Kazuma Okamoto mashed, and if Yomiuri Giants fans are lucky, Shosei Togo will show no ill effects from his long night on the mound, while Taiga Hirasawa showed that reports of his professional demise are still premature.
We have a report on Dragons pitcher Humberto Mejia’s injury, while Japan’s players union wants to stop teams from suppressing service time by doing the Senga shuffle.
Thursday’s games
Eagles 9, Buffaloes 1: At Osaka Flying Saucer Dome, Masahiro Tanaka (6-6) got an early lead and held Orix to a run over eight innings. It wasn’t vintage Tanaka, but a finesse gem, in which he located, changed speeds and, striking out just three, but not giving up much real contact. Still, it was a vast improvement over his July starts, when he twice gave up over seven runs and didn’t go five innings.
Jacob Waguespack (3-5), making an emergency start after Daiki Tajima developed felt a forearm strain — one symptom of a serious elbow strain, allowed two runs in the first and two more in the third. When he came out, the Eagles set fire to rookie Atsuki Kogita, scoring five runs off him in three innings.
Kazuki Murabayashi went 3-for-5 for the Eagles, scoring twice and hitting a three-run homer.
Tigers 5, Dragons 2: At Nagoya Dome, Jeremy Beasley (1-1), starting for the first time in over a month, allowed a run on four hits, a walk and a hit batsman over 5-1/3 innings, for his first win in Japan.
Teruaki Sato singled in a run off Rea Nakachi (1-2), the Dragons top draft signing, in the third, and Koji Chikamoto made it 2-0 with an fourth-inning RBI single. Sato singled and scored in Hanshin’s three-run fifth, when Ryutaro Umeno, who singled and scored in the fourth, singled in a run, and Chikamoto capped the rally with a sac fly.
Giants 2, Swallows 1: At Tokyo Ugly Dome, Kazuma Okamoto hit two homers for the second night in a row, extending his NPB-leading total to 26, and Shosei Togo (10-2) threw a five-hitter to earn the win. With two on and no outs in the ninth, Japan’s least imaginative manager left Togo in the game after throwing 138 pitches. He pitched out of the jam but threw 149 pitches.
Okamoto homered off Dillon Peters in the second. Yakult tied it on a Tetsuto Yamada double and a single from Jose Osuna, who was replaced by a pinch-runner after running gingerly to first. Okamoto broke the tie off Swallows setup man Noboru Shimizu (1-4) in the eighth.
Peters struck out seven while walking one and giving up seven hits in six innings.
Carp 0, Deniers 0, 12 innings: At New Hiroshima Citizens Stadium, both teams combined for put 17 runners on base, and left 11 on in their scoreless 12-inning tie that lasted just 3 hours, 21 minutes. If you’re not going to do anything, you might as well not do it quickly, I suppose.
Marines 7, Fighters 5: At Chiba Marine Stadium, Taiga Hirasawa reminded the baseball world that he is still playing. He homered to open the Marines’ first against Koki Kitayama (6-5), and Koshiro Wada manufactured the tying run in the third, drawing a leadoff walk and scoring on a stolen base and two ground balls.
Hirasawa, who was supposed to be a teenage phenom when Lotte signed him out of the first round in 2015, has pretty much disappeared. He singled with one out in the fifth and scored the tie-breaking run in a three-run rally, and hit one of two homers in the sixth as Lotte took a 7-2 lead. Naoya Masuda, who gave up two homers to blow a save in Tuesday’s loss, worked a 1-2-3 ninth for his 27th save.
Nippon Ham’s Kotaro Kiyomiya doubled and scored in the first on a Chusei Mannami single off Yuji Nishino (8-2), and put the Fighters up for the second time with a third-inning sac fly. After breaking ties three times in the series’ first two Fighters’ wins, Ariel Martinez was walked three times.
Mejia out with pec tightness
Chunichi Dragons pitcher Humberto Mejia, was diagnosed with a damaged right pectoral muscle, after feeling tightness in that part of his torso during his start on Wednesday, when he left after 50 pitches, having allowed one run through three innings. Mejia is 2-1 with a 1.91 ERA in six games.
Mori: Stop manipulating pitchers’ service time
Tadahito Mori, the Nippon Professional Baseball Players Association Secretary General met with NPB representatives in a working session, and said afterward that he asked NPB to credit pitchers who start games on the day they are added to the active roster and are deactivated the following day to credit them with more than the one day of service time they are now getting.
Teams often take promising young starters who are still getting their feet wet in the rotation and use them every 11 days, during which time they are active only on the day they pitch. Mori said this had been done recently by Yakult with Yasunobu Okugawa and Lotte with Roki Sasaki, but with other pitchers including Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Kodai Senga, who lost a huge chunk of service time shuttling back and forth to the farm team during his first few seasons.
Mori said the union wants pitchers who are re-activated and start within 30 days of their last start to receive one week of service time. “We told them we want a response at our next working session, and that if one is not forthcoming, we will present our proposal. We are considering making it a formal demand,” Mori said.
