Nippon Ham Fighters lefty Haruki Hosono issued a leadoff walk Tuesday before throwing Nippon Professional Baseball’s first no-hitter of the season. A month after turning 24, Hosono struck out 12, hit a batter and allowed another to reach on an error. He got a called third strike for the final out with his 128th pitch and seemed not to notice the game was over until his teammates stormed the mound.
Miguel Sano hit the 165th home run of his major league career, and his first in Japan, off Forrest Whitley, who allowed his first in Japan and the fourth of his big-league career, having surrendered three homers in 15-1/3 MLB innings.
Kenta Maeda pitched from a Japanese mound for the first time since 2014 in his Rakuten Eagles debut, the Swallows welcomed back a new version of a late fan favorite, while manager Takahiro Ikeyama continued to be a batting-order outlier.
Baby steps
NPB has a new wrinkle to its video challenge “request” system this year. For the first time since it was introduced in 2018, NPB is running the video reviews from a remote location in a similar fashion to how MLB does it. Until last year, umpires retreated to watch on a monitor under the stands before returning to announce their decision.
According to Osamu Ino, a former NPB umpire supervisor, the teams were responsible for supplying the monitors the umps used to determine their final decisions. Some owners, wishing to save money on something that put no yen in their bank accounts, provided only tiny portable poor-resolution monochrome monitors.
Such was the case on June 22, 2018, when SoftBank challenged a foul-ball ruling on a ball hit into the stands and had it overturned for a decisive three-run extra-inning home run. The umpires made their decision after seeing the ball disappear from the screen and reappear on the far side of the foul pole. After seeing it on a better monitor after the game, the crew chief reported that the ball had indeed been foul, causing Orix’s owner to file a complaint with the league citing the umpires’ incompetence without reference to the crappy equipment he’d grudgingly provided them.
Tuesday’s games
Fighters 9, Marines: Hosono, the Fighters’ top draft signing in 2023, was appearing in just his ninth major league game, and didn’t have to wait long for the run support.
Kotaro Kiyomiya‘s three-run shot and a solo blast by Franmil Reyes capped Nippon Ham’s seven-run second inning, and each homered again in the eighth. The Fighters, who have hit 12 homers in four games, won for the first time.
Giants 5, Dragons 2: Sano opened the scoring in the second for the yet winless Dragons. Mikiya Tanaka singled in Takuya Kinoshita in the fifth to close the books on Whitley, who allowed two runs on six hits and no walks. Japan lefty Yumeto Kanemaru faced the minimum through five only to surrender two runs in the sixth when four-straight batters reached after two were down.
Yoshihiro Maru broke the tie in the ninth with a two-out three-run pinch-hit double that glanced off the glove of Orlando Calixte after the Dragons right fielder got a bad read on Maru’s liner, and Taisei Ota recorded the save in his first appearance of the season. The Giants improved to 2-2.
Hawks 4, Eagles 2: Maeda opened with a sharp 13-pitch first inning, but allowed two runs on five hits and five walks before leaving with no outs and a runner on in the fifth. Yuki Yanagita‘s second hit tied it 1-1 in the third, and SoftBank made it 2-1 in the fourth after loading the bases for the third time. Ryoya Kurihara‘s third hit and second double drove in a ninth-inning insurance run and Kazuki Sugiyama earned his second save. The Hawks improved to 4-0.
The weirdest thing about this game was seeing a right-hander wear No. 18 for the Eagles who isn’t named Masahiro Tanaka, who by the way, will make his season debut for the Giants in Nagoya on Wednesday.
Swallows 8, Carp 3: On a rainy night at Jingu Stadium that delayed the Central League’s clash of unbeaten teams for 30 minutes, Yukihiro Iwata scored in the second by stealing a base and scoring from second on an errant throw to first base. The Carp twice nearly put runs on the board early against Yasuhiro Ogawa without a ball hit hard until rookie Naru Katsuda smoked a one-out liner to Osuna at first for an inning-ending double-play.
The Swallows didn’t manage a hit until Osuna’s one-out homer in the fourth, when Ogawa became the second Yakult pitcher to drive in a run while batting eighth this season, a tactic new manager Takahiro Ikeyama has employed since the team’s second game on Saturday.
It makes sense to bat pitchers eighth because they CAN’T hit, not because they can. That’s because outs in the No. 9 spot dilute the run potential of the better hitters who follow from the top of the order than hits in the No. 8 spot contribute to runs set up by the fifth-, sixth- and seventh-place hitters. It’s not working the way it should, but it is working, and since the Central League switches to the designated hitter next year, this is the last chance we’ll get to see it on the professional level.
Osuna singled in a run in the fifth and scored on journeyman Shu Masuda‘s sixth career homer to make it 6-0 before the Carp chased Ogawa in the sixth. Former setup man Noboru Shimizu entered and surrendered Shogo Sakakura‘s two-out three-run double.
The Swallows’ home opener also marked the first Jingu appearance of the Swallows’ longtime mascot Tsubakuro in two seasons. The quirky mascot debuted in 1994, when I used to attend lots of games at Jingu with my English students from Pepsi-cola Japan who had had been headhunted from Yakult. Last year, the team announced that the only person to portray the popular character had died in February.
“We are really happy to have him back and that’s big support for the team,” Osuna said during the hero interview before getting a bird hug.
Lions 5, Buffaloes 3: Taiwan international Lin An-ko, signed by Seibu through the posting system from Taiwan’s Uni-President Lions, broke a 3-3 with a ninth-inning RBI double off Luis Perdomo in Seibu’s home opener.
The teams traded second-inning runs, driven in by Orix catcher Wakatsuki off Japan teammate Chihiro Sumida, and by Seibu’s Japan shortstop Sosuke Genda. Wakatsuki put the Buffs ahead 2-1, scoring new import Bob Seymour with a fourth-inning double. Seibu catcher Taiga Kojima, the Lions’ top draft pick last autumn, made it 3-2 with a two-run homer, his very first, but Ryo Ota, who tripled to set up Orix’s first run, singled in the tying run in the fifth.
Tigers 4, BayStars 1: Second-year right-hander Jon Duplantier surrendered a first-inning run against his former team on a first-inning Teruaki Sato double. Duplantier allowed two runs on two hits and four walks over five innings. Yoshiaki Tsutsugo got a run back in the sixth with his first home run.
Hanshin righty Hiroto Takahashi allowed a run in six innings and got a two run lead on a pair of sacrifice flies in the home half.
