We had Monday baseball for the second straight week, with SoftBank hosting one of its company parties for Kanto area employees by hosting a game at Tokyo Dome. This year’s boasted an old-timers’ matchup between Tsuyoshi Wada and Masahiro Tanaka.
And while that was going on, Monday was also Roki Eve, with Sasaki’s first start after interleague pushed back a few days, setting up a matchup between him and his WBC BFF, Hiroya Miyagi in Osaka.
Eagles 3, Hawks 2: At Tokyo Dome, there wasn’t much to tell the difference between Wada and Tanaka in this one, but Tanaka (4-4) allowed a run over seven innings, while the Eagles tagged Wada (5-3) for two runs over five, putting better swings on his pitches than the Hawks managed.
Doubles by Daichi Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Yamasaki off poor pitches made it 1-0 in the second, and Rakuten repeated that in the fifth on an Itsuki Murabayashi single and a Ryosuke Tatsumi double.
Yuki Yanagita, who struck out in the first with runner on second on the most borderline of pitches, made it 2-1 in the sixth when he launched a fastball down the pipe to the base of the hitters’ background in center for his 11th home run.
Eagles relievers Sora Suzuki and Yuki Matsui retired six of the last seven batters to close it out with Matsui earning his 15th save.
The win was Tanaka’s 194th in the big leagues.
