The Seibu Lions are giving manager Kazuo Matsui the boot without saying they are giving him the boot, and a power hitter talks about this year’s soggy dead ball.
Due to work scheduling conflicts, I saw very, very little baseball this weekend. On Friday, I caught the start of Roki Sasaki‘s game when it looked like he’d be lucky to go five innings, caught the last the three innings of Shosei Togo‘s no-hit shutout, and the final inning of the Swallows’ extra-inning win against Raidel Martinez.
Let’s start with the game stuff
The No-No
I don’t really know how many no-hitters there have been in Japan, since only shutouts are counted, but of those the first two from the start of league play in 1936 were thrown by the Giants’ Eiji Sawamura against the Tigers, the first, in 1936 at Koshien, the second at the Giants’ first home ground on the Tokyo Bayside, Susaki Stadium, in 1937.
The next two between the teams came in August 1940 by the Tigers’ Hachiro Miwa in Dalien, in a league tour of Manchuria in which the balls used were notoriously dead, and saw two no-hitters in the span of three weeks. Gene Bacque of the Tigers got the Giants on June 28, 1965, and that was the last one before Togo’s.
The Hawks have been stopped
Just when the SoftBank Hawks looked unstoppable, Roki Sasaki saved his bacon on Friday, ending a 35-pitch first inning with just one run scored and the bases jammed. He needed 84 more pitches for the remaining six innings of his outing, in which he allowed no runs on two hits, a walk and a hit batsman in the Marines’ 3-1 win.
C.C. Mercedes threw eight scoreless innings on Saturday. Neftali Soto scored both runs, and drove in one on a home run in a 2-0 victory, and then drove in four in Sunday’s 7-1 win, in which Carter Stewart Jr. (1-2) took the loss after allowing two runs in five innings.
The Marines have won seven straight and are undefeated in 10 games. The Hawks entered the series in Chiba having won 11 of 12.
The Carp sweep the BayStars and Kuribayashi saves 100th
After beating the BayStars in extra innings with three 10th-inning homers on Friday and a three-run 12th on Saturday, Hiroshima only needed nine innings on Sunday to complete their sweep behind six innings from Makoto Aduwa (5-1), and the 100th career save by Ryoji Kuribayashi, who reached the milestone in 178 career games, tying the record by a domestic pitcher set by Takahiro Mahara.
Four imports reached 100 faster, the Chunichi Dragons’ Eddie Gaillard in 148, the Hawks’ Rodney Pedraza in 162, Marc Kroon with the BayStars and Giants in 168, and Yakult’s Lim Chang Yong in 173.
Matsui gets a rest
The Seibu Lions announced after Sunday’s win over the Orix Buffaloes and the series win that second-year manager Kazuo Matsui is taking a “rest.” Unless a manager is known to have health problems, saying he is convalescing is the way teams say they want his ass off the bench without saying so.
After Sunday’s win, the Lions are 15-30 in last place. The interesting thing about Matsui getting the boot in May is not how early it is because May seems to be the time when teams pull the plug the most often, but how Matsui is the first manager to get fired who was a genuine star as a player since the Sankei Atoms gave Takehiko Bessho the chop in August 1970.
Former manager and current general manager Hisanobu Watanabe will step in as interim field boss. My guess is that once the team made the decision, and started looking for replacements, Watanabe ran for the door but didn’t get out fast enough.
