Rain across Japan washed out the three games played outdoors Sunday, when all three late leads nearly vanished, with only one of three visitors holding on to its lead, and since the Giants were one of the victimized teams, Tatsunori Hara made his obligatory hard-to- decipher take on the subject.
Sunday’s games
Dragons 2, Giants 1: At Nagoya Stadium, for the third straight day, the Chunichi Dragons came from behind and seized and eighth-inning lead. Dragons right-hander Hiroto Takahashi gave up the first run on a home run by his Japan WBC teammate Takumi Oshiro.
Twenty-three-year-old iants starter Yuji Akahoshi, who a few weeks earlier had been ordered by manager Hara to recover his missing confidence, was victimized with two outs when Dragons catcher Takumi Kinoshita went after a low 1-2 splitter but somehow got under it and lofted it off the wall to plate Takaya Ishikawa with the tying run.
Hara went to his bullpen and got out of the inning, but 22-year-old Daisuke Naoe (0-1) took over in the eighth and couldn’t find the strike zone with eight of his nine pitches. Lefty Ryusei Oe, who at 24 is a bit more experienced, ran the count full on Yohei Oshima before striking him out. Rookie right-hander Taiki Kikuchi came in and walked the bases loaded before surrendering a sac fly to Ishikawa.
A 1-2-3 ninth by Raidel Martinez for his 10th save of the season and the 101st of his career, wrapped up the series sweep, leaving Hara with nothing to do but explain that his young pitchers need to learn from these painful lessons, and for once didn’t pretend like he knew the easy answer for their problems.
“In the end, it doesn’t matter what we say, it’s those guys who have to overcome this,” Hara said. “All they are extremely young pitchers, they must take what’s happening now and turn it into nourishment to grow on. At the same time, we have to nurture them.”
Lions 5, Buffaloes 4: At Osaka Dome, Orix starter Taisuke Yamaoka’s command crumbled in the sixth inning, when a single and a pair of two-out walks allowed Seibu to tie it when Gakuto Wakabayashi hit a fat first-pitch fastball for a three-run double.
The Buffaloes opened the scoring in the first, when Keita Nakagawa singled home rookie Tokumasa Chano, and made it 3-0 in the second on Frank Schwindel’s first home run in Japan.
David MacKinnon, whose two-out walk started the sixth-inning uprising, and Hotaka Yamakawa singled to open the seventh, with Wakabayashi driving in the go-ahead run for Seibu. A Wu Nien-ting single made it 5-3 in the ninth.
Rookie reliever Minato Aoyama walked the first two Buffaloes hitters in the bottom of the inning. Orix manager Satoshi Nakajima tried to exploit an obvious sacrifice situation, by having his batter swing away after squaring to bunt, and was roasted by TV analyst Yasushi Tao after Yuya Oda grounded into a double play.
Schwindel’s RBI single made it a one-run game, but the game ended with the next batter grounding out.
“It would have been better if the game hadn’t ended there,” Nakajima said.
Fighters 3, Eagles 2: At Kitahiroshima Taxpayers Burden Field, Nippon Ham overcame a two-run deficit. Daigo Kawakamibata tripled and scored on a Kota Yazawa fifth-inning sac fly, Ariel Martinez hit a game-tying seventh-inning home run, and Kawakamibata doubling in the winning run to clinch the walk-off win over last-place Rakuten.
