We had our first elimination games of Japan’s postseason Sunday, a couple of MLB player cameos, and our 2nd “that could have been his last pitch for this team” moment of the week.
Sunday’s games
Carp 4, Deniers 2: At New Hiroshima Citizens Stadium, we had another pitchers’ duel, this time between DeNA’s Shota Imanaga and Hiroshima’s Masato Morishita. Imanaga surrendered a first-inning homer to the wonderful Ryoma Nishikawa, and Morishita made that one-run lead stand up through five. Rookie Takuma Hayashi doubled to open the sixth and after a sacrifice moved him to third, manager Takahiro Arai swapped out his starter for another right-hander, Haruki Omichi.
Omichi, whose best pitches this year have been his slider and curve, took out Taisei Ota and Shugo Maki on six fastballs, that they both got under. Hiroshima, the CL’s best pinch-hitting team this year, got a pinch-hit homer from Shota Suekane to make it 2-0, but the much maligned Edwin Escobar, struck out Shogo Akiyama with the bases loaded to end the inning with what might have been his last pitch for DeNA.
The Carp turned their lead over to Shota Nakazaki, their closer from their 2016-2018 championship seasons, and he surrendered a couple of no-out singles. A bunt put both in scoring position, from where a Taiki Sekine single off Nik Turley brought in one run, and a Neftali Soto sac fly tied it.
Taiga Kamichatani pitched a 1-2-3 seventh against the bottom of the Carp order, but two singles and his failure to get an out at third on a sacrifice bunt allowed Hiroshima to load the bases with no outs. Pinch-hitter Kosuke Tanaka, another former star from the Carp’s championship years, ripped Kamichatani’s first pitch for a single, and Shogo Akiyama, whose deep fly against a drawn-in outfield with two outs in the 11th inning scored Saturday’s winning run instead of being caught for the third out, delivered an insurance run with a sac fly.
Ryoji Kuribayashi, for whom much of 2023 was a lost season, got the final outs to save it send the Carp to Koshien to play the final stage of the CL Foreplay Series to see who competes in the Japan Series.
Carp Hall of Fame outfielder and former manager Koji Yamamoto, who was working as an analyst on the TV broadcast, tossed out the first pitch, and as he was getting ready, another former Carp star, Cubs outfielder Seiya Suzuki walked to the plate carrying a bat to take the obligatory swing and miss.
Hawks 3, Marines 1: At Chiba Marine Stadium, Kohei Arihara worked six innings for SoftBank but had little trouble after two of the first three batters reached and Gregory Polanco tied it 1-1 in the first with a sacrifice fly. The Hawks’ one-two punch of Kensuke Kondo and Yuki Yanagita drove in SoftBank’s first two runs, Kondo singling in the first and Yanagita doubling to put the visitors in front in the third before scoring on an Akira Nakamura single off Lotte starter Yuji Nishino.
After getting their butts kicked Saturday, this game was much closer than the score. Yanagita’s “double” was a little flare over third that rolled into foul territory, and Nakamura’s single was a perfectly placed bouncer between Nishino’s legs and just past the glove of his shortstop.
Former Hawks ace and current New York Met Kodai Senga made the big cameo in Chiba, sitting in the ballpark’s nose-bleed press box in the seat in front of my buddy Jason Coskrey of the Japan Times.
Imanaga: Too early to tell about MLB
Lefty Shota Imanaga, who started Samurai Japan’s final against the US in the World Baseball Classic, may have thrown his last fastball for DeNA. Having said he wants to be posted, the team is now going into the usual song and dance that accompanies all announcements of big decisions in Japanese sports that were made well before.
Japanese organizations typical stage their announcements on the day most convenient for everyone involved to be available to hold a suitable press conference, regardless of the fact that the rest of the world already knows what’s going on.
It’s like when I worked for Yomiuri, and they pretended that their readers didn’t watch TV or the internet, and so if we didn’t tell them about something, such as the massive 2020 protests in Peru against Japan’s media darling, Peru President Alberto Fujimori, no one would know. Instead, the first word printed in the Daily Yomiuri about Fujimori’s difficulties after months of protests came the day he was ousted from office.
Imanaga said after the game he hadn’t yet made up his own mind, which may or may not be the case. He was telling me all year that he doesn’t throw hard enough to pitch in MLB, and there are teams that will look at his 1.78-meter frame and say he isn’t big enough, but he gets tremendous spin on his fastball, throws a good changeup and can change speeds with the best of them. His denial, however, could easily be what the team told him to say.
Tatsuhiro Hagwara, the team’s head of operations said as if he was uncertain that his team had not been eliminated, “It’s a matter we are set to consider after the season ends. We’re waiting for that. We will continue talking.”
