I need to apologize for being AWOL for the past few days as some big games took place. Since I came back from vacation, both league pennants were settled, and for the first time since the Nankai Hawks and Hanshin Tigers won their leagues in 1964, two Kansai teams are champions in the same year – largely because the Tigers have never had a dynasty the way the Hawks did in Osaka and the Hankyu Braves did up the hill at Nishinomiya Stadium before both franchises were sold after the 1988 season.
With the Buffaloes clinching on Wednesday, attention turned to the two tight battles for second and third in each league, while a player, who was at the forefront of a revolution in Japanese baseball, called it quits.
Thursday’s games
Hawks 4, Marines 2: At Fukuoka Dome, SoftBank’s former Fighters, Kensuke Kondo and Kohei Arihara (9-4) were the difference. Kondo’s 23rd home run made it 4-1 in the first inning after Gregory Polanco retained his share of the PL home run lead with his 25th in the top of the inning.
Atsuki Taneichi (10-6) struck out five straight after Kondo’s home run, and his seven Ks over five innings pushed him into the league lead with 153, ahead of Yoshinobu Yamamoto‘s 148.
The third-place Hawks, whose only losing records this season are against the two teams they’re tussling with for two playoff spots, the Marines and Eagles, moved to within a game of the Marines, and pulled 1-1/2 in front of the Eagles.
Lions 7, Eagles 2: At Seibu Half Dome, Tatsuya Imai (10-4) allowed two runs, both scored by former Lion Hideto Asamura, over eight innings. Kento Watanabe‘s two-run second-inning homer gave Imai a lead, and David MacKinnon, who homered the night before, hit his 14th and 15th, a two-run shot in the third and a three-run dinger in the fifth.
Rakuten’s Takahiro Shiomi (0-1) allowed four runs over four innings in his season debut.
Giants 5, Tigers 3: At Koshien Stadium, Yuji Akahoshi (4-5) worked eight innings, and after being held to one hit over the first five innings by Koyo Aoyagi (8-5) Yoshihiro Maru singled in a run and Takumi Oshiro hit a grand slam. Johan Mieses led off Hanshin’s ninth with a pinch-hit home run, and Teruaki Sato made it 5-3 with a two-run shot before Kota Nakagawa entered the game, restored order and earned his 13th save. The Giants win improved their record against Hanshin this year to 6-18-1 and moved them to within three games of third-place DeNA.
Dragons 9, Swallows 8: At Jingu Stadium, Chunichi’s third time was a charm, as in their third look at Cy Sneed (7-8), who surrendered six sixth-inning runs as Yakult blew a four-run lead in this CL mud-wrestling match.
Uchikawa hangs it up
Seiichi Uchikawa, who became the first CL star to move directly to the PL in his prime as a free agent, a move that was a key to the current Hawks dynasty, said Thursday that this season, spent playing independent league ball in Kyushu, would be his last as a pro.
Until Uchikawa, a Kyushu native, eft the Yokohama BayStars as a free agent to join the Hawks, all the big free agent traffic across league boundaries had been from the PL to the CL.
A star for Japan in the WBC, Uchikawa won his first batting title in Yokohama in 2008, and in 2011 joined the Hawks, where he won his second batting title and became the second player to win one in each league.
He played the last two seasons for the Yakult Swallows but was unproductive in limited playing time. He finished his NPB career with 2,186 career hits in 2,022 games and 196 home runs.
