On Thursday, the Central League’s contenders and pretenders had the day off to reflect on their sins, while two teams with PL postseason aspirations, the Lotte Marines and Rakuten Eagles were in action against teams with nothing to lose. The Marines sent strikeout machine Atsuki Taneichi against the Fighters in Hokkaido, where he went into battle essentially unarmed. Taneichi entered the game trailing Yoshinobu Yamamoto by five, 158-153 and his 10.35 strikeouts per nine innings is second only to teammate Roki Sasaki‘s 13.35.

Late on Wednesday night, we learned 40-year-old Nobuhiro Matsuda will wrap up his career at season’s end having played 11 games so far for the Yomiuri Giants after 17 for the SoftBank Hawks, who made him a premium pre-draft signing out of Asia University in 2005.

A day after Lotte failed to deactivate a player for COVID, they were back on board that train, deactivating Taiga Hirasawa. On a positive note, Hiromi Oka and Takashi Ogino returned from brief COVID deactivations.

Thursday’s games

Marines 9, Fighters 2: At Kitahiroshima Taxpayers Burden Field, Atsuki Taneichi faced Nippon Ham without his best pitch, and without having to be on the lookout for that splitter, the Fighters batters beat the daylights out of him. While Haruka Nemoto (3-0) struck out seven while allowing a run over six innings in his best start of the season, Nemoto threw three splitters in the early innings and then they disappeared.

With two outs and none on in the fourth:

• Taiki Narama lashed a first-pitch hanging two-seamer for a single
• Yua Tamaya put a good swing on a 1-0 slider away and pulled it on the ground past first.
• Another good slider, 3-2 away, and Chusei Mannami got enough on it to get it past short.
• A hanging 2-2 slider away, and Ryohei Hosokawa poked it between third and short.
• Kotaro Kiyomiya put a good swing on a good 1-2 fastball low in the zone and drilled it over second.
• A 3-0 fastball down the pipe and Ariel Martinez doesn’t try to do too much with it, just lashes it to left. It’s 7-1 Fighters and Taneichi’s gone and the game’s over.

Taneichi recorded four strikeouts, leaving him one back of Yamamoto, who can now cruise to his third straight PL strikeout title.

Eagles 9, Buffaloes 5: At Miyagi Stadium, Rakuten twice came from behind to move from fourth place to third, a half-game ahead of Lotte with much of the heavy lifting done by reliever Seiryu Uchi, who came in the third for Rakuten and faced nine batters over three innings, to give the Eagles space to catch up.

Tomoya Noguchi‘s three-run second-inning homer put the Buffaloes in the driver’s seat in Sendai, but Kohei Azuma, who was solid in his previous four starts, surrendered four runs over five innings. Daichi Suzuki hit a solo homer for the Eagles in the bottom of the second. Hideto Asamura tied it with an RBI single to cap a two-run third-inning rally.

Hiroto Kobukata who’d reached base his first two times but been forced out, walked with one out in the fifth and scored the go-ahead run on a Yuya Ogo double before the Buffaloes came from behind. Marwin Gonzalez‘s two-out sixth-inning single tied it but Ogo threw a runner out at the plate to end the inning. Shuhei Fukuda, who’d made the out at the plate, made up for that by singling in the go-ahead run in the seventh.

Orix’s Shota Abe, in to protect a one-run eighth-inning lead, instead got hammered, allowing five runners to reach, all of whom scored, with both of his outs coming on sac flies.

Matsuda to hang ’em up

Nobuhiro Matsuda is a guy who belongs on a baseball field. For 18 years, he’s embodied the game, as an energetic and dynamic leader. He won eight Pacific League Golden Glove Awards at third base, and surprisingly for a guy who hit 301 career home runs, just one Best Nine – because in many of his better seasons he had the misfortune of playing the same position as six-time PL home run champ Takeya Nakamura.

Matsuda was a distinctive figure. Unafraid to be flamboyant, he would shout at the top of his lungs in practice when doing toss batting, and would hop on one foot when he swung and missed at a pitch.

He had a chance to play in MLB as a utility player, only to have a lawyer friend of his wife’s poison his MLB agent’s negotiations by talking with the San Diego Padres’ people in Fukuoka, and then representing Matsuda in his huge multiyear deal in December 2015 to remain with the Hawks. It has been a ton of fun watching him play baseball.