We entered the weekend with one of six playoff spots set and on Saturday we had three. The Yomiuri Giants clinched the Central League pennant by crushing the Hiroshima Carp, who tied a franchise record for losses in a month with their 19th, with Tomoyuki Sugano earning his 15th win, matching the two-time Sawamura Award winner’s second best season total from 2018.
To keep up the theme from last weekend’s post about how this year’s dead ball affected the fortunes of the Hiroshima Carp, “Better red AND dead,” the Giants joined the SoftBank Hawks as league champions. The Carp, Hawks and Giants are all good at winning without power because of their pitching and defense. When the power switched back on, the Carp faded, while the Giants and Hawks just rolled on.
As I mention on this week’s upcoming podcast with John E. Gibson, the Giants are a PITCHING and defense team, the Hawks a pitching and DEFENSE team, with Japan’s best offense.
Also on Saturday, the Nippon Ham Fighters walked off winners against the Hawks, bouncing back after SoftBank took a 6-5 eighth-inning lead on a three-run homer from Hotaka Yamakawa — his 34th moving him past Munetaka Murakami for the NPB lead – and a tie-breaking RBI triple from Tatsuru Yanagimachi. In the bottom of the ninth, Tatsuki Mizuno added to his small portfolio of big home runs by tying it with one out before Ariel Martinez singled in the winning run.
The Fighters’ win sewed up the second seed in the Pacific League playoffs. The Rakuten Eagles entered Saturday’s game against the Orix Buffaloes trailing the third-place Lotte Marines by one game, but fell two back after the Marines beat the Seibu Lions 4-1 and Masahiro Tanaka surrendered five runs in his belated season debut in a 5-2 defeat.
The CL playoff picture was a little murkier, with the second-place Hanshin Tigers losing 7-2 to the Yakult Swallows at Jingu Stadium to see their lead over the third-place DeNA BayStars shrink to four games.
On Sunday, the Tigers came from behind to beat the BayStars to lock up the CL’s second playoff spot with a 7-6 win over DeNA. The BayStars broke a 2-2 by scoring three runs in the sixth and another in the seventh, which Tigers skipper Akinobu Okada said had his spidy senses tingling.
“We’ve given up a lot of runs recently after the infield maintenance after five innings, and here they go and put up four runs,” Okada said. “But we kept it together and came back and got them. So that was a relief.”
The Carp set their franchise record for losses in a month with their 20th defeat, twice failing to protect one-run leads in a 4-3 decision to the Chunichi Dragons, with Kenta Bright–soon to get a second wind to jumpstart a career without Kazuyoshi Tatsunami as manager—delivering a tie-breaking pinch-hit home run off closer Ryoji Kuribayashi.
Also on Sunday, Jun Maeda, the 122nd player of 126 taken in NPB’s 2022 draft – in the 10th round of the developmental draft when SoftBank was the only team still picking, showed some evidence that his sub 2.00 Western League ERA is not a fluke with six shutout innings against the Nippon Ham Fighters in a 6-2 win after Jeter Downs opened the game with his first home run in Japan and went 3-for-5 with two RBIs.
