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Nippon Professional Baseball opened its regular season Friday with six games, including three shutouts, a real butt-kicking and two walk-off wins. Here’s a brief look at what happened.
Friday’s games
Buffaloes 3, Eagles 2: At Osaka UFO Dome, Orix lefty Hiroya Miyagi was about as dominant as he’s been all spring, and it looked like Ryo Ota’s two-run second-inning home off Takahisa Hayakawa was going to decide it. After seven perfect innings from Miyagi, who struck out seven, Rakuten, scratched out a run in the eighth and tied it in the ninth off Andres Machado, who got the win when new import Edward Olivares singled with one out and catcher Kenya Wakatsuki singled in the winning run.
Tigers 4, Carp 0: At New Hiroshima Citizens Stadium, Hanshin’s 2003 MVP, Shoki Murakami allowed four hits and a walk while striking out seven on 135 pitches over 8-2/3 innings. Teruaki Sato hit a two-run first-inning homer off Masato Morishita, both of whom have talked about moving to MLB, and Suguru Iwazaki entered with two on and two outs in the ninth to get the save.
Fighters 2, Lions 0: At the roofed stadium formerly known as Prince, Shoma Kanemura won a complete-game duel with Tatsuya Imai, with both guys throwing 105 pitches. Kotaro Kiyomiya, hit his first homer of the season for the second straight year at Seibu’s hanger, breaking up the scoreless game in the seventh, although this time he didn’t wait until July to start banging. Franmil Reyes, who led Nippon Ham with 25 homers last year after struggling through the first half, also got in the groove early with a hit and a home run.
BayStars 5, Dragons 0: At Yokohama Stadium, Katsuki Azuma struck out five, allowed four hits and walked none over seven innings, Tyler Austin doubled in a first-inning run off Hiroto Takahashi, who was anything but himself, allowing five runs in five-plus innings on eight hits, a walk and a hit batsman while striking out two.
Marines 8, Hawks 2: At Fukuoka (Softbank Subsidiary Name) Dome, Kohei Arihara took a 1-0 lead into the sixth, when Lotte whacked him for six runs, capped by a two-run Toshiya Sato homer.
Giants 6, Swallows 5, 10 innings: At Tokyo Ugly Dome, there was a game in three acts, a tense pitchers’ duel between Shosei Togo, who started with four perfect innings, and Yasunobu Okugawa, who survived a lot of early traffic to keep up. But after getting soft contact for four innings, Togo began serving up cookies and Yakult kept putting good swings on them in a four-run fifth. Domingo Santana homered in the fifth, and Okugawa, who declined to have Tommy John surgery after a serious elbow sprain in 2022, threw six scoreless innings.
New import Trey Cabbage, whose name is pronounced in Japanese almost how it sounds instead of how Japanese pronounce the vegetable – kyabetsu – went 3-for-4 with two doubles, a two-run eighth-inning homer that put Yomiuri on the board and contributed to the three-run ninth, when Yakult closer and former Giant, Kazuto Taguchi hit him on the hand.
Another new Giant, Raidel Martinez, threw a 1-2-3 10th, and a third new Giant, catcher Takuya Kai, who started the ninth with his second hit of the game, did that in the 10th. And just so you know this was Japan, Yakult manager Shingo Takatsu did his thing and pulled the outfield in with the go-ahead runner on second and one out, and a routine fly to left plated the winning run.
Japanese baseball is definitely feels as if it is back, although it never left us.
