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NPB news: Sept. 11, 2022

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The Yakult Swallows went from being a fish food feast to creating famine in Yokohama, while the Pacific League lead changed again and another pitcher may be headed to the next “Yuki Yanagita got me too” support group, while Adam Walker had a big game, and Hiroto Kobukata made sure the PL playoff is not exclusively about three teams.

Before we get into it, one of my favorite unbelievable Yanagita homers, from the May 26, 2021, interleague game against the Giants.

Let’s get to the games:

Swallows 1, BayStars 0: At Yokohama Stadium, Yasuhiro Ogawa (7-6) went seven innings, allowing five hits but no walks while striking out four and singling in the game’s only run in the fifth inning off Shinichi Onuki (10-7). This game was not that close as Yakult stranded 10 runners. Noboru Shimizu and Scott McGough each allowed a hit in a scoreless inning with McGough earning his 36th save.

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NPB news: Sept. 7, 2022

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There was a plentiful supply of whoop-ass in Japan Wednesday, when it was not a good night for most of the teams in the top half of their league’s rankings.

Earlier on Wednesday I woke up to some weird talk of people saying stupid things about MLB home run records, and realized Japan regularly partakes in its own record stupidity, and so I had to write about it. We also had the monthly awards, which went to form.

The guns of August

Munetaka Murakami won his third straight CL hitter of the month award, while Shota Imanaga, who went 5-0 while leading the league with 36 innings and a 1.25 ERA. It was his second award of the season after he won for May.

The PL hitter’s award went to Rakuten’s Hiroaki Shimauchi and was also well deserved after he led the PL with a .381 average, 17 runs, 37 hits, 64 total bases, 21 RBIs, and a .660 slugging average. It was the first monthly award for the 11th-year pro.

The pitcher was a kind of a surprise since it went to Orix’s Hiroya Miyagi, who had a 3-1 record rather than Kona Takahashi who went 3-0 with a good ERA. Miyagi threw his first career shutout and led the league with a 1.14 ERA.

Pitcher’s arsenal reports

Starting today, I’m going to begin sharing the fruits of one of my projects, collecting and analyzing pitch-by-pitch data. There’s precious little publicly available, but we can have some fun by seeing how pitchers’ arsenals and individual pitches shape up against other players: I’ll be talking about whether pitches are thrown ahead or behind in counts, how effective they are — not just in final results but also in contributing to better counts, how often their missed, called for strikes or put into play.

OK, so let’s get to the games, the starting pitchers for Thursday and more.

Giants 18, BayStars 3: At Tokyo Dome, Adam Walker hit a fourth-inning grand slam, Gregory Polanco added a three-run homer in the same nine-run inning, and added a two-run shot, his 21st, in a five-run seventh. Giants rookie Iori Yamasaki (5-4) allowed a run over seven innings, while DeNA starter Haruhiro Hamaguchi (7-5) allowed 11 runs on 10 hits and two walks over 3-2/3 innings. Ouch.

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