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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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NPB news: Sept. 2, 2022

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Friday was Roki Day in Chiba and we are celebrating even if Marines fans might not be, while Munetaka Murakami broke out of his two-game homerless slump, making sports editors around Japan salivate at the thought of putting out click bait with the names “Oh, Giants, Matsui” in them.

Buffaloes 1, Marines 0: At Chiba Marine Stadium, with the Buffaloes repeatedly trying to bunt their way on, Roki Sasaki (8-4) retired the first 12 batters—the first three on five pitches–before Orix’s Elmore Leonard (“310 to Yuma”) gang, stole a run in the fourth. Yuma Tongu was hit by a pitch, went to third on a Yuma Mune single and scored on a groundout.

Sasaki had his good—if not his fastest fastball—and went the distance for the first time since his April perfect game against Orix, but five useful innings from lefty Sachiya Yamasaki (5-7), three more from righty Soichiro Yamazaki, and a good ninth with some nasty splitters from rookie Shota Abe was enough.

“Our top two hitters got on base, but the guys after them were not able to get the swings they should have.”

– Marines manager Tadahito Iguchi

Swallows 5, Dragons 0: At Jingu Stadium, Yudai Ono (6-8) missed over the plate with a 2-1 cutter to Murakami with two men on in the third inning, and he blasted into the right-field stands for his 50th home run of the season, which sent Japan’s media into a spasm as the 22-year-old matched Hideki Matsui’s career high.

“He is the best player in Japan by far, and I’m glad he’s on our team so I don’t have to pitch to him.”

–Yakult Swallows pitcher Cy Sneed on Munetaka Murakami

Cy Sneed (8-5) struck out five, walked one and allowed three singles over seven innings to get the win as Yakult pulled seven games clear of the DeNA BayStars.

Murakami is the fourth Japanese hitter to reach 50 behind Matsui (50) with the Giants in 2002, Makoto Kozuru (51), a remarkable power-speed hitter with the 1950 CL champion Shochiku Robins, Katsuya Nomura (52) with the 1963 Nankai Hawks, and Hiromitsu Ochiai with the 1985 Lotte Orions.

There have been 10 seasons with 51-plus homers in Japanese pro baseball, including two each by Sadaharu Oh and Tuffy Rhodes, who each hit 51 and 55.

Oh would be included among a list of Japan-born hitters, but Japan long allowed only fathers to pass on their Japanese citizenship to their children. Oh’s father was Chinese, so his children had no choice but to be Chinese citizens, until their dad switched allegiance to Taiwan out of his frustration with the direction the Communist Party was taking his homeland.

His not being Japanese, however, won’t stop the scavengers who run Japan’s media from calling him the Japanese home run record holder just because it isn’t true.

Hawks 4, Lions 0: At Fukuoka Dome, Kenta Imamiya ended SoftBank’s scoring drought when he broke up a fifth-inning scoreless tie with his fourth home run of the season off Wataru Matsumoto (6-5).

Nao Higashihama (9-6) kept the Lions hitters in check until they loaded the bases with two outs in the sixth on an infield single in which the right-hander appeared to strain a leg muscle. Yuki Matsumoto came in and struck out veteran Takumi Kuriyama and preserve the shutout. Alfredo Despaigne singled in a run in the sixth and SoftBank pulled away with two in the eighth.

The win moved the Hawks to within winning percentage points of first, with Orix a game back in third and Rakuten 2-1/5 further back on the outside looking in.

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