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 11^th-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 21^st, 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.