Saturday we had a special matchup between a former frontline MLB pitcher and Cy Young Award winner, and a guy who was a top U.S. amateur prospect that turned pro in Japan and is now turning into something special. Such was Dallas Keuchel’s introduction to Japanese pro baseball.

Elsewhere, the failure to defend against some heads-up base running cost a pennant contender a win, a pitcher with high expectations heaped on his shoulders won for the first time in over two months, while we had a rare bench-clearing showdown.

Off the field, the Dragons deactivated pitcher Shinnosuke Ogasawara after his abbreviated start on Friday.

I also owe readers a slight apology since yesterday’s Hawks-Marines game was mistakenly said to have taken place in Kitahiroshima, Hokkaido, instead of at Fukuoka Dome in naming rights iteration No. 4.

In other stuff, I am back doing what I did from 2006 to 2020, crunching data from websites and making sense of it. And the first thing that came out of that was a look at called strikes and what they tell us about the teams that get more of them than others.

Saturday’s games

Buffaloes 3, Fighters 0: At Osaka UFO Dome, Hiroya Miyagi, expected to be the ace of the Orix Buffaloes staff this year following the departure of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, earned his first win since June 27 to improve to 4-8 as he allowed three singles and a walk, with no Fighters runner getting as far as third base.

“I had times when my tempo was just too good, and would have times when I was just terrible,” said Miyagi, who had his good fastball, while regularly locating his breaking pitches on the very edge of the zone.

Miyagi gave up a sizzling single to Shun Mizutani in the first but erased the runner with a double play and kept hot-hitting Kotaro Kiyomiya from hitting the ball out of the infield.

“Miyagi was good today,” Kiyomiya said. “But I wasn’t.”

Tomoya Mori opened the scoring in the fourth with a solo homer off Drew VerHagen (1-1), his eighth. A Kotaro Kurebayashi single, a Keita Nakagawa RBI double and a Masahiro Nishino RBI single completed the scoring in the fifth.

Andres Machado earned his 18th save for the Buffaloes.