The Eagles and Hawks matched up with first place in the Pacific League on the line, Masahiro Tanaka took the mound for the Giants for the first time at Koshien Stadium, and we got a taste for why it can be a pain in the butt to manage the Hanshin Tigers.
Thursday’s games
Buffaloes 7, Lions 1: Although the Lions are in last place, this was the first time this year, they’ve been swept in a three-game series.
Orix tied a record for consecutive wins at Osaka Dome with eight that the Buffaloes set in 2021, when the franchise won its first Japan Series since 1996, the year Ichiro Suzuki won his third straight Pacific League MVP as the Orix BlueWave’s headliner.
Kazuki Sugiyama‘s temper tantrum on Saturday broke not only his own hand, but forced the SoftBank Hawks’ hand in their stalemated negotiations with the guy Sugiyama replaced as closer last season, the forever-troubled Roberto Osuna.
Sugiyama broke his left hand when punching the bench in frustration at the Fighters’ ballpark in an eerie SoftBank flashback. In 2004, left-handed starter Toshiya Sugiuchi flew into a rage and sparred with the plastic bench at Fukuoka Dome.
The cost of his getting that out of his system was that the Hawks front office reopened negotiations with Osuna, who is reportedly on a contract that specifies he be used as a closer. After Osuna had more difficulty with batters this spring than he did with his girlfriend in 2018, when he was arrested for domestic assault, he declined to break camp with the major league club in the role the Hawks offered.
