Nippon Ham Fighters lefty Haruki Hosono issued a leadoff walk Tuesday before throwing Nippon Professional Baseball’s first no-hitter of the season. A month after turning 24, Hosono struck out 12, hit a batter and allowed another to reach on an error. He got a called third strike for the final out with his 128th pitch and seemed not to notice the game was over until his teammates stormed the mound.
Miguel Sano hit the 165th home run of his major league career, and his first in Japan, off Forrest Whitley, who allowed his first in Japan and the fourth of his big-league career, having surrendered three homers in 15-1/3 MLB innings.
Kenta Maeda pitched from a Japanese mound for the first time since 2014 in his Rakuten Eagles debut, the Swallows welcomed back a new version of a late fan favorite, while manager Takahiro Ikeyama continued to be a batting-order outlier.
Baby steps
NPB has a new wrinkle to its video challenge “request” system this year. For the first time since it was introduced in 2018, NPB is running the video reviews from a remote location in a similar fashion to how MLB does it. Until last year, umpires retreated to watch on a monitor under the stands before returning to announce their decision.
According to Osamu Ino, a former NPB umpire supervisor, the teams were responsible for supplying the monitors the umps used to determine their final decisions. Some owners, wishing to save money on something that put no yen in their bank accounts, provided only tiny portable poor-resolution monochrome monitors.
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