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NPB news: June 2, 2022

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The Central League didn’t let the Pacific League rest on its laurels on Thursday, answering the PL’s 5-1 interleague Wednesday with a 5-1 mark the day after, although it required a big comeback from Yakult to attain that.

Elsewhere, the players union met with NPB in a working session and presented its ideas for an “active player draft” that ideally would give some players without opportunities at their present clubs another chance with a different team. The union also submitted a list of questions about NPB’s umpiring policies so that players can be better informed of how things stand. This was a response to Roki Sasaki‘s May 24 confrontation with umpire Kazuyuki Shirai.

Thursday’s games

Swallows 7, Marines 3: At Jingu Stadium, Yakult overcame an early three-run deficit to maintain their three-game CL lead.

Yakult lefty Andrew Suarez threw a bunch of first-inning strikes with mistakes in the heart of the zone and it cost him three runs.

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Baseball

NPB news: June 1, 2022

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The CL and PL entered Wednesday’s games tied at 21-21 in interleague play, but the PL just missed another sweep. The SoftBank Hawks hit a franchise wins milestone and Jingu Stadium’s summer fireworks came early.

We also have the first returns from this year’s all-star fan vote.

Marines battery making mark in voting

One never knows what to make of the fan balloting, but for what it’s worth, Lotte’s Roki Sasaki leads the all-star fan voting for starting pitchers with 36,896 over Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s 16,302, while his 19-year-old batterymate Ko Matsukawa tops the PL catchers with 38,333 over SoftBank’s Takuya Kai’s 15,111.

Yomiuri rookie closer Taisei Ota leads the CL closer vote by 2-1 over last year’s rookie sensation, Hiroshima’s Ryoji Kuribayashi. In kind of a surprise, because popularity really IS the thing, Shugo Makita of DeNA is a deserving leader over Yakult’s Tetsuto Yamada.

Ryan McBroom of the Carp, leads the CL’s first base vote with 24,977 over, ugh, Sho Nakata with 20,557.

Nuff said about that.

Wednesday’s games

Hawks 6, Giants 3: At Tokyo Dome, Nao Higashihama (5-1) wasn’t quite as sharp as he was in his no-hitter, but he wasn’t far off that either, as he consistently threw first strikes and got ahead in counts, but allowed six hits, three solo home runs, two of them on first-pitch strikes, while walking none over seven innings.

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