For all those people who said Sunday, “Roki Sasaki only needs three more outs for a perfect game,” I give you the Lotte Marines offense. The Marines failed to score in nine innings for the right-hander, added another scoreless inning that afternoon before losing in 10, and then were shut out again on Tuesday.
There have been 94 regular-season no-hitters in Japanese pro baseball, there’s never been one that ended 0-0.
In other fun stuff, we had a fascinating left-handed matchup in Osaka between 41-year-old Hawks veteran and last year’s PL rookie of the year, 20-year-old Hiroya Miyagi, where Shuhei Fukuda proved he could use his head, while the Nippon Ham Fighters tried to extend their longest win streak under manager Tsuyoshi Shinjo to four games.
The Hanshin Tigers on Saturday became the first team to go beyond half capacity since the start of the pandemic, although the Koshien stadium crowd of 40,354 was still masked and prohibited from vocal cheering.
There, we had a pitchers’ duel between Aaron Wilkerson and Matt Shoemaker, which was fun, while Renato Núñez and Arismendy Alcantara did a ton of damage as Nippon Ham KO’ed the Marines, who were wearing super cool new uniforms on a day I’ll call “Roki Eve.”
Ready? OK. Let’s get started.
Saturday’s games
Tigers 2, Giants 1: At Koshien Stadium, former Milwaukee Brewer Aaron Wilkerson (1-0) outdueled veteran MLB hurler Matt Shoemaker (0-1) to win his Japan debut as the Hanshin Tigers scraped out their third win of the season and their first win streak.
