Tag Archives: Roki Sasaki

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NPB games, news of Oct. 11, 2019

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“Our backs were to the wall tonight, but … that is where the Hanshin Tigers thrive.

–Hanshin Tigers third baseman Yusuke Oyama after his ninth-inning home run broke a 6-6 tie and allowed the Tigers to wintheir seventh elimination game in the past month.

Tigers 7, Giants 6

At Tokyo Dome, 39-year-old closer Kyuji Fujikawa worked two scoreless innings to collect the win as Hanshin won a see-saw Game 3 in the Central League Climax Series final stage on Friday to keep their season alive. League champ Yomiuri needs only a tie over the final three games to advance to the Japan Series for the first time in six years.

Giants cleanup hitter Kazuma Okamoto just missed a third-inning grand slam, with a double off the top of the center field wall in Yomiuri’s three-run third. That gave the hosts a 3-1 lead. Hanshin, which had never led in the series until Ryutaro Umeno homered to open the scoring in the third, retook the lead in a five-run fifth.

The Giants faced bases-loaded situations in the third, fourth and fifth — when rookie Koji Chikamoto capped the inning with a three-run triple. The 23-year-old Okamoto tied it 6-6, however, in the bottom of the inning with a two-run homer, his second of the series.

Each team wasted a good late-inning scoring opportunity before Oyama put an easy swing on a back-foot slider from lefty Kota Nakagawa and lofted it over Tokyo Dome’s shallow wall in straight-away right.

Asked about what it felt like to go into an elimination game, Oyama said, it was nothing new for the Tigers.

“We only got here after facing a bunch of these ‘must-win games’ at the end of the regular season, but that is where the Hanshin Tigers thrive,” he said.

Game highlights are HERE.

Hawks 7, Lions 5

At MetLife Dome, Kodai Senga struck out 10 while allowing two singles and three walks over eight innings as SoftBank pressed league champion Seibu to the brink of elimination.

For the second-straight day, Taisei Makihara singled to open the game and scored on an Akira Nakamura first-inning single. But while Nakamura was the Hawks’ big bopper on Thursday, it was their second baseman’s night Friday.

Makihara, who made a good play to defuse a third-inning situation before it erupted, doubled in two runs with a hard grounder over the first base bag in the second, hit a two-run homer in the fourth, and Senga did most of the remaining work.

The Hawks are trying to match a franchise record by appearing in three consecutive Japan Series, something their Osaka-based predecessors, the Nankai Hawks achieved from 1951-1953 and again from 1964-1966.

The Lions, meanwhile are trying to avoid becoming the first PL regular season leader to lose the final stage of the PL postseason since the Daiei Hawks lost to the Lions in 2004 and Bobby Valentine’s Lotte Marines in 2005.

Game highlights are HERE.

News

High school fireballer Sasaki completes talks with teams

Flame-throwing right-hander Roki Sasaki met with scouts from the Pacific League’s SoftBank Hawks and Seibu Lions on Friday, the last of 11 clubs slated to meet with the pitcher who will likely go in the first round of NPB’s amateur draft on Thursday.

The Nippon Ham Fighters, potentially a prime destination for a player with his eye on a major league future, did not meet with the youngster, although the club has already asserted it will nominate Sasaki as its first draft choice. Although Sasaki suggested last week he would play for any NPP team and had no thoughts at the moment about playing in the majors, the Fighters have a history of using the posting system to allow their stars to get an early start in the majors.

The Hawks, and the Central League’s Yomiuri Giants, are at the other end of that spectrum, and to date have refused to post players, forcing them to wait until they are eligible for international free agency to leave.

The Hawks’ chief amateur scout, Yutaro Fukuyama, tried to sell the youngster on Hawks owner Masayoshi Son’s vision of creating the world’s strongest team and its strong development setup.

“He’s one of our candidates for the first pick,” Fukuyama said. “No player in my 20 years of scouting has offered the promise that this amazing athlete does. His ceiling is impossible to imagine.”

Fighters throw in towel for Hancock, Barbato

The Nippon Ham Fighters said Friday they will not bring first-year pitchers Johnny Barbato and Justin Hancock back for the 2020 season.

The 28-year-old Hancock injured his right shoulder on May 11, and has twice gone back to the United States for examinations. He pitched in eight games with one loss, two holds and two saves and posted a 9.00 ERA. Barbato, who was used in relief and as a short starter, pitched in 15 games, going 2-2 with one hold with a 5.63 ERA.

Baseball, Commentary, News

No decision for Sasaki

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Roki Sasaki announced Wednesday that he has registered for Nippon Professional Baseball’s amateur draft, displaying no interest in being a trailblazer in the ways of how amateur players deal with NPB teams.

The Ofunato High School pitcher was clocked (by one Chunichi Dragons scout) at 163 kph in April at a tryout camp for prospective national Under-18 players. The other scouts in attendance had him at 161, which is still just over 100 mph. He hit just under 100 mph in August’s Iwate-prefectural tournament.

Over a third of MLB’s 30 teams have been following the lanky right-hander with interest in hopes perhaps that he would bypass the NPB draft and sign directly with an MLB team in the 2020-2021 international signing window starting next June.

“I can’t even think of the major leagues now,” Sasaki said. “I want to do my best in Japan first.”

Because of his talent, Sasaki could have told the 80 or so members of the media what NPB teams were most frightened of: that he would only sign with a team that was willing to post him or that whoever drafted him would have to speak to his agent.

Those things could still come to pass, but don’t hold your breath. Japanese youth baseball teaches a lot of things that are not very useful, but it also teaches humility. When you go to the baseball ground, players doff their caps to every adult they pass and greet them.

It would have been a huge shock for Sasaki–even with a former pro ballplayer as his high school manager–to break with that tradition of subservience by assuming he had any right to sit at the same table with the teams that are now lining up to exploit him.

“There are 12 (Japanese) teams, and I desire to do my best wherever I go,” the 1.90-meter Sasaki said. “I want to become the kind of player who inspires children to dream and hope.”

That’s the script he’s been learning since he was a boy.

If he does sign with the Hawks or the Giants, he has to know what Koji Uehara didn’t realize when he turned pro with Yomiuri after turning down a huge offer from the Angels.

“Nine years (to free agency) is an awfully long time,” he said 10 years ago in an interview with the Daily Yomiuri. “But when you’re young you don’t think about that. You only think about the next step.”

One would hope that before he signs he gets a chance to sit down and chat with star Hawks pitcher Kodai Senga. One of Japan’s premier pitchers for the past four years, Senga is now 26. Because he was shuttled in and out of the Hawks roster for four years, he has only amassed five years of service time, although he turned pro out of high school.

At this pace, Senga will be eligible to file for international free agency after the 2023 season. He has asked SoftBank to post him and they’ve said, “We appreciate your concern, but we own you.”

Ideally, Sasaki would sign with a club that would promise to post him when he’s 25, so he can learn how to pitch in an extremely competitive environment, enter MLB as an international professional free agent, and reap his club a rich reward.

If he signs with the Hawks or Giants it will be another case of a pitcher spinning his gears, waiting for a chance that won’t come until he’s too old to learn some of the lessons he needs to realize his maximum potential. There’s no place better in the world to learn how to pitch than Japan, but there are things you can’t learn here.