Sunday was Roki Day, and I’m sad if you missed it, because while the final results were less than perfect, his pitching was – until the fifth inning when a few things went awry – as good as I’ve ever seen from him, and I’ve seen virtually every inning he’s thrown as a professional pitcher.

As he did last Sunday, when he outpitched Sasaki at Koshien, Hanshin’s Hiroto Saiki dealt more disappointment to another PL club, while DeNA became one of the few teams to solve Hiroya Miyagi. In Fukuoka, Tomoyuki Sugano made his season debut for the Giants after being sidelined all spring with fitness issues.

Sunday’s games

Marines 5, Carp 4: At Chiba Marine Stadium, Roki Sasaki (5-1)’s principle Achilles heel has been the command of both his fastball and splitter, and for four innings on Sunday, it was as good as it’s ever been. He attacked the zone with both those two big pitches and decent hop on his fastball, which has been another sore spot for him since May 2022.

For four innings, the Carp could not make anything resembling good contact off him, and that continued into the fifth, when he gave up a scratch infield single on a little bouncer for a leadoff runner. He then got dinged by umpire Takahiro Tsuchiyama, who followed custom and declined to call 0-2 strikes on the corner to the next two hitters, one of whom, Kosuke Tanaka, took a tough high fastball for a well-earned walk.

Matt Davidson got the barrel on a slider Sasaki had been tormenting him with for the first solid contact in play by a Carp hitter. It was Sasaki’s 33^rd pitch of the inning, and he began muscling up to get out of the inning and began throwing pitches with less movement. Ryutaro Hatsuki was able to foul off four two-strike pitches, including one at 165 kph (102.5 mph) matching the fastest pitch recorded in Japan by a domestic pitcher, a record he shared with Shohei Ohtani. Hatsuke then smashed a straight fastball between third and short for a two-run single.

Sasaki got a four-run lead in the third on Koki Yamaguchi’s grand slam. Sasaki allowed two runs on five hits while striking out 10 and walking one and throwing 109 pitches. It was a game that very early could have turned into an historic performance but didn’t but damn he was good, doing what he did in last year’s perfect game, throwing his splitter in the zone when he wanted to and locating his fastball.