The good news is that I don’t have COVID again, although this cold is mimicking the COVID symptoms I had in March. The bad news is that it wiped me out for most of the past two days, right up until the end of Wednesday’s Foreplay Series final stage.

The six-game best-of-seven home-team-advances-on-a-tie series made Kansai Japan’s capital of baseball this week. The Orix Buffaloes sent Yoshinobu Yamamoto against Lotte’s Manabu Mima, which seemed like a horrible mismatch, while Shoki Murakami, who is going to get my vote for Central League Rookie of the Year, started for Hanshin against Hiroshima’s Allen Kuri.

On Tuesday, while I was enjoying an extremely high fever, we learned that the SoftBank Hawks have let manager Hiroshi Fujimoto’s two-year contract expire.

Wednesday’s games

Tigers 4, Carp 1: At Koshien Stadium, Shoki Murakami did it all for Hanshin, striking out six batters over six innings, and breaking a 1-1 tie with an RBI double as the Tigers took a 2-0 final stage lead into Thursday’s game, which will see Hanshin’s Masashi Ito go against Carp ace Daichi Osera.

Hanshin’s hitters came out swinging, and Kuri needed just seven pitches despite giving up a double to rookie Shota Morishita.

Kaito Kozono tripled to lead off the Carp’s fourth and scored on a Shogo Akiyama sacrifice fly to straight-away right that’s probably a two-run homer everywhere else in NPB. In the bottom of the inning, Morishita fouled off three two-strike pitches before Kuri hung a slider up in the zone and he crushed it for a solo homer.

The Tigers went to the well again after Murakami stranded a runner in scoring position in the top of the fifth. A one-out hit batsman and a Seiya Kinami single brought Hiroshima’s infield in, and Murakami’s routine grounder got past rookie Yuya Nirasawa for a double that could just have easily been ruled an error.

With the infield still in, another routine grounder got through the infield for a one-out two-run single by Koji Chikamoto because Murakami got as big a lead as he could get and scored easily from second.

Kuri got out of the inning, and neither team would mount a threat again.

Tigers manager Akinobu Okada, who unexpectedly quit in 2009 after being bounced out of the playoffs in the first stage for the second straight season, improved to 2-8 in the postseason in his managing career.