Late in Tuesday’s game with Los Gigantes del Yomiuri I had a chat with one of the Chiba Marine security guards I know in passing. Him: “This feels good.” Me: “Yeah, yeah it does.” Him: “I went to both of the games in Tokyo Dome. Bad, very bad.” Me: “Mmm.” Him: ((pauses)) “This feels REALLY […]
Where did all this pitching come from? In the last three games we’ve seen great pitching from Yoshimi, Shunsuke, Itoh, Yabuta, and Kobayashi. Tonight we added to that list with Bill Murphy, Kentaro Hashimoto, and Takuya Furuya. Aren’t we supposed to be limping, imploring our wounded arms to get better soon? Aren’t we supposed be
I made a road trip last weekend to see our guys play at Koshien, home of the Hanshin Tigers. I haven’t yet gotten around to writing up that trip (maybe tomorrow? How long have I been saying that?) but it didn’t work out so well, either for the team or for myself as it was
This is 90% picture post and 10% game talk, though if you added it up by KB it would be more like 99.9% picture post and, well, you get the idea. Much like Friday night’s game this game was over very, very early as Lotte poured on the offense over visiting Yakult in a 20
I originally wrote this post as “On Pitching: Lotte vs Kyojin, Interleague Games 3 & 4”. It was a bit of a sarcastic title as there was little pitching to be found in that series. Actually, Naruse was quite decent in Saturday’s 4-2 loss in Tokyo Dome, if you look past the three HRs he gave up – which were, incidentally, numbers 14, 15, and 16 on the year. I was at Tokyo Dome on Sunday for Lotte’s 10-8 loss – yet again, the pitching was purely to blame as Lotte hurlers coughed up 5 HRs. Ohmine took the loss on 4 ER but he actually pitched much better than his replacement, Kodai Matsumoto. The 1st inning HR Ohmine gave up to Abe was probably the biggest HR I have ever seen in person. It was listed at 145m (~475ft) and I don’t doubt that for a second.
Despite the 5 HRs given up the Lotte offense made a go of it and tried to wipe out a 6 run deficit in the 9th with blasts of their own. Nishioka started with a 2-run shot (scoring Aono, making his first appearance at ichi-gun since 2007) and Kim Tae Kyun hit his second of the night into the left field stands. The rally would fall two runs short, though. [Click for more]
