Lotte walks off with a sayonara win in the 11th. We now have sole possession of first place, thanks to an 8 game winning streak. More on innings 10-11 in a bit… Highlight of the night: Iguchi’s game tying solo HR It was night of missed opportunities at the plate and scrappy pitching for […]
A good old fashioned victory parade. Yeah, we didn’t see that one coming in September! I’m a doofus who can’t read a parade map properly, so instead of being in the thick of torrent of paper raining down upon Our Marines as they celebrated their amazing run to the Nippon Series title I got to
I was poking around the Marine Museum after the game to see what new goodies they had in the shop. There was some interesting new items in there, and a bunch of stuff on clearance, so I scooped up a bit, paid my yen, and wandered into the humid evening. Lotte had just dropped the
You see in the media that this is the halfway point of the season, even though the next game is game 91 for Our Marines, 54 games left in the season. It must be the “halfway” point and I’ve missed the punctuation. The curse of the hat – over. The next time I wore it
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]
