You might not have been tracking along with me, but Hanshin hit just 10 home runs the entire month of September. It is a big reason that the team was unable to get on a roll, and ultimately, it saw the team drop into second place. But tonight, the two sluggers who were in the…
It is hard to win games in which you serve up three home runs, especially if you only hit one yourselves. The team had chances, pulled even a couple of times, but simply could not get the job done. They got out-homered in the series 6-1 and the three-game party at Tokyo Dome over the…
This simply was not the Tigers’ night. They actually had some reasonably well-hit balls that went directly at their outfielders. They also created two good chances (thanks to poor control by the Carp pitchers). Starter Takumi Akiyama was quite strong, giving up just two runs in seven innings of work (and striking out nine!) but…
The Tigers got off to a good start, though the 3-0 score was a deceptive one – it could have (and should have) been much greater of a lead than that. And then, it vanished. Yuki Nishi walked a batter with two outs in the bottom of the third and came completely unraveled… single, home…
Somehow, despite having a decent number of chances to bring home runs, our guys were squeezing the bat too tightly, did not play their game, and ended the game with a check-swing foul tip into the catcher’s glove for strike three, game over. That made Koji Chikamoto the seventh batter (well, fourth — Jefry Marte…
Despite getting the leadoff man on base five times tonight, the Tigers bats were simply unable to push anyone across home plate. That is mostly because the same three guys kept getting on base, but the rest of the batters did pretty much nothing. Great outing by rookie Masashi Itoh goes to waste. Swallows win,…
Most of you know about RISP (batting average with runners in scoring position)… and the higher your number, the more clutch you appear to be. That said, our sluggers really blew such chances four innings in a row. The most glaring was a no-out, bases-loaded situation that came up completely fruitless. This game looked like…
I’ll give the team this much. After playing at Koshien in the first part of the week, they headed west to Hiroshima for a pair of games, and then traveled to Yokohama just for this one game. I mostly expected they would be tired and struggle against Shota Imanaga, who is historically good against our…
After a rough last outing (2 innings, 5 runs), Takumi Akiyama had something to prove. And prove it, he did. His lone base runner through six was a hit batsman, and until the solo home run he gave up in the seventh, he faced the minimum number of batters. He could have easily gone out…
We’re back in first! This was a true nail-biter, as the teams exchanged blows from the fourth inning on. Both teams also had bases-loaded chances that came up short, and both teams got big home runs from last year’s two biggest home run hitters. Kazuma Okamoto’s sixth-inning bomb was a dagger through the hearts of…