The Tigers have been playing excellent baseball in the past month or so. Losses were few and far between, and series losses were becoming so rare, they were more like mythology than real life. But during this particular weekend, the team had uncharacteristically poor fundamentals. Two errors and two (or three, depending on how you…
After the rather embarrassing opening series in Tokyo against these same Giants (25 straight innings without a run), the Tigers’ pride was on the line for this, the first home set of 2024 against their longtime rivals. They continued to struggle with run production, but the pitching trio of Shoki Murakami, Masashi Itoh, and Yuki…
The good news is that the Hanshin Tigers won their 2024 Koshien debut (on a cold night, I might add). The bad news is that in three games, they managed just three runs (two of them coming in a blowout loss). They now have lost three of their first four sets of the year. Heating…
Last season, that magical season that saw the Tigers win the Japan Series, started with a three-game sweep at Kyocera Dome against these same Yokohama DeNA Baystars. That hot start propelled the team to the top of the standings, where they stayed for the better part of the season. This year things did not go…
The Hanshin Tigers have been hard at work down in Okinawa. Camp started on February 1, and runs through the 27th. Starting this weekend, practice games will become more frequent, and we will see which players are going to get more playing time during the March exhibition games, and which will end up in the…
A loss is a loss, so there is no point in complaining about what seemed from these biased eyes to be an inconsistent strike zone. Normally steady Shoki Murakami walked two (on close calls) and Yuki Nishi walked one on a questionable call, while Yoshinobu Yamamoto got the benefit of several calls the other way…
The lesson we need to learn, Hanshin fans, is to not let the wins get us too high (until our fourth win of the series, that is) and to not let the losses get us too low. Yesterday was a dominant Tigers win, and tonight, well, it was the exact opposite. Our pitchers looked shaky,…
Years in which these final games matter to the standings are few and far between, and this year is no exception. What can be said is that this season, we are the champs and it does not matter if we drop more games than we win! That said, it would be nice to see the…
It has been far from an ideal season for Yuki Nishi. Once the staff ace, he is now the “old man” (despite being two months shy of 33, only one player on the team is longer in the tooth, and only by 6 months). He got farmed for the first time as a Tiger (in…
If you have read any of my series recaps over the past 8 years, you know what I’m going to say. I’m a broken record when it comes to this because it’s such a solid fact: the Hanshin Tigers do not score many runs or win many games in Nagoya at the Dome. Well after…