As seen in Daily Sports Online (Japanese only) / デイリースポーツオンライン連載コラム・トレバーの虎場から
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since last Tuesday night’s anti-climactic loss mathematically eliminated the Hanshin Tigers from winning the pennant in 2021. Which Tigers fan has NOT been doing a lot of thinking??? Why could we not seal the deal? How long will fans be kept waiting for the next CL championship? How much of a lead in the standings is safe?
After all, the team was 8 games up on the Giants and 9 ahead of the Swallows on June 18. That was a long time ago, so I am not going to call this an epic collapse as the Japanese media may portray it. But still. Every article from now until next September or October will talk about how Akihiro Yano’s Tigers are looking for their first pennant in seventeen years. Think about it: no children in Japan have memories of seeing the Tigers win the league in 2005. If they do, they are truly gifted kids, because they were 3 or younger when it last happened.
Anyhow. Sometimes I wonder what has happened to my Canadian mind. Who cares about the regular-season standings so much, anyways? In Major League Baseball, the pennant is given to the team that pushes through the playoffs to the World Series, regardless of their place in the regular-season standings, right? That is not the case in Japan, though. If it were, our dear Tigers would have taken the pennant home in 2014, when they miraculously swept the first-place Yomiuri Giants at Tokyo Dome. (Let’s not talk about how the Japan Series ended, though, alright?)
But I wonder: does finishing first in the league really matter that much? Especially if it results in being ousted in the playoffs? Wouldn’t you rather celebrate the team winning the Japan Series, as opposed to simply having the best record during the regular season? I know I would!
Now… how realistic is winning the Japan Series when not winning the pennant? Let’s examine this historically, shall we? The current playoff format has been used in the Central League since 2007, but not in 2020 because the pandemic shortened the season. This means we can look at 13 postseasons and extrapolate what might happen this year.
In the Central League, there have been three such cases (meaning a 23% frequency):
- The 2007 Chunichi Dragons hosted the Tigers in the first round, beat them, went to Tokyo and toppled the Yomiuri Giants, and completed the improbable by defeating the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in the Japan Series. (The Dragons finished the regular season just 1.5 games out of first.)
- The 2014 second-place Tigers (7 games back) hosted the Hiroshima Carp, “beat” them (1-0 and 0-0 games were enough to declare a winner), then swept the Giants at the Big Egg, and lost in the Japan Series to the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks.
- The 2017 third-place Yokohama DeNA Baystars (14.5 games out) beat the Tigers at Koshien (including a game that should have been a rainout), then upset the Carp in Hiroshima before bowing out to the Hawks in the Japan Series.
The Pacific League has more instances of the non-pennant team advancing, in part because they have a longer history of using this postseason format. The 2004 second-place Seibu Lions, 2005 second-place Chiba Lotte Marines, 2010 third-place Marines, 2018 and 2019 second-place Hawks all beat first-place teams. They also all won the Japan Series.
Those Hawks aside (they had won three of the past four Japan Series at the time), was it not refreshing to cheer for the underdog? Obviously, seeing the Giants on the losing end twice was pure joy for Tigers fans, regardless of who beat them, but even the other ones were pretty cool dramatic stories.
Are you ready for another miracle? This could be the Tigers’ year. They finished near the top in the standings, picked up more wins than any other team in NPB (stupid ties!) and had a winning record against the Swallows (13-8-4) this year. This includes a respectable 7-4-2 mark at Jingu Stadium, where the final stage will be played.
You were not prepared to root for the underdogs this year, and neither was I. But here we are, holding out hope that our guys can bring home a Japan Series despite not being able to call themselves the Central League pennant winners in 2021. And that accomplishment would, to me at least, be far more rewarding and exhilarating than squeezing past the Swallows for the banner at season’s end. The sting of losing the pennant race has worn off. It’s time to look ahead to the challenge and potential reward that awaits our favorite team. Let’s GO TIGERS!!!