Not much to say. Just look at the scorecard. Chances aplenty, runs were few. Relievers once again porous. And just for good measure, the same ump who screwed over Yoshio Itoi on a bad check-swing call on Friday did the opposite tonight: Murakami did not check his swing nearly as well as Itoi did, but…
This game was essentially over after seven batters. Haruto Takahashi worked around a fluky hit (that could have been an error) in the top of the first, and then the third batter for the Tigers, Jefry Marte, hit one out of the park to provide all the runs this game had. Takahashi went the distance…
Haruto Takahashi has had some pretty epic starts against the Yomiuri Giants. Last season, he struck out a career-high 14 in seven innings of work at Koshien in a blowout win. This start, in the Heart of Darkness known as Tokyo Dome, he bettered himself. For the first time in his career, he went the…
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…
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…
Through the top of the sixth, this one looked really lopsided, as though the Tigers were going to simply bow down to the Giants yet again… but somebody turned off the orange light and flipped on the yellow switch. Yuki Nishi missed his spot a few times in the middle innings, putting the team down…
After yesterday’s embarrassing loss, the Tigers came out roaring on both ends. Joe Gunkel mowed down the first three batters he faced really quickly, and Koji Chikamoto smacked the first pitch in the bottom half of the inning over the wall. From there, the batters kept the foot on the pedal most of the night,…
Masashi Itoh (5 in 3) and Yukiya Saitoh (3 in 1) and Yuta Iwasada (2 in 2) combined to allow 10 runs in 6 innings of work. The batters did next-to-nothing. We almost had more stolen bases in this game (3) than we did hits (4). Oh. Our pitchers also made Shugo Maki the first…
What to say. This was a true pitching gem by starter Yuki Nishi. He dissected the powerful Giants order all night, and made just one mistake on an 0-2 count… his pitch missed Umeno’s glove by maybe 6″ and was in the bottom of the strike zone, enough for Takumi Ohshiro to push it through…
This was a tight game, with the lone run in the game’s first six innings coming on a broken-up double play. But then in the seventh, Jefry Marte homered off Robert Corniel, and in the eighth, both he and Jerry Sands got RBI hits off Kyle Bird. On our end of things, Masashi Itoh pitched…