The 2022 season started with a ton of uncertainty for Hanshin Tigers fans. Can we trust Shintaro Fujinami to start the year well? Is he worthy of the Opening Day starter role? Is Teruaki Sato ready to hit cleanup after a disastrous second half last season? Why is Kento Itohara batting 5th? Can 40-year-old Yoshio…
If you are a new fan and are not particularly familiar with the team, let this be your introduction! We are going to break down the entire roster for you very briefly so you can get a feel for who is whom, what they have done, and what they might do in 2022 and beyond….
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…
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…
Unfortunately, it neither rained nor poured at Koshien Stadium on this day. It would have helped if the game had been called before the fifth inning because at no point during these nine innings did it look like our guys were going to pull off the win. Masashi Itoh walked three and plunked one in…
Everything is lined up for this to be a lucky game for the Tigers: it is Tanabata Festival Day (make a wish day) in Japan, it is 7/7, and game 77. You’d think that would be enough for us to get some cool mojo going, like a ninth-inning three-run home run to give us 7…
After yesterday’s slugfest, fans on both sides of this battle of the felines were looking forward to more long balls and dramatics. Instead, they were treated to a pitchers’ duel that was aided by the umpires calling a very wide strike zone. The result is that Masashi Itoh’s full-count mistake against Hotaka Yamakawa in the…
Games like these leave an indelible mark on fans and could be talked about at season’s end if all continues to go well for these Hanshin Tigers. Teruaki Sato hit his first home run in what felt like ages, and for a follow-up act, he hit two more, including a ninth-inning, go-ahead, rip-the-heart-out-of-the-Lions three-run monster…
As a new decade dawns and the players prepare to head off to camp, it’s time to look at some of the guys you may not yet know. Every player wants to be known by his team’s fans, and these ten young men could be household names by season’s end if all goes well for…
If you’re a normal, sane person, you’ve been hibernating all winter. The snow is not yet melting and the ground has yet to thaw. Still, baseball is just around the corner, and it’s time to catch you up on the offseason acquisitions.