2010 Pacific League Opener
It took some time to find a working video feed, and the live chat idea didn’t really work out, but we had baseball yesterday.
Amazingly, my data collecting and parsing programs still work with this year’s sites. I need to do some usability work to make the 2010 data easier to find, but it’s all there. Here are the charts for this year’s opening day starters:
- Chiba Lotte’s Yoshihisa Naruse vs Seibu’s Hideaki Wakui
- Rakuten’s Hisashi Iwakuma vs Orix’s Chihiro Kaneko
- SoftBanks Toshiya Sugiuchi vs Nippon Ham’s Yu Darvish
Kaneko had the best outing with his four-hit shutout, but the game I spent the most time watching was Nippon Ham vs SoftBank. Some thoughts on the game:
- Darvish scrapped that pause at the top of his delivery, and was overall quicker to the plate than last year.
- Darvish also seemed like he was trying to strike everyone out, and went the distance throwing 147 pitches. He struck out 13.
- Sugiuchi was not sharp with his command, especially up in the zone.
- Every year I wonder if Hiroki Kokubo has anything left, but he looked great yesterday. He had a great at-bat against Darvish in the 5th, resulting in an rbi double, and saved a run in the field with a diving play down the 1st base line.
- Sho Nakata‘s plate discipline was put to the test in the 6th when he came up with runners on 2nd and 3rd. I thought Sugiuchi had a pretty big advantage in that situation, and Nakata did chase a couple of pitches out of the zone, but Nakata worked the count full and then hit a single off a hanging breaking ball.