Game Notes: Nippon Series Games 1 & 2
Lots of text today, so no intro here—just a few observations I’ve made about the Nippon Series so far. The ordering might be a little out of whack, but so be it. To bet on any player listed below, click on links such as 온카.
Game 1 – Chunichi wins 2-1 in ten innings:
Tsuyoshi Wada took a no-hitter into the 7th inning, when he surrendered a home run to Kazuhiro Wada. Wada nibbled a bit, and Chunichi had better at-bats the third time through the lineup, but he maintained his command and only gave up one hard-hit ball aside from Kazuhiro’s home run.
Wei-Yin Chen looked different than every other time I’ve seen him, including the two games I watched this year. The Chen I’m used to throws a fastball in the 145-150 km/h range, a slider, a two-seam/shuuto with some late horizontal movement, and a forkball with inconsistent command, working up and down the inside and outside parts of the zone. The Chen I saw on Saturday gave up some fastball velocity, maxing out at 145 km/h but frequently working below 140 km/h, though with better command than usual. Yahoo’s data listed Chen’s primary breaking pitch as a slider, but it moved more like a changeup and worked extremely well.
Wada’s line: 8 IP, 29 BF, 119 pitches, 2 hits, 1 HR, 8 K, 2 BB, 1 R, 1 ER.
Chen’s line: 8 IP, 29 BF, 124 pitches, 4 hits, 0 HR, 11 K, 2 BB, 1 R, 1 ER.
Softbank’s lineup was disappointing. I thought they would start recognizing Chen’s good breaking stuff and wait for his average fastballs as the game progressed, but they actually got worse after their first time through the lineup. Hitoshi Tamura and Munenori Kawasaki were particularly bad in the later innings.
Yahoo Dome’s artificial turf looked like a pretty bad playing surface. Kawasaki made an error on a hard line drive that seemed to take an odd bounce, then made a nice play on a softer hit up the middle that took an unpredictable bounce.
Chunichi won this game with home runs: the aforementioned Wada’s no-hitter breaker, and Masaaki Koike’s winning shot in the 10th off an errant Takahiro Mahara forkball. Koike’s home run immediately followed some stats on the television broadcast about the lack of home runs in NPB this season.
Mini-rant: Kawasaki led off the bottom of the first with a single, and what did manager Koji Akiyama do? Immediately bunts him over, with a good on-base guy. I get that these are tight games, but why take the bat out of your guy’s hands in the first inning?
Game 2 – Chunichi wins 2-1 in ten innings:
This game was started by two of my favorite pitchers to watch: Toshiya Sugiuchi and Kazuki Yoshimi.
Sugiuchi didn’t quite have his best swing-and-miss stuff, like the last couple of times I’ve seen him. He had his pop-out stuff.
Sugiuchi’s one big mistake pitch was a fat 136 km/h fastball up in the zone in the 7th inning, which Ryosuke Hirata smacked off the left field fence for a double. Another meter or so, and that ball would have been gone, and the Dragons wouldn’t have needed Mahara to choke again.
Yoshimi wasn’t really at his best, but he generated a ton of groundballs and quieted each of Softbank’s threats until leaving with the bases loaded in the 7th. Takuya Asao mostly bailed him out, allowing only one run on a Kawasaki single. The damage might have been worse if Softbank’s third base coach had sent Tamura instead of holding him at third—it looked like he had a chance to score.
Softbank again played a conservative game—lots of sacrifice bunting, holding Tamura at third.
Chunichi’s Motonobu Tanishige still has a good arm at age 40.
Hiromitsu Ochiai had the umpires check the tape on Seiichi Uchikawa’s bat in the third inning. Uchikawa changed bats, then lined to center on Yoshimi’s first pitch.
Softbank’s lineup isn’t executing. In Game 2, they had runners on base in each of the first five innings, including runners in scoring position in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th innings, but failed to score each time.
Mahara wasn’t that bad in Game 2. He lost, but his only really poor at-bat was when he walked Kazuhiro Ibata without really challenging him.
Highlights from the 1999 Daiei-Chunichi Nippon Series – Akiyama was awesome as a player. Rodney Pedraza showed up in the highlights too.
For some reason, I kept expecting to see Norihiro Nakamura emerge from Chunichi’s bench during Game 2.
Another mini-rant: After Hiroki Kokubo led off the 2nd with a double, Akiyama had Yuya Hasegawa—another good contact hitter—bunt him over to third. Kokubo was stranded there after another listless strikeout by Tamura and a groundout from Shuhei Fukuda. Akiyama bunted Kokubo over after his leadoff single in the 4th as well, with equivalent futility. Ironically, the bunt attempt I agreed with was with Tamura in the 7th, but he couldn’t get it down and ended up singling with two strikes.
Overall, I’d say Ochiai is out-managing Akiyama so far. The Dragons are clearly making better adjustments at the plate throughout the game, and though Akiyama can’t really be faulted for Mahara choking, Ochiai has created better matchups with his bullpen.