After the disastrous series against the Hiroshima Carp (3 loses!), our Tigers are not doing that bad.
Those are the scores of the last games:
August 19th: Rained out.
August 20th: Baystars 3 - 5 Tigers
August 21th: Baystars 1 - 1 Tigers
August 23th: Giants 5 - 3 Tigers
August 24th: Giants 1 - 2 Tigers
August 25th: Giants 3 - 3 Tigers
Honestly they could have won the two draws, but with that sluggish line-up of ours... The batting coaches should hurry and find a solution, because our batters are wasting the efforts of our best pitchers. This is what happened during the first game against the Giants. Iwata didn't give up a single run in 6 innings, but then when the Giants started scoring our batters just couldn't catch up with them. It's also Mayumi's fault, for not knowing when to make a pitchers change (and it seems that he doesn't have the slightest idea of which pitcher use in which situation). But on the other hand, they played this two series away, so the outcome is not so bad considering they only lost one game.
Now, the game I liked the most was the one we won against the Giants at Tokyo Dome. Both teams had their aces face each other for the first time this season. Utsumi is currently the best pitcher of the Central League (12 wins and an ERA of 1.65). Nohmi is at the top of the league regarding the number of K (138 by now). And I must say both of them were of the same level during this showdown. Nohmi pitched 8 innings, did 131 throws and 11 K. Utsumi pitched the 9 innings, did 126 throws and 8 K. As expected there were few hits: the Tigers did 3 and the Giants 4. The funny thing is that the runs scored were only homeruns. Hanshin scored the first one with the completely unexpected homerun of Hirano (he has done 16 in his whole career). Then the clean-up of the Giants also hit a homerun, and since it was in a dome it's quite normal but Nohmi took his revenge when he struck him out in the 8th inning. Finally we won thanks to our veteran aniki Kanemoto's homerun, a player that has been roughly criticized.
The fans had also make a habit of speaking ill of Arai (since we like our clumsy clean-up so much), that's is good to point up the wonderful homerun he hit today.
Some bad news, Brazell won't be able to play for a while because of a pulled muscle. He said on twitter that he will be back as soon as possible.
Hanshin and the Dragons are in 3rd position 0.5 games behind the Giants, who are 5 games behind the Swallows. Tigers will face the league leaders tomorrow. They will recover some wins eventually, since they have won most of the games against the Swallows: 8 wins and 3 loses.
Win or Lose Tigers Pride!
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