Every Year is Golden Year in Chiba
On 10 April 2022 at Zozo Marine Stadium, 20 year old Lotte fireballer Roki Sasaki served up the best pitching performance in Japanese baseball history, if not the history of professional baseball, with the first perfect game in NPB in 28 years. I’ve fortunately lived a long enough life that I could be in attendance …
The practice games are over and the regular season is getting started this Friday, June 19. Let’s take a look at how Our Marines will be facing this abbreviated, fan-less, 120 game 2020 season, starting with the pitchers. Opening Day Starting Rotation Ayumu Ishikawa – 8-5, 3.64 ERA, 1.32 WHIP in 2019 (32, 7th year) …
A group of us Lotte fans we call the Kamome Kyodan meet daily on Line to discuss baseball and all sorts of other things, so I’ve polled everyone to get a set of season predictions. Get it right for glory, get it wrong and you’ll get nothing but shame. I’m fully expecting to pick up …
Unless you’ve been living in a remote cave*, you know that there hasn’t been much in the way of sporting activity around the world these last few months. Japan’s B-League pro basketball league was forced to cancel the remainder of its season due to the novel coronavirus, MLB has been shut down indefinitely (and may …
I started this by saying ‘This is not one of those “Oh it’s been a long time since I’ve posted but I hope to post more regularly now!” posts”, but lo and behold, it is one of those posts – shÅganai. This site has been live since 2009, we went through long periods of not …
On Monday, NPB released the final rosters for the All-Star games next week in Kyocera Dome (7/13) and Kumamoto (7/14). As I have mentioned over the past few weeks, many players are putting up strong numbers in the first half. However, no members of Our Marines made the cut in either the fan voting (for …
Our Marines continued their run of strong play in June this week, taking both sides of a 2-game set at the ‘Zo with the last place Rakuten Eagles1. Those results guarantee a winning record for the month – the team is currently at 13-7 with just two games to play this weekend. Here’s a few …
We were talking in this space last week about the performance of the infield so far in 2018, and I pretty much glossed over the contributions by first baseman Seiya “Aja” Inoue to the team’s success so far. Perhaps that is a bit unfair – he does lead the team in RBIs and as I …
The 2018 Chiba Lotte Marines season is in full swing. New skipper Tadahito Iguchi‘s squad looks much different from 2017’s team, who finished with arguably the worst season in the 67 years of franchise history. At this point last season, Itoh’s Marines couldn’t hit, couldn’t pitch, and certainly couldn’t get many W’s but this year? …
The weekend series vs cross-Kanto rivals Seibu represented a chance for Our Marines to get back to .500, as well as a taste of the only Pacific League team we’ve yet to see. Ultimately, what we learned is much the same as what the previous four series taught us – when the pitching is good, …