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 …
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 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, …
The Men From Makuhari headed to Kansai this week for the first series of the year vs the suddenly strong Buffaloes, winners of 5 straight coming in. But after receiving a beating at the hands of second place Orix in game 1, Lotte rallied to take games two and three to win their second series …
That’s right, folks – our buddy Mr Yuk has made his first (and hopefully last) appearance of 2017, and for games 6 & 7 to boot. Why? For all the progress Our Marines displayed in the last two games of the Fighters series, the offense looked every bit as terrible as it did in the …
Preseason action for Our Marines could not have gone better, as Chiba out-pitched and out-hit everyone en route to the first open-sen first place finish in 25 years. The pitchers that made the opening day roster ended that preseason action with a combined sub-1.00 ERA, superb even by my rosy predictions. That success didn’t translate …
The 2016 version of Our Marines aren’t going anywhere – for now, at least. As of this writing Chiba sits 9.5 games behind Hamu in second and 8 up on Rakuten in fourth with just 18 games to go. To my mind, that’s the very definition of “stuck in place”. Fortunately that is a good …
It looked like Our Marines were back on course for a successful summer campaign after we won our first 7 out of 10 games in August. Around mid-month it became clear that barring anything crazy we’d be locked in at 3rd place for the rest of the season. Our post-season status was secured by a …
July hasn’t always been the kindest month to Our Marines. The summer collapse has become somewhat of a tradition around here. Maybe it’s due to some unique home field advantage we get from the brutal early-season Marine Field conditions, but it always seems that our PL opponents hit their strides and overtake us the weather …