Every Year is Golden Year in Chiba
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 …
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 …
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 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 …
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 …
Ten games in and Our Marines are at an even .500 with five wins and five losses.
Lotte Fans – the season has just begun for Our Marines, and am overjoyed to report so far it is a SMASHING success!
The batting order seems to have been optimized – after weeks of frustration at the plate, Our Marines have put up 8, 7, 8, 5, 6, and 6 runs up in the past 3 series. Now the pitching needs some optimization as well, as despite those high scoring outputs Chiba is just 3-3 in those six games.
This series in Yokohama is tough to predict. One might think a warming up Chiba offense could give Yokohama arms fits, but it didn’t play out that way two weeks ago at QVC. The starting pitching is full of intrigue as Yuta Ohmine makes a surprise start in Game 2, with New New Lefty Ace Fujioka in Game 2.
A series split with Hanshin isn’t exactly convincing me to put more stock into the 2014 Marines. Putting it perspective though, it was nice to actually see Our Marines show some signs of life after the beating we took in the previous series at Yomiuri. We’re an even 8-8 in our interleague campaign, and can probably write off any dreams of catching the 12-6 CL leading Giants, or 12-6 PL leading Buffaloes. Meanwhile, the picture in the PL standings shows us four games under .500 and in fourth place.