While the students take the field at Koushien the Hanshin Tigers （阪 神タイガス） have to go on their road trip of hell when they won’t have any homegames for two weeks because of the High School tournament. I have no idea what effect this takes on the performance of the team, but I have read somewhere that their record in that timespan isn’t the best one at all. Seems they are always afraid to hit the road for such a long time. Things started off rather well this time when they thrashed the BayStars 19-2 but yesterday it turned out to be badly for the Tigers when they lost to Yokohama 3-6. And right now they are trailing the Carp 0-1 in the 4th. Still their lead over the Giants is rather huge (9.5). Update: It’s 1-6 in the 8th inning now. There we go, a 4-run 7th inning by Hiroshima. Looks like Tomoyuki Kubota botched it.
Obu Koukou 大府 (East Aichi) vs Takaoka Shogyo 高岡商 (Toyama) 1-5
This looked very close until the 7th inning when TakaSho broke through with a four-run assault. Seems like the late games are the close ones every day this year. Don’t get confused, this was a lot closer than the end result might indicate. Both pitchers carried their team without any errors through the game and it was only when TakaSho came through in the 7th after Obu‘s starting pitcher Oono wasted a chance by trying to stretch a double into a triple. After the 7th inning attack Obu wasn’t able to retaliate and so TakaSho move on to the next round.
Honjyo Daiichi (North Saitama) vs Kaisei Koukou (Shimane) 5-4
Aomori Yamada (Aomori) vs Nihon Koku (Yamanashi) 2-1
Keio Koukou (North Kanagawa) vs Matsushou Gakuen (Nakano) 6-4
As always great inning-by inning reports can be found at http://goroshigeno.blogspot.com/
A little on the late side here, but thank you for linking to me a few weeks ago and welcome to the Japanese baseball blogosphere.
Cheers,
Patrick