to homer in front of the Emperor since Nagashima The 2026 World Baseball Classic is in full swing and it's been pretty much everything we all had expected and hoped for. There's been some upsets, some near-upsets and some flat out amazing games. It's kind of wild but there had never been a walk-off home run in a WBC game before yesterday and then there were two! There are any number of things that I could write about but I decided to limit it to just two.
I had the Cuba-Panama game on Friday afternoon and was surprised to see a familiar name in the lineup. Now, to be fair, there were a number of players with NPB experience playing for Cuba that day with Roel Santos and Ariel Martinez also in the lineup and Livan Moinelo, Yariel Rodriguez, Yoan Lopez and Raidel Martinez all pitching. Moinelo got the win and Martinez got the save. The player I didn't expect to see (and this was my fault for not looking over Cuba's roster before the game) was 39 year old Alfredo Despaigne, who had spent ten years in NPB with the Marines and Hawks. It's been three years since he played for the Hawks and I had assumed that he had retired. This is his fifth WBC which I think ties him with Miguel Cabrera and Oliver Perez for most WBCs played in (there may be other players for whom the 2026 WBC is their fifth tournament but I don't know who they are off hand). Here's a card of a younger, slimmer Despainge from his first WBC in 2009:
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| 2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC #W09R059 |
Today's Japan-Australia game was a nail biter. The game was scoreless through the first five innings but Australia took a 1-0 lead in the top of the sixth when Aaron Whitfield doubled, stole third and came into score when catcher Kenya Wakatsuki's throw bounced into left field. Japan wouldn't get on the board until the bottom of the seventh where Kensuke Kondoh set the stage by beating out what would have been an inning ending double play but a bad throw pulled pitcher Jon Kennedy off the bag. The next batter, Masataka Yoshida, deposited the second pitch from Kennedy into the Samurai Japan cheering section in right field to put the home team up 2-1. Japan tacked on two more runs in the bottom of the eighth to extend their lead to 4-1. It turned out they needed those insurance runs as two Aussie batters - Alex Hall and Rixon Wingrove - hit solo home runs in the ninth inning before closer Taisei (Oto) finally got the last out to preserve the 4-3 win. With the victory, Japan has clinched the top spot coming out of Pool C. One of the broadcasters mentioned that Japan had been the top seed coming out the first round for every WBC but that's actually not true as they were the second seed in 2006 behind Korea. Korea had upset Japan 3-2 in the last game of the pool with Lee Seung-yuop hitting a two run home run in the eighth inning to provide the winning margin.
Tonight's game at the Tokyo Dome was attended by Emperor Naruhito and the Empress Masako. It was the first time that a reigning Emperor had attended a professional baseball game since November 11th, 1966 when the Showa Emperor attended a game between a Japanese All Star team and the visiting Los Angeles Dodgers. The only other time an Emperor attended a professional baseball game was the Emperor's game in 1959, a game that dramatically ended on a sayonara home run by Shigeo Nagashima. Gabe Lerman on BlueSky asked if Yoshida's home run was the first home run by a Japanese player "to homer in front of the Emperor since Nagashima" which, of course, got me curious. I broke out my copy of "Nichibei Yakyu: US Tours of Japan, Volume II: 1960-2019" and looked up the details about that game. It turned out that three Japanese batters went deep in the game - Nagashima, Yukinobu Kuroe and pitcher Tetsuya Yoneda - so, alas, the answer was "no". For the record, Japanese Emperor's have witness nine home runs by Japanese players. Nagashima hit three of them (two in 1959 and the one in 1966) while the other six were by Kazuhiko Sakazaki, Katsumi Fujimoto and Sadaharu Oh in the 1959 game, Kuroe and Yoneda in 1966 and Yoshida today. (A Japanese Emperor has also seen four home runs hit by foreign players - Ron Fairly and John Roseboro in 1966 and Hall and Wingrove today).
Here's a card of Yoshida to commemorate his home run:
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| 2020 Epoch Buffaloes Rookies & Stars #32 |
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