Card Of The Week August 9

The Yomiuri Giants were not having a good time last Thursday night in Nishinomiya.  The Tigers starter Haruto Takahashi had held them to just three hits while striking out 11 over seven innings.  Meanwhile Hanshin had knocked Giants starter CC Mercedes out of the game in the fourth inning.  Mercedes had given up four runs but a succession of Giants relievers held the Tigers scoreless until the bottom of the eighth when it all collapsed on them.  The Tigers slapped around Hayato Horioka (who had just moved from the ikusei ranks to the 70 man roster in late July) for seven runs, four of which came on a grand slam by Masahiro Nakatani.  Horioka faced eight batters and only got one of them out.

At this point Giants manager Tatsunori Hara made an unusual move.  Instead of bringing in another pitcher, Hara instead tapped infielder Daiki Masuda to take the mound.  This is a pretty much unheard of move in Japan.  To paraphrase Jim Allen, between games being limited to a maximum number of innings (normally 12 but 10 this year) and the ichi-gun roster having 29 players of which 25 are active (26 active players on a 31 player roster this year) there's usually more than enough bullpen pitchers available that a manager doesn't have to ask a position player to pitch.  But Hara had evidently decided the Giants were short and had Masuda come in and pitch.

Masuda didn't pitch badly.  He came in with no one on base (courtesy of Nakatani's grand slam) and got Koji Chikamoto to ground out to second, walked Taiga Egoshi (although catcher Takumi Ohshiro though he'd struck Egoshi out) and then got Yusuke Ohyama to fly out to deep right field.   Here's a video clip showing all 13 of his pitches (6 balls and 7 strikes):



Masuda's got an interesting background.  He dropped out of Kinki University in his second year there and ended up joining the Tokushima Indigo Socks of the Shikoku Island League in 2014.  He spent two seasons with the team and was part of the league's 2015 All Star squad that played in North America in the Can-Am League (I saw him play in Little Falls, NJ against the New Jersey Jackals).  He was taken by the Giants that fall in the first round of the ikusei draft.  He got registered on the 70 man roster in mid-2017 and made his debut with the ichi-gun team in April of 2019.  He's Hara's favorite backup outfielder/pinch runner - taking over the role that Takahiro Suzuki used to have.

The last time a position player appeared as a pitcher was over 20 years ago.  On June 3, 2000, Orix BlueWave infielder Akihito Igarashi pulled the "play all nine positions in a game" stunt and as a result pitched one inning against the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes.  He gave up one hit but otherwise had an unremarkable inning.  Igarashi is the second player to ever do the nine positions in one game thing - Nippon-Ham Fighters catcher Hiroshi Takahashi did it on September 29, 1974 against the Nankai Hawks.  (The Hawks were Takahashi's former team - he was one of the other two players Nankei sent to the San Francisco Giants organization with Masanori Murakami in 1964.)

Beyond these three times I only know of one other time that a position player took the mound and it wasn't in a regular season game.  On July 21, 1996 at the Tokyo Dome in the second of the three All Star games that season, a 22 year old outfielder for the Orix BlueWave took the mound with two outs in the top of the ninth in a game the Pacific League was leading 7-3:



The batter Ichiro was supposed to face was Hideki Matsui but it looks like Central League manager Katsuya Nomura didn't think it was a good idea risking the Giants top star and instead sent up relief pitcher Shingo Takatsu.  So yeah, it's a pitcher pinch hitting against an outfielder pitching.  Takatsu ended up grounding out to shortstop to end the game.

I thought I'd share cards of Masuda (2018 BBM Giants #G55) and Igarashi (2000 BBM #314) as well as a card commemorating Ichiro's pitching appearance (2000 BBM All Stars #A72):