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The story
A thread went up on 5ch’s “Live Everything General” board about the Hanshin Tigers’ late-season collapse. Right after MBS aired a championship countdown special featuring Yuko Ando on September 13, Hanshin dropped into a 5-game losing streak — and lost again that same day, giving up the go-ahead run in the 11th inning. September has exposed the slump of key hitters, with Morishita batting .208 and Sakamoto a flat .000, and the team’s magic number has barely budged. The thread split between posters saying “Hanshin might genuinely be the weakest team in the Central League” and others countering that “at least their magic number is shrinking — it’s the Giants who are really cornered.”
What people said
What's with this lack of cohesion so late in the season?
Because it disrupts team harmony, you know.
Can't have just one guy hitting well.
Still better than the self-proclaimed "League Overlords" the Giants (lol), who gave up 4 in the first and then got shut down by a bullpen relay 🥹
[MBS aired a championship countdown special]
Airing today at 4:00 PM on MBS:
"Gathering with Tigers Fans — Yuko Ando's Mouko Shokudo: Countdown to the Franchise's First-Ever Back-to-Back Title!"
Tiger fans from every walk of life gather to "pre-celebrate" Hanshin's championship
Featuring Yuko Ando, Shinichi Tsutsumi, and more!
https://x.com/Saba_Tigers/status/2096070136088420500
Hasn't something like this happened before…?
Honestly, Ando's kind of a "fair-weather" Hanshin fan for PR purposes, isn't she.
I've got my suspicions about Yuri Nakae too.
These people never learn, lol
Would you rather have Tatsunami [Chunichi's struggling manager] in charge?
Honestly, yeah, ever since September started.
They're already 4 games under .500, and that's with rained-out games still left to make up.
And their magic number was shrinking faster than the Hawks' back then too lmaooooo
Seriously?
SoftBank's magic number is already down to 5, you know.
Losing to the last-place team after burning through your best relievers is way more pathetic, lol
The "Fake Giants" (derogatory nickname for Yomiuri) racking up hit-by-pitches is unavoidably hilarious 🥺
Even funnier that the Fake Giants got into a post-game off-field brawl with each other, pouring all that "fighting spirit" into beating up their own teammates 🥺
Hanshin's magic number went down by 1, you know.
Cornered and then it vanishes again in a single day, lol
1 Chikamoto .250
2 Nakano .259
3 Morishita .208
4 Sato .310
5 Oyama .321
6 Takadera .200
7 Sakamoto .000
8 Motoyama .158
Everyone acts like he's off-limits for criticism, but I honestly think Morishita's the real culprit here.
Caught in the tension between chasing the pennant and padding personal stats.
Sakamoto's numbers are brutal.
They should seriously platoon him, for real.
Gotta admire Manager Fujikawa's "baseball instincts" for not pinch-hitting for Sakamoto with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th today!
Apparently the players got fired up after seeing the reports about a new manager coming in to replace Tatsunami.
What really stings is Sakamoto — his August hot streak is exactly what locked him into the lineup, and then he goes hitless all of September.
To begin with, that magic number was basically built on Sakamoto's lucky hot streak ("kakuhen," pachinko slang for a lucky bonus mode).
It was always destined to disappear the moment he cooled back down to normal.
(rolling eyes)
And if they both lose out every remaining game…?
They were only ever strong against Yakult and the Giants.
They've only got 1 game left against the Giants anyway, you know.
Too bad it's already too late.
Though to be fair, they're smack in the middle of a last-place battle, and as of today they've actually pulled ahead of Hiroshima in the standings gap.
If they'd figured this out sooner, they might've been in the playoff race…
nah, who am I kidding.
Even setting aside Tatsunami's "triple-six" [three straight 6th-place finishes], being a perennial 5th-place team doesn't even help much in the draft, so honestly 5th and 6th aren't that different.
3rd might be out of reach, but just getting to 4th matters — since Hanshin's likely to give up their season-opener hosting rights in two years, landing 4th would lock in the opening-day slot.
It's basically not moving at all.
That's an exaggeration — while they knocked 12 off theirs, we still knocked 3 off ours.
Just 3 more innings to set the record, lol
Sounds just like the Giants' lineup.
Normally it's the visiting team that cracks first and gives up the walk-off.
Can't score runs, so what do you expect.
This might be a curse on the level of the famous "Hiroshima Moeyu" jinx (a hyped-up Weekly Baseball cover feature that famously preceded a team collapse) — did Weekly Baseball ever run a special on this one?
Background and key points of this discussion
A team’s championship magic number doesn’t move based solely on its own results — it also shifts depending on how the teams below it fare against each other. That’s why the thread spent so much time comparing how fast Hanshin’s and SoftBank’s magic numbers were shrinking: even without a direct win, the number can move based on other teams’ results. What sparked this particular discussion was confusion over that very mechanic — bewilderment that Hanshin seemed to be winning yet not closing the gap — colliding with September’s batting slump (low averages from Morishita, Sakamoto, and others) and runs surrendered in extra innings. It’s also worth noting this isn’t the first time MBS has aired a championship countdown special; past broadcasts have reportedly been followed by team slumps too, and posters seemed to enjoy riffing on that “pattern repeating itself.” The thread’s opinions split roughly into two camps: one holding that Hanshin itself is simply in a slump, and another arguing that the Giants and other rivals are struggling just as much, meaning Hanshin still holds the relative advantage.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (“Live Everything General”) thread “[LOL] The Chunichi Dragons (‘Chin-kasu,’ a mocking nickname) are toast w w w w w w w w w w w w w.”
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