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The story
In Central League play on August 20, the Hiroshima Carp scored a walk-off win over the Chunichi Dragons, closing out the series with a three-game sweep. The Dragons’ loss — which involved a wild pitch from pitcher Ariel Abreu — was their fourth in a row, and on 5channel (5ch, Japan’s largest anonymous forum board) the team’s slump became the talk of the thread, with posters reaching for nicknames like “Zombie” (Hiroshima’s injury-depleted, patchwork lineup) and “Chuni-Dora” (a jab pairing “Chunichi” with chūnibyō — “eighth-grader syndrome,” Japanese slang for delusions of grandeur — mocking the Dragons’ habit of talking a big game before collapsing). The thread also argued over in-game strategy and roster depth.
Chunichi 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ｜1
Hiroshima 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1X ｜2
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Source: nikkansports.com / Original article here
What people said
Well, to be fair, the "gray" players (guys under a cloud of suspicion but never officially punished) have been cleared out of the first team…
A walk-off balk is about the only pattern they've got left, huh
Didn't that already happen back in the Tatsu(nami) era? (a nod to former manager Tatsunami Kazuyoshi, nicknamed "Tatsu")
Well, they just dropped 3 straight to the one team they absolutely couldn't afford to lose to.
→ "The Dinosaur Awakens!! Our real battle starts here!!!" (a pun on Dragons/dinosaurs)
And then
→ ●◯●●●◯●●●● 2 wins, 8 losses
What is that, a "section rapid" service? (a train that's only fast for part of the route, then stops at every station the rest of the way — i.e., their hot streak didn't last)
Honestly feels like watching straight-up false advertising.
With runners on first and third in a walk-off spot, the runner on first can advance to second for free without risking a force-out, or you could even try a delayed steal — hence sending in Oomori to run. If the steal works, you want Sasaki to come through with the hit, but if they walk him intentionally to load the bases, you pinch-hit Akiyama. Their pitcher's already wild, so Akiyama might draw a walk too.
That's probably how the Carp bench was thinking.
Abreu's Dominican too, you know.
Just to be clear, I was talking about the Carp there. Dragons — good luck next season and beyond!
Chunichi had the best run in franchise history during the 2000s though.
For Hiroshima it's the players who are zombies. For Chunichi, it's the manager who's the zombie. Inoue's results should've gotten him fired ages ago, and yet he just keeps managing on like the undead.
No.
A rotting corpse.
Background and Key Points
For readers unfamiliar with Japanese pro baseball: Hiroshima and Chunichi are two of the Central League’s six teams, and this game sits inside NPB’s long regular season where a single walk-off loss rarely means much on its own — except that it capped a sweep and a fourth straight defeat, the kind of skid Japanese fans track obsessively via win-loss “streak” notation like the ●◯ strings posted in the thread. The nicknames carry real weight in Japanese: “chūnibyō” (中二病, literally “eighth-grader syndrome”) is common slang for someone who talks a big game while acting delusional, so “Chuni-Dora” is a pun stacking that onto “Chunichi” (中日) — mocking a team that hyped a win streak as “the Dragons awakening” only to immediately collapse. “Zombie” for Hiroshima refers to a squad missing injured regulars and playing patchwork lineups, and the reference to “gray” players nods to a domestic gambling scandal that pushed several suspected-but-uncharged players out of NPB’s top roster.
The thread didn’t converge on whether Chunichi is simply weak — it split specifically over the in-game decision to pinch-run Oomori for Montero, with one poster laying out a detailed rationale (steal attempt, force-out avoidance, setting up Akiyama as a pinch-hitter against a wild pitcher) that others hadn’t considered.
What’s easy to miss: posters treat this as one bad week, but the streak data buried in the thread (2 wins, 8 losses after a 5-game high) suggests a deeper slide than a single sweep, and the jab at manager Inoue’s job security implies this is a recurring, not new, complaint about the team.
*This article was compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Geisports Bulletin+) thread “[Baseball] Central League: C 2x-1 D [8/20] — Carp win walk-off for 3rd straight win; Chunichi’s Abreu wild-pitches his way into a sweep, 4th straight loss.”
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