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The story
At Jingu Stadium, the Giants’ Norimoto and the Swallows’ Yoshimura faced off in a pitchers’ duel, but as Norimoto kept putting runners on base, complaints piled up in the live thread: “Change him already,” and “They always wait until he’s scored on to pull him — that’s why they lose.” The same night, Chunichi’s Uebayashi hit a go-ahead two-run homer as action unfolded across other stadiums too, and the thread buzzed with frustration over managerial decisions.
What people said
Giants Acting Manager Thread 112
Starting Lineups
【Giants】 【Swallows】
4 Urata 6 Nagaoka
8 Sasaki 8 Monteru
5 Dahlbeck 9 Masuda
2 Oshiro 3 Yamada
7 Matsumoto 2 Koga
9 Nakayama 7 Nishimura
6 Izumiguchi 4 Uchiyama
3 Masuda Riku 5 Akahane
1 Norimoto 1 Yoshimura
Pull him or they'll blow the lead
Yeah, seriously
Bottom of the 4th
Chunichi 2-0 Hanshin
What's rough is the pitching itself
Doesn't matter how many runners you let on
as long as you hold them to zero
Don't want a guy like this getting the win
Though apparently that's "Ma-kun's" deal (a player nickname)
Their game sense is just different from our team's
I relaxed for a bit, took a bath, came back, and now there's this score gap
but they've been pitching nonstop lately
Those two have been mismanaged this whole time
Runners on 1st and 3rd, nobody out, no runs scored lol
Hurry up and heal that groin
then they can try Urata at shortstop
Might've panicked a bit just because it was Urata
Lucky 2 RBI
That was an error, so it shouldn't count as an RBI, right?
Background and Key Points
Norimoto here is Takahiro Norimoto, the former Rakuten Eagles ace (2021 Pacific League MVP) who signed with the Yomiuri Giants as a free agent for 2024, giving him unusual authority in fans’ eyes even when he struggles. The venue, Jingu Stadium, is the Tokyo Yakult Swallows’ home park, so this was a road start for Giants pitching. Two details need unpacking for non-Japanese readers: the thread is a “sailback” or 采配 (saihai) thread — literally about in-game managerial calls like pinch hitters and pitching changes — not about an actual interim or “acting” manager; the Giants’ real manager in this period is Shinnosuke Abe. And it’s hosted on 5ch’s Hello! Project (idol fandom) board, a common workaround Japanese baseball fans use to dodge the post-rate limits on official livestream boards during real-time games, which is why the thread has reached number 113.
The actual disagreement in the thread wasn’t simply “pull him” versus “leave him in” — it was whether traffic on the bases even mattered. Most posters wanted Norimoto out the moment he loaded bases, but >>46 pushed back that walks and hits are irrelevant “as long as you hold them to zero,” a scoreless-innings-only view of pitching success that others didn’t fully rebut.
What’s easy to miss: nothing in the thread confirms whether Norimoto was actually removed or what the final score was — this is a live snapshot, not a recap, so posters were reacting to incomplete, real-time information, arguing over a decision the manager hadn’t yet made.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “Giants Acting Manager Thread 113.”
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