Home to Koshien May 9th to 11th

Tigers wore their special green and yellow uniform (which will make only two other appearances this season (at the end of July and beginning of August). It has a certain similarity to the As colours but is not a copy. Anyway it didn't help Tigers this series which was very much a case of throwing games away. The turning point in the first game was the Giants sixth innings. Tigers were leading 1-0 with Sakamoto having singled and two out. Hara signaled the steal which on the face of it was a bad call. Tsuruoka took well and was up and ready to throw. All it needed was an accurate throw and Sakamoto who is no stealer would have been out. Instead Tsuruoka threw terribly to the left of second. Toritani took the ball but had no time to make the tag. It really was poor work by Tigers catcher and in the very next game he would throw wildly again. Kataoka the batter singled to bring in Sakamoto and Giants were level. The next innings they scored three runs and drove Nohmi from the game. Tigers did pull one back in the seventh courtesy of an Arai single but the final score was 4-2 Giants.
Tigers then wasted another chance for victory in the second game. Here we had a superb - if uneconomical - performance from Enokida giving up just one run and leaving the game with a 3-1 lead. Andoh held the lead through the seventh and then Fukuhara blew it dramatically. He has now been sent down to the farm team to rest his stiff muscle which apparently was the cause of him blowing the two games recently. Giants drew level 3-3 and then in the bottom of the ninth loaded the bases with one out. This should have been a Tigers sayonara. What happened was that there were runners on first and second with the runner on second being Shibata. Toritani singled left but Shibata was held up on third so that Gomez could have the honour of driving the winning run in. He struck out and Tigers had missed the chance. The game went into extra innings where an Anderson 3 run home run buried Tigers chances 6-3 Giants.
Finally, on Sunday Tigers managed a backs to the wall victory with a 1-0 win on some excellent pitching by Messenger who pitched a complete game shutout. The winning run came courtesy of the bat of Tsuruoka. Tigers finished this 9 game continuous 3-6 throwing away several clear victory chances through poor play and poor management. They also managed to string together their first four game losing streak. Too much sentiment and not enough hard headed preparation infected the decisions taken by the coaches who looked anything but professional.