Masanobu Sasaki, who served as a professional baseball umpire until 2020“The former referee of professional baseball knows”Partially reprinted from (Wanibooks) and introduces the back side (3 times in total / # 1 and # 3)
Masaki Saito makes it easy to switch on and off
It’s a generation before the pitchers I’ve mentioned so far, but I’ll name the giant Masaki Saito because he’s a pitcher with good control. From the latter half of the 1980s to the latter half of the 1990s, the giants had three powerful starting pitchers: Saito-Masumi Kuwata-Hiromi Makihara.
It was said that pitcher Kuwata also had good control, but pitcher Kuwata had a clear “usable ball” and “missing ball”. Yakult ran on Victory Road in the wake of the dangerous ball leaving of pitcher Tetsuya Iida in the second round of the opening round in 1995. Pitcher Saito could use all the balls, including sliders, curves, and sinkers, as well as straights from sidearms, as both count balls and game balls.
Pitcher Makihara had many forkballs missing. Before that, there was a compatibility between the pitcher and the ball umpire, such as “I often hit a home run at this ball umpire” or “The winning percentage is low at this ball umpire”. Since the pitcher is a tester, I felt that pitcher Makihara was more conscious of me, even though I was unconscious.
Switching on and off during pitcher Saito’s game. Nowadays, it is often described as “putting in gear”, but it was a very easy-to-understand pitcher.While I was able to hit quite a bit, there was a tremendous amount of perfection to suppress when the gear entered. That’s why he threw about 120 to 135 balls in one game and was called “Mr. Complete Game”.
In 1989, before I became a referee, 20 wins including 11 complete games in a row (21 complete games in total). In 1990, he won 20 complete games in a row, including 8 complete games in a row (19 complete games in total).
Even after I became a referee, I started 27 starts, 18 wins and 16 complete games in the era of 130 games in the 1995 season. It’s an amazing number that I can’t believe from now on.
Are the sliders of Saito and Tomohito Ito similar?
Should pitcher Saito’s winning shot be described as a “slave” with a ball that looks like the middle of a slider and a curve?
Pitcher Tomohito Ito, who won the rookie of the year at Yakult in 1993, was throwing the legendary “high-speed slider.” I haven’t seen it in the raw, but the senior referee said.
