This year is the year of the tiger. Year of the tiger. The Japanese record that Hanshin set in this year of the zodiac is likely to remain forever. The first year of the tiger in professional baseball was 1938 (Showa 13). At that time, there were two seasons, spring and autumn, and the team name at that time was “Tigers”. Under the direction of Shuichi Ishimoto, he won the spring season. In the 1-league era, 8 teams competed in 35 round-robin games in 5 games each. The Tigers won the championship with 29 wins and 6 losses, far behind the 2nd place giant. The winning percentage of 80%, 2 minutes and 9 minutes is still the highest in the professional baseball season. Unless there is a good deal, no team will have a better win rate.

This year, the Tigers jumped out of the spring league in the short-term decisive battle with the opening dash of seven consecutive victories and scored as it was. No. 4 Masaru Kageura won 31 RBIs, and Yukio Nishimura, an ace, won the title with an ERA of 1.52. The batting average of the team was 20%, 6 minutes and 8 minutes, and the score of 212 was also unbelievable.

This winning percentage is 80%, 2 minutes and 9 minutes. Even though it’s only 35 games, it’s a tremendous number. The highest winning percentage after splitting into two leagues at the time of 35 games is 80%, 2 minutes and 4 minutes (28 wins, 6 losses and 1 draw) of Shochiku in 1950, which is a high pace that remains in the history of the ball. By the way, for Hanshin after the division into two leagues, the highest winning percentage at the time of 35 games was 70% and 6% last year. He won the match against DeNA (Yokohama) on May 9, with 24 wins, 10 losses and 1 draw. However, he allowed Yakult to reverse in the second half of the season and did not win the championship.

In the year of the Tigers in 1987, Hanshin won the first victory after the division into two leagues. This year, I would like to aim to reproduce the auspicious year of the Tiger so that it will not be the second dance of last year.[Recording room Isao Takano]