Two NPB games on the last day of the regular season, and in both the starting pitchers and the stakes point the same way for me. At Jingu, Yakult hands the ball to a starter who has lost seven straight and was sent down in mid-September, against a Hiroshima right-hander with a 2.68 ERA. At Yokohama, the home side has to win to dodge the champion's two-win head start in the playoffs, while Hanshin has already clinched and sends out a left-hander coming off a demotion.
Start with Jingu. Yakult's Yoshimura is 4-12 with a 4.98 ERA and gives up 1.71 homers per nine innings. September was ugly: a 9.75 ERA over three starts with five homers in 12 innings, including two innings and six runs against Hiroshima on Sept 15. Hiroshima's Kuribayashi has a 0.93 WHIP and a 2.44 FIP, and his strikeout-to-walk ratio is above five. Even his one soft spot, Jingu, comes with context: he got zero run support in his three starts against Yakult this year. Hiroshima also beat Hanshin 6-4 in the last game to deny them the clincher in the day game, so they arrive in good shape.
Now Yokohama. Chunichi Sports reported that DeNA was at .500 and nine games back, and under this year's rule a runner-up with a losing record or a gap of ten or more hands the champion two wins before the final stage starts. Their starter Taira is after a career-high sixth win and has a 2.01 ERA in four starts against Hanshin this year. Hanshin's Ito has an FIP of 4.01, has allowed eight homers in 53 innings, lasted two innings in his last start on Sept 22 and was demoted the next day. Hanshin then wrapped up the pennant when the Giants lost to DeNA, with the players watching from their hotel.
The head-to-head is a fair counterpoint. Hanshin won 13 of the 24 meetings this season, took the Sept 20 and 21 games, and won 8-3 on Sept 26 after losing the day before. That was with a title race still running, though, and Yokohama rested closer Reynolds in the last game, so the late innings are the thinner part of its game. I'm treating the finale as a question of who needs it more and whose starter is in better shape, and on both counts the facts lean to the home side.
I paired the two because each rests on a pitcher mismatch plus a motivation gap, not on one number.
