Should that condition no longer apply, the magic number disappears. Teams have magic numbers when they fulfill the condition of being able to win the pennant despite losing every remaining game against its closest pennant challenger. In MLB, ostensibly every team begins a normal season with a magic number to clinch of 163, but not so in Japan. In Japan, it has acquired the additional condition of assuming that the trailing team wins all its remaining games with the leading team. This is not your American baseball magic number but a complex variation of the number of wins by a contender and losses by a chasing team that will ensure a pennant. In this case, the manager will most typically respond with, “We’ve got other things on our plate to deal with besides that nonsense.” Like the appearance and disappearance of magic numbers and players amassing the necessary service time to file for free agency, beat reporters, without fail, will ask questions when this happens. This goes hand in hand with Japan’s Rube Goldberg calculations for determining when teams have a magic number and when their magic numbers vanish. When it vanishes, (消滅– shometsu) a team can no longer clinch the pennant by running the table and winning all its games. This, known in Japanese as “自力V,” is one of those things Japan uses to track an individual team’s progress through the season. Jiriki V–literally “victory under one’s own power” Valentine said he made cash payments out of his own pocket to those guys so they could make ends meet, which I later confirmed. The problem in the clubhouse was that Valentine used the fight money as a way to supplement not only the players’ incomes but also the team support staff, the video analysts and batting practice pitchers. When the Lotte Marines were trying to get Bobby Valentine to complain to the media in 2009 as a way of voiding his contract and saving millions of dollars, they terminated the fight money on the grounds that the money was needed to pay for an indoor practice facility - something that was eventually built about three years later much to my surprise. Why it is a top secret is also something of a mystery. I don’t have a good sense for how much the star of a game can receive, but am told it varies a lot depending on how big the team is. After teams win, someone will distribute cash to individuals based on their contribution to the win. This is definitely something you won’t learn about on baseball broadcasts or in postgame interviews. Tuffy Rhodes indicates one consequence of not tipping your cap after hitting a batter. Tuffy Rhodes famously bowled over Lions pitcher Hayato Aoki, and had his suspension reduced on the grounds that Aoki failed to tip his cap after the ball hit Rhodes’ Kintetsu Buffaloes teammate, Norihiro Nakamura. It is doubtful anyone believes batters are hit by pitches because of insentient baseballs, since pitchers are expected to apologize by tipping their cap. This was once explained to me that a “dead ball” is one which strikes a batter because the ball itself has lost consciousness and thus has no control of its movement. This is not to be confused with a stoppage of action, which in Japanese is known as “ball dead,” but rather a hit batsman. It is often accompanied by the runner moving, and thus becomes a “buster and run” - not to be confused by a run of the mill “ and run.” It was a favorite tactic of Hall of Fame manager Katsuya Nomura during his time in the 1990s with the Central League’s Yakult Swallows to attack infields playing in for the ubiquitous sacrifice bunt. Technically a swing by a batter after faking a bunt. In Japanese this sounds like “end run” and is not a football play but rather an abbreviation of “hit and run.” Recently “run and hit” has become quite common but one doesn’t hear “and hit.” When a player makes a careless mistake or fails to give sufficient effort, the broadcast analyst will often remind his audience that baseball is not so forgiving. It is most commonly used to suggest something that makes a pitch fat, either the “course” (location) is amai or the pitch lacks proper execution and then the ball itself is amai. “Sweet” comes to mind when talking about fat pitches, but in the baseball usage it seems more closely related to the idea of being “careless.” Other related nuances suggest “mediocre,” “lenient” or “forgiving.” “Amai” has a number of different meanings. Here’s a brief glossary of Japanese baseball terms that might not mean what you think they do.
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