There's no question which team has been more impressive this season. The Giants have been the class of the league ever since midseason, when the wind left the Hanshin Tigers' sails like the air leaving 45,000 balloons before the bottom of the seventh inning at Koshien.
It's a short season now and anything can happen. And if there's one team that is least likely to fold under pressure, it would have to be the Swallows. Yakult has won each of the last four times it has been in the Japan Series, and the birds haven't lost a close pennant race since 1991.
As of Wednesday, the Giants held a 5 1/2-lead after losing four straight games. A few losses and the Swallows could still find themselves out of the running as quickly as many people predicted at the beginning of the season.
And while they have won their share of close games, the Swallows record is essentially where it should be for a team that scores 11 percent more runs than its opponents.
On the other hand, Tatsunori Hara's new look Giants have retained one of the team's recent traditions: vastly underperforming in the win column.
Teams that outscore opponents by 39 percent, as the Giants have, should win 66 percent of their games, instead of 61 percent, as the Giants have.
Unreliable relief pitching, another Giants tradition under former manager Shigeo Nagashima, is also a common characteristic of teams with won-lost records that fail to match their ratio of runs scored to runs allowed.
Before the season started, Giants head coach Yoshitaka Katori admitted that the team lacked a closer of quality. Katori said he was willing to go with a tag team of relievers to get opponents out in the final inning or two with the Giants nursing a lead.
Unfortunately, the Giants have decided to go with the flow and stay away from any kind of a bull pen buddy system that would take the pressure off Junichi Kawahara.
Kawahara is a very good pitcher, but being THE Giants closer is perhaps the most pressure-filled job in Japanese baseball, something coach Katori can understand, having once held the job himself.
The question for the Giants is not whether Kawahara can do the job, but whether he can do it without more help. Hideki Okajima is brilliant in those two out of three games when his control is on, and fellow lefty Yukinaga Maeda has been better than anyone expected.
After that it's hold your breath and roll the dice.
Like most other managers in pro ball, Hara has decided that relying on one closer is better than figuring out a way to share the workload.
The downside of such a policy in Japan is that relievers, while not throwing a lot of pitches in games, throw all the time in the bull pen. Foreign players are uniform in their amazement about how much Japanese relievers throw day in and day out. So much so that any reliever still holding up at the end of the season is considered something of a marvel.
One notable exception is Masahide Kobayashi of the Chiba Lotte Marines. Manager Koji Yamamoto, despite his failure to take the Marines anywhere during his tenure in Chiba, is one of the few managers in Japan who sees rest as something positive.
The Swallows, too, have their problems in the pen. One never knows who is going to come to the mound when the call goes out for closer Shingo Takatsu: Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hangingsinker.
But when Takatsu struggles, Swallows manager Tsutomu Wakamatsu wastes little time using either Ryota Igarashi or lefty Hirotoshi Ishii to get the final outs. Because Wakamatsu uses these guys in tight spots, they are as familiar with the pressure as they ever will be. Each crucial mound appearance is not a trial by fire.
Ironically, this is how Hara has handled his non-pitching reserves. Nearly every position player on his bench gets an occasional start and regular assignments coming off the bench. As a result, the Giants have caught up with the better teams in this regard. The Giants bull pen is not horrible, but it's not on a par with the Swallows' or Lions'. It could be better.
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .