Yomiuri Giants vs Hiroshima Toyo Carp
Sunday, August 23, 2026 · 2:00 PM · Tokyo Dome
The Yomiuri Giants were founded on December 26, 1934, which makes them the oldest professional sports team in Japan. They have won 22 Japan Series and 39 Central League pennants, including nine Japan Series in a row from 1965 to 1973, an era everyone here just calls "V9." Their owner is the Yomiuri Shimbun, which also owns Nippon TV, so for decades the Giants were the team that was simply on television every night whether you liked them or not. Japanese fans reach for the Yankees comparison themselves, and they mean all of it: the trophies, the money, the national reach, and the fact that half the country roots against them (Yomiuri Giants).
The Hiroshima Toyo Carp were founded on December 5, 1949, four years after the bomb, by local residents and businesses who decided the rebuilding city should have a professional team (JapanBall). They had no wealthy parent company. They finished last in 1950 and last again in 1951, and there was a serious proposal to fold them or merge them into the Taiyo Whales. Hiroshima refused. Citizens put sake barrels outside the ground and filled them with cash, and players went door to door across the region after games asking for donations (South China Morning Post). Toyo Kogyo, later Mazda, bought in during 1968 and the Matsuda family still holds 60 percent. Three Japan Series titles, all between 1979 and 1984. Nine pennants, most recently a three-peat in 2016, 2017 and 2018 (Hiroshima Toyo Carp).
| # | Team | G | W | L | T | PCT | GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hanshin Tigers | 110 | 62 | 47 | 1 | .569 | -- |
| 2 | Yomiuri Giants | 112 | 60 | 50 | 2 | .545 | 2.5 |
| 3 | YOKOHAMA DeNA BayStars | 111 | 50 | 58 | 3 | .463 | 11.5 |
| 4 | Tokyo Yakult Swallows | 110 | 50 | 59 | 1 | .459 | 12.0 |
| 5 | Chunichi Dragons | 114 | 48 | 65 | 1 | .425 | 16.0 |
| 6 | Hiroshima Toyo Carp | 107 | 43 | 60 | 4 | .417 | 16.0 |
Live table from Yahoo Sports Navi, timestamped 18:17 Saturday. NPB's official English standings still show Friday until the overnight update, and Friday's official table plus Saturday's two Central League results (game 2 below, and Chunichi 5 Yakult 4; DeNA vs Hanshin was called off) works out to exactly these numbers. Note the T column. It is real, and it matters: see section 4.
The Giants are chasing Hanshin from two and a half games back with a bit over a month left. They took half of that on Saturday without Hanshin playing at all, the Tigers' game at Yokohama having been called off. It has been a strange year to do it in. Manager Shinnosuke Abe resigned in late May, and offensive chief coach Hideki Hashigami has run the club since (Japan Times, ESPN). They also lost the best hitter of their last decade over the winter, and you know exactly where he went: Kazuma Okamoto signed a four-year, $60 million deal with Toronto in January and has 25 home runs, which broke Eric Hinske's Blue Jays rookie record and passed Shohei Ohtani for the most ever by a Japanese-born rookie (SI, MLB.com). The building you are sitting in on Sunday is the one he left.
The Carp are now last, 16 out of first, which sounds finished, but the number that matters is 4.5. That is how far they sit behind third-place DeNA, and third place is the last Climax Series spot. Chunichi passed them on Saturday. Takahiro Arai is in his fourth year as manager and staring down a third straight finish out of the top three. Hiroshima have also played seven fewer games than Chunichi, so a punishing September is coming whether they are still alive or not.
So: the Giants already have the series, and Sunday is about the sweep and another half game on Hanshin. Hiroshima are playing to avoid a third straight shutout and to keep the gap to third place from getting any wider.
S. Howard started for Yomiuri and gave them five shutout innings on three hits with four strikeouts, and the bullpen finished the job. Bobby Dalbec singled in the game's first run in the third. Takumi Ohshiro singled another home to center in the eighth. Raidel Martinez closed it for his 33rd save. No home runs by anybody.
The unlucky man was Masato Morishita, who pitched well enough to win and fell to 6-8 because Hiroshima could not score. That is the Carp season in one line.
Confirmed on NPB, Yahoo Sports Navi and Mynavi.
The announced starters held. Yamato Shiroki gave the Giants five shutout innings on four hits with four strikeouts and got the first win of his professional career. Go Matsumoto put them ahead with a two-run home run off Shogo Tamamura in the fourth, his third of the year and the first home run of the series by either side, then drove in another when Yomiuri added three in the sixth. Raito Nakayama had the other two runs batted in. Five relievers finished the shutout, with Raidel Martinez getting the last out for save number 34. Tamamura fell to 1-4. Attendance was 42,420 and the game took three hours seventeen minutes.
That is eighteen innings in this building without a Hiroshima run.
Confirmed on NPB's official box score and Yahoo Sports Navi.
Posted Saturday evening on NPB's announced-starters page and matched on Yahoo Sports Navi's schedule.
Giants: Shinnosuke Ogasawara, LHP, 3-2, 1.64 ERA in five starts. He was the Chunichi ace from 2016 to 2024, spent 2025 in the Washington Nationals bullpen and got hit hard there, opened this year in Double-A and Triple-A, and signed with Yomiuri in June (NPB career record, the move). Five starts in, his ERA is better than the 2.15 that has Haruto Inoue third in the league. Watch him hit, too: no DH, and he bats left.
Carp: Shohei Mori, LHP, 1-3, 3.27 ERA in 11 games. Another Hiroshima starter whose ERA is a lot better than his record, which is the shape of their whole season. He is the second straight lefthander the Giants have seen, and Tamamura kept them off the board into the fourth on Saturday, so the first three innings will tell you plenty.
Records from NPB Giants pitching and NPB Carp pitching. Neither man pitched Saturday, so both lines are current.
| Player | Pos | 2026 line | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bobby Dalbec | IF | .256, 20 HR, 65 RBI (108 G) | Ex-Red Sox, signed last December. Leads the team in homers by seven and is ninth in the league in average. Drove in Friday's first run. |
| Haruto Inoue | RHP | 10-7, 2.15 ERA, 111 K | Leads the Giants in wins and strikeouts and sits third in the whole Central League in ERA. |
| Raidel Martinez | RHP | 3-3, 1.59 ERA, 34 SV | If the Giants lead after eight, the ninth is over. |
| Forrest Whitley | RHP | 3-4, 2.31 ERA, 97 K (14 G) | Once the top pitching prospect in the Astros system, finally healthy, striking out more than a batter an inning. |
Stats from NPB Giants batting and NPB Giants pitching.
Two more worth knowing. Shunsuke Urata is hitting .285, fifth in the league, with zero home runs in 99 games: a pure contact hitter of a type North America stopped producing. And Hayato Sakamoto, the franchise shortstop of the last fifteen years, is hitting .151 in 48 games. If he comes off the bench to pinch hit, the noise will tell you exactly who he is before you can look him up.
| Player | Pos | 2026 line | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kaito Kozono | IF | .257, 1 HR, 23 RBI (101 G) | Represented Japan at the 2026 World Baseball Classic in March. Age 26, and the player the next Carp team is built around. |
| Shogo Sakakura | C | .253, 12 HR, 54 RBI (103 G) | Team RBI leader and the everyday catcher on a team whose pitching is better than its record. |
| Ryosuke Kikuchi | 2B | .243, 7 HR, 26 RBI (96 G) | Nine consecutive Central League Golden Gloves from 2013 to 2021, plus NPB single-season records for assists and fielding percentage by a second baseman (bio). Watch him, not the ball, on anything hit to the right side. |
| Sandro Fabian | OF | .223, 16 HR, 36 RBI (74 G) | Team home run leader in three quarters of a season's playing time. The one Carp bat that can change a game with one swing. |
Stats from NPB Carp batting and NPB Carp pitching.
Also on the roster: Elehuris Montero, formerly of the Rockies, 11 homers and 38 RBI. Shogo Akiyama, who spent three seasons with Cincinnati, hitting .286 in a part-time role at 38. And a genuinely good bullpen: Daisuke Moriura has 15 saves at 2.27, Ryoji Kuribayashi is at 2.04, and lefty Taylor Hearn has a 1.53 ERA. Hiroshima's problem is not preventing runs.
The oendan. Each team has an organized cheering section in the outfield: trumpets, taiko drums, flags, and a leader up on a platform with a whistle running the whole thing. Giants in right field, visiting Carp in left. Every single batter has his own composed song with lyrics, and thousands of people know all of them by heart (MLB.com on oendan history).
They take turns. This is the thing that will surprise you most. The oendan only plays while its own team is batting. When the Giants hit, right field runs the show and left field is silent. When Hiroshima hits, right field sits down and the red corner takes over. The whole building alternates, all afternoon, like breathing. Do not cheer during the other team's half.
Nobody boos. Heckling is rare to nonexistent. A dropped fly ball gets sympathetic silence and then encouragement, which is roughly the opposite of what the 500 level at the Rogers Centre would do (Japan National Tourism Organization).
No jet balloons at Tokyo Dome. You will have read about the seventh-inning balloon launch. It does not happen here. Tokyo Dome has banned them since before the pandemic and there is no sign of that changing (base-info, confirmation). Hiroshima's own Mazda Stadium still flies them, but only with special short-flight balloons you inflate with a hand pump, because the Sanyo Main Line runs right beside the ground. They came back there in June 2023 after a three-year pandemic pause (Hiroshima Athlete). At Tokyo Dome the towel replaces the balloon, which is why section 5 says buy a towel.
Beer girls. They are called uriko, and they carry pressurised kegs weighing 15 to 20 kilos on their backs while running stairs for three hours (AFP). Raise a hand and one comes to your row and pours it in front of you. Do not reach for your wallet: they carry a payment terminal, and you tap a card or let them scan a QR code.
Tokyo Dome is completely cashless. Yen notes are not accepted anywhere inside the building, including from the uriko. What works is transit IC cards (Suica, ICOCA, all of them), credit cards, and the QR apps (Tokyo Dome City's own payment list). Top your IC cards up before you go in. There are charging machines and one ATM inside, but you did not come here to queue at a machine.
Food. There are 67 food outlets inside the dome. The one to get for the photo is the GIANTS Helmet Cup pork kimchi yakisoba, served in a plastic batting helmet you keep. There are also bento boxes produced by the Giants' own coaches and players, and karaage everywhere (Tokyo Dome food guide, official).
No DH. The Central League still plays without a designated hitter in 2026. The pitcher bats. This is the last full season of it: the six CL clubs voted unanimously to adopt the DH from 2027 (WBSC, JapanBall). So watch for the things MLB deleted: pitchers laying down sacrifice bunts, double switches, a manager pulling a starter who is cruising in the sixth because his spot is up with a runner on second.
Ties are real. Regular season games stop after 12 innings and if it is level, it is a tie, and it goes in the standings (Japan rules). Hiroshima have four this year, Yokohama three. Winning percentage ignores them entirely: Hanshin's .569 is 62 divided by 109, not 110. No ghost runner on second, no bonus innings, everyone goes home.
Four imports. Each club can dress a maximum of four foreign players per game, and no more than three of them can be pitchers or three position players (NPB overview). So on any given day one good import is sitting.
Everyone stays. Nobody leaves in the eighth to beat traffic. Sections tidy their own rows. For a game with 40,000 people singing in unison for three hours, it is startlingly orderly.
Gate 20 is on the first base side. Gates 20, 21 and 22 are the first-base cluster, and 20 feeds the first-floor infield aisles, so you walk in on your own side and stay there (Tokyo Dome gate guide). Arriving at 1:00 is right: the oendan warm up before first pitch and the pre-game is worth being in your seat for.
Where the noise comes from. You are Giants side. Everyone around you will have an orange towel. The Carp support is diagonally across the field to your left, in the left field corner by the foul pole, with a smaller visitor block on the third base side near the same pole (visitor seating guide, Tokyo Dome seating). Sound carries in a dome. You will hear both bands clearly all game.
Buy the towel. One orange Giants towel each from the shops on the concourse. It is not a souvenir, it is the participation ticket. You need it for rallies and you absolutely need it in the seventh. Do not go looking for balloons.
Two things you can join by the third inning.
The seventh. Both teams get a Lucky Seven, and they are not the same thing. The top of the seventh belongs to Hiroshima. Look across at the left field corner instead of at the field for those few minutes: a few thousand people in red, a long way from home, going at full volume in a building that is not theirs. The song is "Sore Ike Carp", the same one the balloons fly to at Mazda Stadium, sung here without them. Then the bottom of the seventh is yours. Stand up, take the towel by two corners, spread it flat over your head, and sing along to the Giants' fight song "Tokon Komete." Everyone does it. Nobody is watching you.