Baseball: Suzuki goes long as Cubs hit record 8 HRs against Cards
The Japanese slugger broke the ice with his solo shot with two out in the bottom of the first, sending a 2-2 sinker from Miles Mikolas (4-6) an estimated 413 feet over left center field.
Five different Cubs batters had at least one big fly, with Michael Busch homering three times, Pete Crow-Armstrong twice, and Dansby Swanson and Carson Kelly adding one each.
Suzuki finished 1-for-4 as he took his RBI total to 74, tying the current Major League Baseball lead and equaling his career high from the 2023 season. The 30-year-old also extended his MLB record for most home runs in a season by a Japanese right-handed batter.
The Cubs stretched their win streak to four games, with the victory coming a day after they needed 10 innings to score one run against the Cleveland Guardians.
"That's the sport. That's what's crazy about it, and that's why you turn the page every single day," Chicago skipper Craig Counsell said.
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The Mainichi
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OSAKA -- The year 2025 marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of Japan's Hanshin Tigers. While the professional baseball team's tiger emblem is well-known, it's less commonly known that the Tigers' first ace pitcher and a designer employed by Hanshin Electric Railway Co. teamed up to produce it. The tiger emblem was already appearing on posters as early as the year following the squad's founding in 1935. The Mainichi Shimbun took a closer look at the team's history from the perspective of the logo's iconic design. Inspiration from alma mater of first pitching ace "Before the word 'brand' became established in Japan, the Tigers had already branded their tiger emblem and logo, and it's been loved by fans for 90 years," says Masaki Omori, 58, a railway designer from the Hyogo Prefecture city of Ashiya in western Japan. According to Omori, the birth of the tiger emblem can be traced back to Tadashi Wakabayashi (1908-1965), the team's first ace. The team was founded in December 1935 as the Osaka Baseball Club. When the Osaka Tigers was chosen as the team's name, Wakabayashi, a Hawaiian-born "nisei," or child of Japanese-born immigrants, recalled that his alma mater, President William McKinley High School, had a sports team also called the "Tigers" with a tiger emblem. He accordingly proposed adopting a tiger emblem for the Osaka team, Omori says. One of Wakabayashi's high school classmates, Susumu Hoshina (1906-2000), who went on to become the first coach of Hosei University's American football team, drew the initial draft, which was then incorporated into a design by Genichi Hayakawa (1906-1976), a designer at Hanshin Electric Railway. Omori praised the design, saying, "The shape of the eyes and fangs are drawn accurately, the balance of the stripes is just right and it's superb." Hanshin's beautiful baseball tickets The 1936 poster "The Osaka Tigers are Coming" (held by the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum), designed by Hayakawa, already featured the tiger emblem. The following year's admission ticket marking one year since the team's founding was beautifully colored with a red circle containing the tiger emblem against a base of yellow and black stripes. "Printing technology was underdeveloped at the time, and I think multicolor printing was likely expensive, but the Tigers continued to produce beautiful tickets from the start," Omori recalls. Shigeyuki Yamagishi, 51, a company worker in Nagoya who has collected tens of thousands of baseball tickets dating from before World War II to the present, also praises the tickets, saying, "In the era before the war, when most tickets only had text, those adorned with the tiger emblem and the 'TIGERS' logo were by far the coolest." Attention to striped uniform detail Hayakawa, who hails from Tokyo, studied design at Kyoto Craft High School (the present-day Kyoto Institute of Technology), and went on to enter Hanshin Electric Railway Co. Materials relating to Hayakawa are retained at Osaka company Shiura Sports Yohin Co., which supplied uniforms to the Tigers in the 1950s. Including the word "OSAKA" that decorated the chests of the uniforms, Hayakawa paid attention to details that would typically be outsourced to manufacturers today. This included hand-drawing the stripes one by one to make samples to show the difference in width. The team's name changed to the current "Hanshin Tigers" in 1961. Even after retiring in 1958, Hayakawa continued to work with the team, designing the cover for "Tigers 30-year history" in 1965 and a Hanshin Department Store poster featuring pitcher Yutaka Enatsu in the 1970s. Original strength from yellow and black Incidentally, it was in 1953 that the Yomiuri Giants, founded in 1934, adopted orange as their team color, while the Hiroshima Carp, founded in 1950, chose red in 1975. The "raging bull" emblem of the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes (1949-2004) was designed by renowned Japanese artist Taro Okamoto but has faded from view since the team's merger with Orix. Omori reflects, "I think the raging bull emblem is a wonderful work of art, but I got a keen sense of how difficult it is for designs to endure, no matter how good they are." In the 2000s, it became more common for teams to wear not only home and away uniforms but also revived designs and ones with different color schemes. Since 2013, the Hanshin Tigers, too, have adopted different uniform designs each year under the theme "Urutora (Ultra) Summer" -- a play on words incorporating the Japanese word "tora" for "tiger." Even when a green-themed uniform was introduced, the yellow and black tiger emblem on the sleeve ensured that the "Tigers' identity" was not lost. Omori, a Hanshin fan from Tokyo, fell in love with the design of the yellow and black baseball cap as an elementary school student. Having designed train cars for JR West, he found a connection with Hayakawa, who also worked as a designer for a railway company, and has made researching Hayakawa his life's work. For 90 years, the tiger emblem has continued to be loved by fans. "I feel the original strength anew," Omori says, expressing respect for Hayakawa. (Japanese original by Mayu Maemoto, Osaka City News Department) Exhibition underway in Hyogo Pref. The Otani Memorial Art Museum in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, is currently hosting an exhibition titled " Baseball and Design: Tracing the Hanshin Tigers Through Design." The exhibition features posters by Hayakawa, along with many caricatures and other items from teams other than Hanshin, including a caricature of famed Giants player Shigeo Nagashima, who passed away in June. Yamagishi's ticket collection and Omori's collection of historical Hanshin baseball caps are also being displayed. The exhibition runs through July 27, and is closed on Wednesdays, with general admission costing 1,200 yen (about $8). For more information, phone the museum on 0798-33-0164 (in Japanese).
