"Change the pitcher!"
Outside the home team's player area of the SoftBank team, team supervisor Akiyama Koji raised his hand to signal his intention to replace the pitcher.
And the one he replaced was Takeda Shouta, who started on the mound for this game.
After experiencing a major turmoil in the top half of the first inning, Takeda Shouta seemed to have regained his pitching rhythm in the subsequent few innings, facing 7 batters in the second and third innings combined, giving up 1 hit, and no runs.
However, the situation had just started to improve when, in the fourth inning, after using a breaking ball to deal with Orix's first batter Sagaku Tomotaka at the beginning of the inning, Takeda Shouta's control inexplicably became unstable again.
