KYODO NEWS - Oct 21, 2017 - 19:27 | Sports, All

Seiichi Uchikawa believes he now knows what it feels like to play like one of baseball's greatest sluggers after homering in his fourth straight postseason game on Saturday.

Uchikawa's long leadoff home run tied Game 4 of the Pacific League playoffs' final stage 3-3, setting the stage for the SoftBank Hawks' 4-3 victory over the Rakuten Eagles.

After two breaking pitches away, 1.85-meter Taiwan right-hander Sung Chia-hao missed up and over the plate with a 151 kilometer-per-hour fastball that ran onto the barrel of the Hawks captain's bat.

"At the instant of contact, I thought I'd hit it perfectly," Uchikawa said before making an improbable comparison between himself and the Hawks chairman, legendary home run-hitter Sadaharu Oh.

"While I was rounding the bases, I had this thought that this is how it must have felt to chairman Oh every time he hit a home run. I thought, 'How fun it would be to play baseball feeling like this.'"

Uchikawa barely had time to wipe the grin off his face before teammate Akira Nakamura hit the first pitch he saw from the hard-throwing Sung for his second tie-breaking home run in two games.

"There have been a ton of strikeouts in this series, and so I wanted to be proactive and try to get a good pitch early in the count," Nakamura said.

The pitch was not nearly as bad as the one to Uchikawa, but Nakamura was all over it, pulling it down the line just fair, to put the Hawks ahead for good.

The 25-year-old Sung, who joined the Eagles last year on a development contract and made his first-team debut this past August, entered the game with 10 strikeouts in his 7-1/3 innings between the regular season and the Climax Series.

"It's my fault that the team lost," Sung said. "One can't only challenge hitters with fastballs."

Veteran Eagles skipper Masataka Nashida, however, was reluctant to blame the youngster.

"After all," Nashida said, "until now he's pitched well for us."