Where will Ino and Kajitani of the Giants Poor Performances Lead them Next?

It was a blowout.

On June 30, at Giants Stadium (Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture), the Giants’ second-team game against Rakuten took place. Giants starter Shoichi Ino (36) gave up six runs on nine hits and was knocked out in four innings.

On June 23, he took the mound against DeNA in the middle of the 5th inning, but gave up four consecutive pitches, including a wild pitch, without getting a single out. Manager Tatsunori Hara immediately demoted him to the second team.

Motonobu Tanigai, who was commentating for Nippon Broadcasting System, had a scathing comment on the game. “I think it was four pitches that almost ended Ino’s baseball career,” he said. Ino is the oldest pitcher on the team, and if he can’t produce results even in the second team, retirement is the only next door to go into, just as Tanishige said.

Ino joined the Giants as an FA from DeNA in December 2020. He was expected to be a pillar of the rotation to fill the vacancy left by Tomoyuki Sugano, who at the time was expected to move to the major leagues, and his estimated salary was 200 million yen for two years. However, he failed to win a single game for the Giants and has spent much of his time with the second team.

Ino may look nervous and he has a tendency to fail to produce results in the most important match. He has not been able to show his ability to win 50 games in all with DeNA. He is also very worried about it.

Not even a timetable for his comeback.

At the same time as Ino, another fielder was an FA transfer from DeNA to the Giants: Takayuki Kajitani (33), who joined the team for an estimated 800 million yen over four years.

Kajitani has not played a single game this season. He underwent surgery for a herniated disc in October of last year and surgery on the meniscus in his left knee in May of this year. There is no indication that he will even make a comeback.

From the beginning, there was opposition to acquiring Kajitani. It is true that he is a good hitter who can run, hit, and defend, but he has been injured so often and has so many wounds on his body that there were concerns about whether he would be able to play satisfactorily. The repeated surgeries made his fears a reality.

Kajitani was expected to be the leadoff man for the Giants.

I heard that Haruki Nishikawa (Rakuten from Nippon Ham), a similar type of player, was not acquired last season because of this. Kajitani has a multi-year contract and will be with the Giants for two more years. In reality, however, he is not an asset at all. Ino and Kajitani, who joined the Giants for a total of 1 billion yen, have become a complete liability.

The gap with the leader Yakult, which on July 2 became the fastest in history to have its magic number 53 lit, has only widened. Ino and Kajitani seem to have become a stumbling block for the slumping Giants.