The year was 1998.
The Chiba Lotte Marines had been struggling for a couple of seasons. They hadn’t been a relevant NPB franchise in a while, since star Hiromitsu Ochiai had elected to use his free agent rights and sign with the Chunichi Dragons a decade prior, leaving the then-Lotte Orions aimless and adrift.
Since their move across the bay to Chiba in 1992, the team had almost always lost, with the exception of 1995. That year the team brought in former Texas Rangers manager Bobby Valentine to oversee the club. The Marines went on a miracle run, finishing second in the Pacific League and having their first winning season since Ochiai departed, but then general manager Tatsuro Hirooka kicked Valentine to the curb, upset that the man he’d brought in as a publicity stunt was actually winning games.
Valentine’s two successors, Akira Eijiri in 1996 and then Akihito Kondoh, hired in 1997 and still the bench boss in ’98, failed to achieve anything close to what Valentine had pulled off.
That’s not to say the 1998 Marines didn’t have good players. For one, fan-favorite Julio Franco was back in the black and white for his second stint, and the face of their franchise, Kiyoshi Hatsushiba, was still hitting well. Mark Carreon, who’d shown flashes in 1997, was back for another go-round, and sophomore Kazuya Fukuura was looking to get some more playing time.
What’s more, veteran starter Satoru Komiyama was coming off his first elite season, and young starter Tomohiro Kuroki was on the edge of breaking out.
While the Marines probably weren’t going to win the pennant, the Pacific League was showing signs of having a lot more parity than in previous years. The Marines didn’t have the star power of the other five teams, but as long as they played some decent baseball, they hoped they could position themselves for a sneaky run at the pennant, their first since 1974. And they started strong too.
At the end of April, the Marines were 11-5, holding a 1.5-game lead over the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes. They’d done so by not only sweeping the Orix BlueWave and Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, but the defending pennant winners, the Seibu Lions. They’d also taken the Nippon-Ham Fighters behind the woodshed, thumping them 16-2 on April 7th.
What’s more: beyond a 7-1 return thumping by the Fighters, the Marines hadn’t lost a game by more than a run. They were always in it, keeping things competitive and playing good fundamental baseball.
Then May happened.
The Marines lost two of three against the Lions, got swept by the Hawks, and then lost two of three against the Fighters. After tying two two-game sets with the BlueWave and Lions, the Marines dropped two of three against the BlueWave, Hawks, and Lions. It wasn’t until the end of May that the Marines finally won a series, taking games two and three of their three-game set against the Buffaloes.
All this dropped the Marines from first in the Pacific League to fifth. They were still only three games back of the Hawks and Fighters for the league lead, but still, going 9-16 wasn’t ideal, and the losing would continue—worse than they could even imagine.
On June 12th, the Marines beat the Orix BlueWave 2-1 at Marine Stadium. Little did they know that this would be their last win for nearly a month.
On the 13th, a 5th-inning collapse let the BlueWave beat the Marines 6-4.
The 16th saw the Marines pitching staff drubbed by the Kintetsu Buffaloes at Fujidera Stadium, despite putting up five runs in the second inning. They’d eventually lose 12-8, and then 9-6 on the 17th, and then 7-5 on the 18th.
In those three games, the Marines gave up a total of 8 home runs, as their pitching staff was unable to contain the Buffaloes’ high-flying offense.
This was bad, sure, but sweeps happen all the time in baseball. The Marines may have been rattled, but they had still scored 19 runs in three games; they just got out-hit. Alarm bells weren’t quite going off yet.
Then they lost 7-0 to Nippon-Ham at the Tokyo Dome on the 19th. The Marines committed four errors in the losing effort, while the Fighters’ defense held firm. Fighters starter Hiroyuki Sekine only struck out three in seven innings of work, but he allowed just one baserunner per inning.
That loss was painful, but the next two games would be agonizing.
On the 20th, the Marines jumped on Fighters starter Hiroshi Shibakusa. Mitsuchika Hirai clubbed his fourth home run of the season in the third inning, and newly acquired backup catcher Takumi Shiigi hit the first (and only) home run of his career. The Marines defense had also been brilliant behind starter Junichiro Mutoh, but leaving nothing to chance, manager Akihito Kondo lifted Mutoh after seven innings. In came Tomohiro Kuroki…the Marines’ ace. (Why? What compelled Kondo to do this? Well, the Marines bullpen had been devastated. Scotty Davison had suffered what turned out to be a career-ending injury, and set-up man Atsushi Yoshida was also hurt).
Maybe the losing streak was starting to enter Kondo’s mind, and he wanted to make sure that the Fighters wouldn’t score. But they did. Kuroki gave up four hits in the inning, including an RBI single from Yukio Tanaka and a two-RBI double from Atsushi Kataoka. The Marines lost 3-2. The streak climbed to six games.
The next game, on the 21st, was an absolute slugfest. Once again, the Marines held a late lead: 10-9 in the bottom of the 9th. Then, with two outs, Marines reliever Koji Takekiyo gave up a hit to Yoshinori Ueda, bringing up Yukio Tanaka. Kondo immediately decided to lift his pitcher for… Tomohiro Kuroki, off whom Yukio Tanaka had hit an RBI single the previous day. Tanaka also led the Fighters in home runs, with 15.
Make that 16. The Fighters won, 11-10.
After a merciful Monday off, the Marines headed across Honshu to play the Seibu Lions in a two-game set in Toyama.
Shut out by Lions ace Fumiya Nishiguchi in the first game, the Marines extended their losing streak to eight. The second game would be an absolute barn-burner. After neither team scored in the first five innings, Lions DH Domingo Martinez clubbed a three-run shot in the bottom of the sixth, with Hall of Famer Tsutomu Itoh driving in another two with an RBI single, putting the Lions up 5-0.
But the Marines fought back. Iwao Ohmura put the Fighters on his back, hitting a pair of clutch singles in the seventh and eighth that each drove in a pair, with a game-tying fifth run driven in by Makoto Kosaka.
From there, the bullpens took over. Denney Tomori held the Marines down, while Kondo threw everything at the wall to see what would stick, eventually sending out Koji Takekiyo. Takekiyo promptly loaded the bases for Domingo Martinez in the 11th. But there were two outs. All Takekiyo needed to do was get Martinez out, and the Marines could start fresh in the 12th. But he couldn’t, and Martinez walked off the game.
The Marines had now lost 9 in a row.
The Marines would return home on the 26th to face the Buffaloes again. And once again, the Marines tied the game late and sent it to extras, but after ten innings of work, Satoru Komiyama was finally lifted. The Buffaloes went on to score two runs in the 11th and the Marines couldn’t respond.
The Marines had now lost 10 in a row.
After two heartbreaking losses, Marines fans were probably relieved that their 3-1 loss to the Buffaloes on the 27th was just “normal”. Nothing particularly heartbreaking—just the Buffaloes getting a late lead and the Marines being unable to respond. Still, the Marines had now lost 11 in a row.
The final game of the series against the Buffaloes was also fairly standard. The Buffs jumped on Marines starter Joe Crawford in the middle innings, and the Marines couldn’t claw their way back, falling 6-2 for their 12th loss in a row.
By now the national media was starting to take notice. The Marines were beginning to creep up the leaderboard for most consecutive losses in a season. The Yokohama BayStars had lost 14 in a row in 1955, when they were still the Taiyo Whales. The Fighters had also dropped 14 in a row in 1984. Both the Dragons and Hawks had dropped 15 in a row in 1946 and 1969 respectively, with the latter being the Pacific League record, and at the top of the garbage pile sat the 1970 Yakult Atoms (now Swallows), who lost 16 in a row.
If they wanted to avoid joining that illustrious group, the Marines had to get their act together, and fast.
Once again, they found themselves traveling to the other side of Honshu to play the Lions, this time in Fukui.
The Lions jumped out to a quick three-run lead, but the Marines responded by clobbering Shinji Mori for five runs in the 5th inning. Finally, the Marines had a late lead. The streak could have ended there and now… but it didn’t. The Marines left Yabuta in for too long, and he gave up two runs in the 8th. Neither side could do anything in extras, and the game would end in a 5-5 tie.
The Marines’ best shot to finally win a game was lost. None of the players could believe it. You could probably hear a pin drop on the bus to neighboring Kanazawa the next day.
A new month would see the Marines return to old form, dropping another game to the Lions 7-4. The streak now sat at 13.
On the 3rd of July, the Marines returned home to face the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, who quickly went up 4-0. Makoto Kosaka tried to spark a Marines comeback, hitting a two-run home run in the 6th, but the Marines could only tack on one more and lost 4-3.
The streak was now up to 14, tying the 1984 Fighters.
On the 4th of July, the Marines suffered another backbreaking loss. The Marines once again tied the game late, but in the 11th, Hawks pinch hitter Ryo Kawano hit a sac fly to put the Hawks up 7-6, and Tadahito Iguchi clubbed a three-run shot that put the game virtually out of reach.
Koichi Hori hit a solo shot in the bottom of the 11th, but it wasn’t enough. The Marines had now tied the 1946 Dragons and 1969 Hawks, with the streak going up to 15.
There was still one more game to play in the series, and it wasn’t even close. Joe Crawford was on the receiving end of another drubbing, and the Hawks dispatched the Marines 10-3, giving sole ownership of the Pacific League record to the Marines.
The Marines now had to fight to stave off infamy. They were on their way to Kobe to play the Orix BlueWave, the team that had kicked this whole thing off nearly a month ago. But this time, Kuroki wasn’t being trotted out to get a save; he was starting. And he pitched brilliantly. While he only struck out five in eight innings, he had allowed only one run—all while feeling extremely lightheaded due to dehydration in the 35% Celsius Kobe heat.
Mark Carreon hit a two-run shot off BlueWave starter Masao Kida, and Julio Franco added an RBI double of his own. Up 3-1 in the bottom of the 9th, it looked like the Marines might finally win a game. Sure, sharing the record for the longest losing streak is embarrassing, but sharing is better than sole ownership.
But up to the plate stepped Bluewave’s Harvey Pulliam, who launched a two-run shot over the wall. Tie game.
Kuroki didn’t even watch. He just stared into space as if he just couldn’t feel anything anymore, a mixture of exhaustion and shock. He was immediately lifted.
To add to the indignity, veteran BlueWave bench bat Yasutaka Hironaga walked off the game by hitting a grand slam with no outs in the 12th.
The 1998 Chiba Lotte Marines now had the longest losing streak in NPB history, at 17. The question on everyone’s mind was: how long could this go on?
Well, it would last at least one more game, as Ichiro Suzuki and Yasuo Fujii would blast a couple of homers off Yasuhiko Yabuta to help the BlueWave to 6-4 win. The streak now stood at 18 games. Surely, this had to end soon.
On July 9th, the Marines came out swinging, putting up five runs in the first two innings and chasing Nobuyuki Hoshino early. When the BlueWave finally scored a run, the Marines answered it immediately with four of their own, bringing the score up to 9-1. The BlueWave battled back, putting up five runs in the bottom of the 6th. The Marines bench braced for another heartbreaking loss, especially as Akihito Kondo refused to lift Satoru Komiyama from the game. But his confidence in his ace was rewarded. The Marines won 9-6. It was over.
It was finally over.
The Marines would go on to finish last in 1998, 9.5 games back of the pennant-winning Lions. Kondo stepped down at the end of the season. The Marines wouldn’t have a winning season again until 2005, when they were once again led by Bobby Valentine.
But I haven’t told you the best part. Guess who holds the record for the longest undefeated streak in NPB history? The Chiba Lotte Marines, back when they won the 1960 Pacific League Pennant as the DaiMai Orions.
The length of that streak? 18 games.
Baseball.
