Shutouts in baseball a winning home team will not bat (and the visiting team will not field) in the bottom of the ninth if they are winning, and the game will end with only 8½ innings played. In 1991, Major League Baseball changed the definition of a no-hitter to require that a pitcher throw at least nine full innings for the no-hitter to be official. With that change, there have been four no-hit performances ruled ineligible despite the pitcher pitching an eight-inning complete game in a losing effort: Silver King (June 21, 1890), Andy Hawkins (July 1, 1990), Matt Young (April 12, 1992),
American expatriate baseball players in Japan the foreign culture, the language barrier, and loneliness, differences in the way the game is played in Japan are often challenges for American players. Japanese teams practice much more often than American teams, the game relies more on off-speed pitching and not as many fastballs, and team harmony is stressed over individual achievements. The American writer Robert Whiting wrote in his 1977 book "The Chrysanthemum and the Bat" that, While others have objected to characterizing the sport that way, many Japanese players and managers describe themselves in these terms. Perhaps because of these cultural differences, many expatriate baseball players don't