Baseball: Hawks' Nakamura pads qualifications as postseason hero

Although he already had a Japan Series sayonara home run on his resume, Akira Nakamura's post season heroics with the SoftBank Hawks had otherwise been fairly muted, until this month.On Oct. 20, with the Pacific League champs two games from postseason elimination at the hands of the third-place Rakuten Eagles, Nakamura broke an eighth-inning tie with a two-run homer to power his team to victory. The following day, his sixth-inning homer broke a 3-3 tie in SoftBank's 4-3 win, setting the stage for SoftBank's series-clinching win, when Nakamura scored three of the Hawks' seven runs.Although o…READ FULL ARTICLE