Three game-winning home runs in three days gave Japan its word of 2016, and Seiya Suzuki a name

Seiya Suzuki's 2016 changed in one weekend at Mazda Stadium. Daily Sports recorded the sequence. On June 17 the 21-year-old hit a two-run walk-off home run against Orix in the 12th inning. On June 18 he came up in the ninth with Hiroshima two runs behind and hit a three-run walk-off. On June 19 he broke a 4-4 tie in the eighth with a solo shot off left-hander Sachiya Yamazaki. It was his first season in double-digit home runs.

The paper looked up the club's history at once. It was the first run of three straight game-winning home runs by a Carp player since Akira Eto in 1996, and the first back-to-back walk-off home runs since Kiyoyuki Nagashima in 1984. Manager Koichi Ogata's reaction supplied the word that stuck: kamitteru, slang built from the word for god, roughly "he's on a divine run."

On Dec. 1, the phrase won the grand prize at the U-Can New Words and Buzzwords Awards, with Ogata and Suzuki named as recipients. The organizers tied it to the broader Carp story of that year, including the club's first league title in 25 years. J-CAST noted on the same day that social media carried reactions from people saying they had never heard it. Suzuki told the ceremony he was more nervous there than in the Japan Series, and said he could not explain his good form.

The numbers did support the word. Baseball Channel and BASEBALL KING give the season as .335 with 29 home runs and 95 RBIs, and Baseball Channel says it was his first season qualifying for the batting title, in which he finished second in the Central League. He was in his fourth year as a pro, drafted out of high school in 2012. In January 2017, a BASEBALL KING column headlined his goal as a 1.000 average, 200 home runs and 1,000 RBIs.