By Robert Whiting (2016)
After an extensive in-house “investigation” last year, 3 farm team players were found to have been involved in gambling on the Yomiuri Giants and banned from the game indefinitely. We were assured that was it—there was nobody else involved. Then, just recently, however, we discovered there was a fourth player who admitted, under pressure, that he had gambled on baseball too. This player, a pitcher named Takagi, had pitched in 136 games for the Yomiuri ichi-gun over the last four years. Takagi tearfully admitted his transgressions in a mid-March press conference.
This is the way the Black Mist scandals of 1969-1970 started. First, a game-fixing scandal involving a Lions pitcher was uncovered. He was suspended for life and we were assured there was no one else. By the following spring, drip, drip, drip, the truth dribbled out and we learned there was more to the story. Several teammates on the Nishitetsu Lions were also found to have been involved, as were the yakuza, and the scandal spread to other sports.
I fully expect a similar thing will happen with this scandal. I predict that before the season ends, we will discover the full extent of underworld participation in this scandal and even more people will find their heads on the chopping block.
America has had its own gambling scandals, most notably with Pete Rose, who said he bet on baseball every single night, both as a player and a manager, often for as much as $10,000 a day. It took years for that scandal to unravel, and it wasn’t until 1989, Rose’s fifth and last year as Reds manager, that his gambling addiction was uncovered and revealed to the public.
But one of the biggest differences is that nobody in the front office at the Cincinnati Reds resigned when Rose was investigated by the MLB commissioner’s office and banned from baseball in 1989. The Reds front office held a press conference and announced a change in managers. End of story. No apology. No acceptance of responsibility. In Cincinnati, not even one executive stepped forward and apologized for not guiding Rose properly.
In Japan, however, where the investigation was done by Yomiuri and not the commissioner’s office (typical, since Yomiuri controls the game), the revelations about Takagi caused the resignation of Tsuneo Watanabe and two other high-ranking Kyojin executives, who apologized for not being more vigilant and careful in their education of their players.
Said Yomiuri team president Hiroshi Kubo, for example, “The team humbly apologizes for causing trouble at this important time. We apologize to all who love baseball, to the citizens of Japan and to the other teams.”
The reason for this difference is that, generally speaking, America is a country founded on individual freedom and individual rights, as contrasted to Japan, where it is the group that is all-important and there is a sense of collective responsibility. The individual is submerged.
One example of this difference can be seen in player media interviews. In the US, if you’re a reporter for a magazine, newspaper or TV company and you want to interview a baseball star, you go straight to the ballplayer and start negotiating, and it’s up to the player to say yes or no. In Japan, however, that reporter has to go to the front office and request the interview, and then, for a fee divided between the team and the individual player, the interview will take place. Same with commercials and endorsements. In US MLB, the front office is not involved in player endorsements, unless the team uniform is involved. In Japan, the team controls everything and takes a hefty percentage of the revenue. Thus, player-team identification is stronger in Japan than it is in the States.
The latest development in the baseball scandal caused the resignation of Tsuneo Watanabe, the 89-year-old patriarch of the Yomiuri Shimbun and, by extension, the Giants. Normally, officials who resign in such circumstances often return quietly through the back door, but Watanabe is in failing health and not nearly as sharp as he used to be, so his return is doubtful, and so an era has ended.
Watanabe was the George Steinbrenner of Japan, you might say. He was loud, abrasive, given to public insults, and he didn’t know very much about baseball (he once asked whether second base or shortstop was closer to first base; his big love was sumo). But that didn’t stop him from interfering in the management of the team. He was a blustering alpha male who did everything but urinate on the floor to make his mark. When a former employee tried to challenge him on this, Watanabe ruined his career.
Watanabe was the de facto commissioner of the NPB; the staff in the commissioner’s office were essentially his lackeys. He singlehandedly ordained the advent of free agency in the NPB because he wanted access to the stars on other teams. This contrasted with US MLB, where the players union won free agency through arbitration. The NPBPA was terrified of him.
I once had to find out the capacity of the Tokyo Dome. The Giants claimed 56,000 for every game from 1987 to 2004, but the park did not look that big. In 1990, I persuaded an individual in the commissioner’s office to show me the blueprints, and determined that the actual figure was around 46,000, meaning the Giants had publicly misstated their attendance. The official begged me not to say where I got the info, because he and his colleagues would all be fired by Watanabe. That’s the power he had.
On Watanabe’s attitude toward player agents: “If one of my players brings an agent into contract negotiations, we’ll cut his salary in half. If he doesn’t like it, we’ll release him.”
He was a feudal lord and the players were his vassals. Now that he is gone, will feudalism in baseball go with him? Or is it too deeply ingrained?
Tokyo Junkie 