Also seen in Daily Sports / デイリースポーツのコラム（トレバーの虎場)
There are two things I have gotten plenty sick of since becoming a Hanshin Tigers fan six years ago. The first is the constant beatings at the hand of the Yomiuri Giants. In fact, when I first started this column at the start of the 2018 season, the team was coming off a similar thrashing to the one they were given over this past weekend. Outscored 21-4? Starting pitcher with your only RBI hit of the series? Smashed to the tune of a 7-run inning on Saturday and a 5-run job on Sunday? Yeah, there was no joy left in Nishinomiya and the season was only three games old.
But as fans, there’s not much we can do about the product on the field. We do not make personnel decisions or play the game for them. The results would not have been much worse if we had done either of those, mind you!
What bugs me even more, though, is an expression that needs to be canned and thrown into the ocean: The Second Coming of Randy Bass. It was plenty annoying when the Yomiuri play-by-play announcer said it every time Justin Bour came to bat in Saturday’s game, but this was not a case of the enemy trying to get under the fans’ skin by backhanding us with a sarcastic misnomer. No, this is a byproduct of the local media, who seem to get a kick out of giving the title to every “big” import hitter the team signs.
Since Randy Bass left the team midway through the 1988 season, there have been no fewer than 25 guys given this albatross. Ruppert Jones was the first, and it only took months before it became a thing: Bass left in June and Jones joined the team soon after. From then, not a single guy hyped by the media in this way has panned out, or come even close to achieving the levels that Bass did back in the 1980s.
What good comes out of “the kiss of death from the media” as Craig Brazell calls it? Only one thing: more sales of their newspapers. People see the headline, get excited about the possibility, buy the paper, and get their hopes swollen way too much. (Truth is, the majority of fans these days get anxious when they hear the phrase. That’s what happens when it gets overused so carelessly!)
The player struggles eventually, whether right away or a few weeks down the line does not matter. The media will also play this angle shrewdly: mutterings of Mike Greenwell start to pepper their columns and headlines, and fans grumble about how he’s worthless… the player himself has to catch wind of this, and if his job wasn’t hard enough to begin with, it sure isn’t easy playing under the added pressure.
Savior or scapegoat. Messiah or antichrist. Buddha or ogre. There seems to be no in-between for these guys who have been cursed by the media.
It’s time to put that phrase to death. No one is Randy Bass except for Randy Bass. There will be no second coming. There doesn’t have to be. Let Justin Bour be Justin Bour. Give him time, room to breathe, a chance to forge his own identity and place in team history, and believe that he can and will turn things around.
And please, start beating the Giants down, too.