The Gritty Tigers

The Gritty Tigers
January 17, 2021

Sometimes, reading one book sends you down the rabbit hole and has you ordering all kinds of other books related to the topic. I forget exactly which book led me to buy this title, but I have a feeling it was probably either this one or this one.

Either way, I bought it over a year ago and it sat there on my shelf, telling me, “Someday, you gotta read me. You bought me for a reason, after all…” And let me tell you, it has served its purpose and then some. Written in 1980 by a longtime Tigers beat reporter (and fan) and published the next year, The Gritty Tigers (a.k.a., ガッツタイガース) is barely about the team’s state of affairs roughly 4 decades ago. It is more of a recounting of some of the biggest players’ stories (including a few that I have featured on H-TEN, like Tadashi Wakabayashi and Fumio Fujimura) plus others who probably deserve some form of mention as well: Kaoru Bettoh, Masaru Kageura, and Kenjiro Tamiya.

There is roughly a paragraph written about every single year in the team’s existence (1936-80), and reasonably detailed (but also concise) accounts of some of the team’s more memorable (scandalous) moments. Many of those, I have already documented for your reading pleasure, but some others have come to light in a new way for me, which made this a true pleasure to devour over the course of the past couple of weeks.

The final one-third of the book is a veritable mini-encyclopedia of the team: record-holders, individual title winners, league standings for every season since the beginning, and something that really surprised me: a player directory, complete with spouses’ names and home addresses! I guess there was very little in the way of player privacy back in the day, which is completely unimaginable in this day and age. I wonder if any of them are still living in the homes listed in this book!

More important than the fact that I really enjoyed hearing these stories from yesteryear is this: my desire to write an English book about the history of Hanshin has been rekindled. I can’t say it will get done any time soon, but I am pretty sure that I have the right mindset to at least get it started! If you’ve enjoyed reading these book reviews, I am sure you are going to love what H-TEN puts out when the time is right. Wait for it, because it is about to get started in 2021!

Back to Book Reviews


Final Verdict: A Solid Double to the Gap

Facebook Comments

Discover more from Hanshin Tigers English News

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading