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!