From our monthly Daily Sports column (Japanese) / デイリースポーツの連載コラムから
So the Hanshin Tigers reached the playoffs despite an extremely poor start to the season. Congratulations! Let’s send off incumbent manager Akihiro Yano, who announced his resignation way back on January 31, with a miraculous playoff run! Meanwhile, the team appears to finally be ready to announce Akinobu Okada as Yano’s replacement for 2023 and beyond. Excited for this new era of Tigers baseball?
To an extent, I am… but I have many concerns about next season. And they’re not really about Okada or any of the coaches rumored to be joining the fold. For the record, some of the names bouncing around include: Yutaka Wada (farm manager), Katsuo Hirata (head coach), Makoto Imaoka, Kyuji Fujikawa, and Eiji Mizuguchi. Takashi Toritani was reportedly offered a position as well, but wants one more year of freedom to learn the game from the broadcaster’s booth (among other places).
So if the coaches themselves are not a concern (I’ll reserve judgment until I hear more about their philosophies), what is the problem? It is the entire structure of the organization. Question: Who exactly hires the manager? Apparently, the front office wanted to bring in Hirata (who has successfully managed the farm team for 4 years) as top squad manager… but the parent organization (Hankyu-Hanshin Holdings) opted instead for the man who guided this team to its last Central League pennant… back in 2005. He’s now 64 years old and will be 65 before doing any official work for the team, other than drafting new players on October 20.
For the record, the guys in the front office are not necessarily baseball executives or gurus. They are simply company employees (of Hankyu, a railway company) who have been dispatched to positions on the baseball club. So in a sense, it makes little difference if the front office or the parent company calls the shots about the manager. It’s only marginally wiser than letting ME make that decision. Maybe. But how do they reach their decisions? What does the organizational structure look like? Now that you ask…
Anthropologist and author William Kelly details that the Hanshin Tigers Team Administration Division in 1999 consisted of trainers, conditioning coaches, scorers, managers, and interpreters. They took orders from (and were accountable to) the Team President, who was appointed by the parent company.
Wait, where’s the General Manager? Who’s making important executive decisions for the team? Who’s in charge of drafting players, acquiring talent in the off-season, and making sure the team is heading in a wise direction in the long-term? The manager is. The end result is that the front office (and parent company) will only hire someone they know and trust, and who will not recklessly (or wisely?) blow up the roster and start afresh (though that is what Senichi Hoshino successfully did in 2002). They generally hire from the same gene pool, i.e., men who have played the lion’s share of their career with (and were drafted by) the Tigers. Yano and his predecessor, Tomoaki Kanemoto, who were both “tozama” (outsiders) who made their way to the Tigers mid-career, but ultimately found stardom with the team.
So here’s my big beef. The manager of the team is expected to wear four very large hats:
(1) He is the face of the franchise. Look at team posters, magazines, and pretty much anything PR-related. His face will be there, front-and-center. He needs to be congenial and pleasing to the eye (and fans’ hearts). He meets with the media before and after every game and might even answer their questions during mid-afternoon practices.
(2) He makes offseason roster cuts and acquisitions. This includes domestic free agent acquisitions, which may even require him to be in the negotiation room, as well as draft picks, which forces him off the field on a weeknight during the playoffs to select 5-10 young hopeful Japanese players out of high school, university, or company leagues. Obviously, this means he leans on the scouting department (which he should) but also needs to be in meetings with them to hear their reports. He basically constructs the roster he wants to field for the upcoming year. No small task by any means.
(3) He is responsible for overseeing offseason training. This includes spring training, but also fall camps, and even “voluntary” training for the new crop of draftees in January before camp starts.
(4) This is the one place he needs to have enough broadband for (but in my opinion does not): on-field, in-game decisions. He needs to call shots like changing pitches mid-inning, calling for certain players to pinch-hit (or bunt), and all the other decisions managers need to make.
The point of this all is, a GM needs to be instituted to take care of at least number two. This allows the team to have a long-term vision that does not require new managers to fall in line with his predecessor’s methods or vision for the team.
Case in point: in my years as a fan, we have gone from small-ball under Wada (2014-15), an attempt at beefing everyone up under Kanemoto (2016-18), and F1 sprinters racing around the basepaths with Yano (2019-present). None of these styles resembles the other, and the result is that the players Wada drafted may have struggled to adjust to Kanemoto’s demands and philosophies, and the same can be said with each subsequent new manager. Putting a GM in place to dictate the team’s direction and overarching approach to the game allows the manager to customize the roster he has been given, but not to the point of rejecting the big plan.
I honestly have been waiting for the team to return to having a GM post, which it did until 2015, when Katsuhiro Nakamura tragically and suddenly passed away. Not sure why they did not replace him, and not sure when they will. But they need to… otherwise, we’ll be looking for another manager and playing a different brand of baseball again in 3-4 years’ time, leading to one more lap on the roller coaster ride of Hanshin Tigers fandom.