First things first. This book was released before the 2016 season, when Tomoaki Kanemoto was about to take over as manager of the team. Despite an appearance in the 2014 Japan Series, the team stumbled towards the end of 2015, resulting in the dismissal of then-manager Yutaka Wada and bringing in a new regime. Takashi Toritani had already been team captain for four seasons at this point, and his new manager called him into the office and said, “You need to change or this team will never win!”
The bulk of this book is spent getting to know Toritani’s past as a child, high school baseball player, university star, and young player on the Tigers. He goes into his philosophies of work ethic, preparation for all situations, why playing every day meant so much to him, and what captaincy means to him. In essence, he was defending himself in saying, “This is who I am, and if the new manager says I need to change, well, I’m not going to change. I know who I am and what I can and can’t do. If you don’t like my brand of captaincy, well…”
Among the most interesting parts of the book for me was his description of how he viewed baseball as a high school and university student (he only did the bare minimum and never put in extra work). That all changed when he played some practice games against the Daiei Hawks team as a junior in college. He then realized that if he ever wanted to make it to the pros and survive, he had his work cut out for him.
Also of note was his talk about his decision to try to get to the majors – an endeavor that fell flat during the 2014 off-season and resulted in his return to the team. He also said that was one of the reasons for his poor 2015 numbers – he spent most of his time off preparing to play in the bigs, and not on what he needed to do in order to lead the Tigers to a pennant.
I purposely decided not to read this when it first came out, in part because I was not particularly enamored with Toritani the player or the spokesperson. So how did this whole book age? Not particularly well. It is quite dry, repetitive, and self-centered. Truth be told, were it not for this book being included in my free trial of Kindle Unlimited, I never would have considered picking it up in the first place.
I love Takashi Toritani the color commentator and analyst, and definitely feel like he has a wealth of insight into the game, but it really did not come through in this writing.