Soon after I became a Hanshin Tigers fan in 2014, I received a bit of a challenge from one of the H-TEN followers: Read a Japanese book about the team and write a report about it on your website. My reward was that he was to buy a beer the next time we went to a game together at Koshien. I read the book and wrote the review, but never cashed in my reward (and since I don’t drink, I didn’t really want a beer anyways). Well, from that point on, I started to get hooked on Japanese baseball books, particularly about the Tigers. One of the books that always intrigued me but I never got around to until recently was this one.
Written in early 2014, 32 Years of Hanshin Tigers Play-by-Play not only had recency (at the time I added it to my Amazon Wishlist) but also had the perspective of someone in a position I envied to my core: the play-by-play announcer for the Tigers’ home games broadcast on Sun-TV (the best channel for watching the Tigers, for what it’s worth).
Akira Nishizawa spent 32 years in the booth, and was actually directly involved in several historic moments in team history. In fact, he claims partial responsibility for the second-most-infamous moment in team history (based on my own personal ranking). He said that the rapport he had established with Takenori Emoto is what prompted him to freely and casually say that the coaching staff was a bunch of idiots. Just prior to that, Emoto had been confronted by young reporters he did not know, and did not speak frankly… but Nishizawa was a long-time friend, so he didn’t mince his words – and indirectly, that comment is what led to his premature retirement from the game.
That is just chapter 1 of this book which is filled with other anecdotes involving Nishizawa-san and his time behind the microphone. He gives great background stories about all sorts of other players from Tigers history – some legends, and some not. Examples include Minoru Murayama (ace in the 1960s), Masayuki Kakefu (best Tigers slugger ever), Yutaka Enatsu (ace in the 1970s), as well as stories about past foreigners like Hal Breeden and Mike Reinbach (is the rumor TRUE that they did not get along?), Cecil Fielder, Randy Bass, and Willie Kirkland.
Also of note are the “interlude” chapters he wrote, such as, “What was it like to broadcast that 6-hour 26-minute game with the Phantom Home Run?” And “What do broadcasters do during the summer when the Tigers have no home games?” The answers, in brief, are: He did not eat or even drink much during the marathon game, and broadcasters like him do wedding emceeing and other such gigs to fill their schedules and supplement their income during times like that.
Overall, after reading this book, I felt envy creeping in as I wondered what life might have been like for me if I had followed my childhood dream and become a broadcaster. Surely, I would have a wealth of stories like this to tell as well. I guess for now, the best I can do is keep on doing what I do, part of which is reading entertaining books like this and reporting on them for all the wonderful folks who read what I write. Thank you, everyone.