Former Hanshin Tigers manager (2004-2008) Akinobu Okada must have seen something in the Yutaka Wada regime that he couldn’t find in his successor, Akinobu Mayumi. Apparently the Tigers went from being a winner (2003 and 2005 Central League champs) to somewhat of a loser until 2013. Having become a sports analyst, he decided to write…
Now I’m going to sound like a spoiled child, but my father-in-law called up his daughter (my wife) the other day and said, “I found something your husband might be interested in. Can you come over sometime this week and check it out? If he wants it, it’s his. If not, that’s OK, I can…
Knowing very little of the team’s tradition or its long-time writers, I picked this book up to get a quick education. It ended up being much more than that – a real entertaining read about some of the quirks of Hanshin fans, anecdotes of various players throughout history, and even a few write-ups about Tigers-related…
“Relationships deepen by repeatedly paying attention to not just the big things, but the small details as well. It was my job as ‘housewife’ to elevate the status of the ‘men of the house,’ the pitchers. I think I was able to do this because I always made it priority to think not of myself,…
The original title of the book is 未熟者 (Mijuku Mono). Written in the 2008 offseason and released prior to the second World Baseball Classic in 2009 (which the author played well in), Kyuji Fujikawa wrote a book that is not quite an autobiography but is somewhat difficult to classify. He mostly talked about how he got…
I have tried to focus on NPB and specifically the Hanshin Tigers as much as possible since last year. However, as someone who has mostly followed the game on paper for the better part of the last two decades, I thought I needed to get an education from someone who played the game on the…
The original title of this book is 本当は強い 阪神タイガース (Honto wa Tsuyoi Hanshin Tigers) and its author is Norio Torigoe. It was published in April 2013, so its contents reflect the team up to the end of the 2012 season. What interested me in this book before I even started reading it was its analysis…
To purchase and read this book, I had to put away my dislike of the Yomiuri Giants. After all, the subject and co-author starred for them during the most interesting years of my Hanshin Tigers’ history. He was a perfect foil to then-star Tiger Randy Bass, who enamored the fanatics at Koshien from the time he arrived in…
If only there were more books like this. If only I had been a fan of Japanese baseball when these two faced each other. If only I had had time to actually finish reading the book! (It was a loaner from the library, and I will take it out again after I’ve read a handful…
It is hard to believe Robert Whiting waited 15 years after publishing the groundbreaking You Gotta Have Wa (1989), but with all the changes in professional baseball, The Meaning of Ichiro presents several new angles on the Japanese-American relationship as seen on and around the baseball field. Instead of looking at how Americans adjusted (or didn’t) to Japanese…