Within hours of Shinnosuke Abe’s Monday arrest for domestic assault, the Yomiuri Giants manager submitted his resignation on Tuesday, presenting the organization with a monumental challenge.
The challenge isn’t about how to move forward with a new manager to win more games than the team loses this season, but how to control the damage and sweep as much of the necessary repair work under the carpet in order to preserve a carefully managed team tradition.
Police showed up to Abe’s Tokyo home Monday night, answering a call from his 18-year-old eldest daughter. Abe said he tried to break up a fight between his two daughters, was enraged when the older one gave him some lip, and shoved her to the floor. Police reported that there was alcohol on the skipper’s breath.
Prior to Abe’s resignation, the team named offensive tactics coach Hideki Hashigami their interim manager.
The Giants have certain ways of doing things. That doesn’t mean they do things by THE BOOK, because that would imply the club obeys rules it expects the other, lesser teams to follow. Rather, they do thing by their book, and three of those rules are 1) never let anyone who played for a different team manage, 2) never fire the manager, and 3) never change managers during the season.
The only Giants manager to play for another team, Haruyasu Nakajima, played for Yomiuri until 1949, during which he had two stints as manager. After leaving the Giants, he went on to both play and manage for Taiyo. Since discarding Shigeo Nagashima after the 1980 season led to a tsunami of canceled subscriptions to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the team has not fired its managers, preferring them to “resign.”
Hashigami became a highly regarded coach after playing for the Nippon Ham Fighters, and Yakult Swallows, where he was one of Katsuya Nomura’s right-handed-hitting high on-base-percentage role players in the 1990s. Even the Giants’ first manager when league play opened in 1936, Sadayoshi Fujimoto, pitched for Yomiuri’s pro team during its 1935 tour of the United States.
Japan is a wonderland of made-up history.
In the 1860s, a group of outside clans in need of legitimacy to overthrow the staggering Tokugawa Shogunate, invented the idea that the newly enthroned teenage emperor was not just human but a living god, and that all of Japan’s previous emperors had been men who were living gods and all had ruled through a mysterious “imperial will.”
When Japan adopted public education as part of its modernization process, the route through which baseball flooded into the country, history texts documented the newly invented history and eliminated all traces of the eight previous female emperors who did not fit the narrative.
The Yomiuri Shimbun, in its self-appointed role as keeper of baseball truth, is a master of this art.
During the 1960s, the team featuring Korean star Masaichi Kaneda and Chinese star Sadaharu Oh billed itself as “pure Japanese.” Yomiuri is also fond of declaring its team the first professional baseball outfit in Japan, despite its creation coming 10 years after the professional Shibaura Club folded.
For those reasons, I’m certain Hashigami will never be promoted to the top seat, if only so Yomiuri can claim to have never officially been managed by an outsider.
