Tuesday was my season debut, at the ballpark with a roof that was formerly known as Prince.
Japanese are fond of reminding newcomers that Japan has four seasons, which is fine until we are confronted with the fifth, the early summer rainy season, when a few weeks of petty rain and damp in June and early July precede the typically brutal heat that Japan’s 2020 Olympic Bid Committee euphemistically described as “mild and sunny ” and “an ideal climate for athletes to perform their best.”
If five seasons, or even four, are too many for you, the Seibu Lions’ home stadium might be for you, with its two, deep freeze and steaming hot with just a few weeks of pleasant transition between the two each year. A longtime colleague for another website agreed, “Shitty cold and shitty hot.”
While it might not be a great place to watch baseball, it is one of the better places in Japan to report on baseball. Probably due to the trek required to get there from central Tokyo, the Lions reopened the field before the game to reporters after the pandemic, when other clubs kept their pandemic media restrictions in place. What used to be a simple task of talking to players with out-of-town teams in front of the visiting dugout, has become a one-sided game of hide and seek, with reporters quarantined to the photographers well adjacent to the dugout, and players given ample room to hide.
At Seibu, however, the corridor under the stands behind the visiting dugout creates a space where players and reporters headed for the photographers well can mingle. There I’ve interviewed Hawks and Fighters players and expected the same when the Tigers showed up Tuesday. When Lions’ practice concluded I made my way to the first-base camera well, only to find myself the only reporter there.
A photographer I’ve known for years from Kyodo News told me the Tigers have banned those entering on official NPB credentials from using the corridor behind the dugout. While their Hanshin beat writer said the only way to talk to Tigers players was to wait for them after the game in the parking lot and grab them before they board a team bus.
By accident, I was able to talk to new Tigers manager Kyuji Fujikawa, who came over to say hi while I was still on the field as Seibu’s practice ended.
“I’ll be OK,” he said when asked about his lack of coaching and managing experience. “It’s different from playing, because of the details, but I just need to stay on top of it. The job is about dealing constructively with personalities, not unlike that of a manager in any other enterprise, I think. The appeal to this job is its difficulty.”
Being Tigers manager, however, gives a new dimension to the word “difficulty,” kind of like the difference between feeding your pets and feeding your pet piranhas. In an environment where Hanshin’s media demands managers and coaches announce which players were to blame for defeats, the two most successful managers over the last 20 years, Akinobu Okada and Akihiro Yano, were extremely skilled at avoiding that trap. When I asked Fujikawa about it, he said, “Hey this is where I grew up.”
Well, Yutaka Wada also spent his whole career as a Tiger and was as mild-mannered as they come, as did a pair of former big Tigers stars who moved to Hanshin mid-career, Akinobu Mayumi and Tomoaki Kanemoto, but all of them ended up airing their personal evaluations to the media.
Just before the game, there was a moment of silence on the 14th anniversary of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan’s Pacific coast, and once it started we had a scoreless duel between a pair of lefties with precise short-arm deliveries, 21-year-old Shinya Sugai, Seibu’s third pick in the 2021 developmental draft and Hanshin’s top draft signing from last year’s slave market, 24-year-old Takato Ihara.
Ihara had a few command issues but threw few fat pitches and got a lot of soft contact. Twoof his poor fastballs were ripped by new Lions Tyler Neven and Leo Cedeno, while the other hit Ihara gave up in four innings was a “double” right fielder Shota Morishita lost in the glare of sky-lit roof.
Ihara, a 24-year-old, who played college and corporate-league ball is a short guy, 170 centimeters, with a compact delivery, who touched 143 kph. The 183-cm Sugai reminded me of Yakult’s Keiji Takahashi but the late movement he has on his fastball is arm-side run instead of the hop Takahashi gets.
After five innings, Sugai gave way to Kaima Taira, who is back in the bullpen after an injury-plagued 2024 season aborted his starting-rotation ambitions. Taira threw some good breaking pitches which bode well for a big guy with big heat.
Another new Lion, longtime minor leaguer Emmanual Ramirez pitched a sharp eighth to setup their fourth newcomer of the game, reliever Trey Wingenter, who was absolutely dominant with his fastball and slider but surrendered the Tigers’ only hit of the game with two outs in the ninth, when shortstop Natsuo Takizawa made a good grab up the middle only for his bounced throw to first to pull his teammate off the bag. The 201-cm Wingenter got a called third strike to end it.
“My delivery was repeatable. I got ahead in the count. I didn’t throw Strike 1 with the first pitch, I was throwing it with the second, and was able to land my slider for a strike and get some swing and miss, and had control of my fastball,” said Wingenter who saw one guy try to ambush his heater only to whiff on a bunt attempt.
The Lions won 1-0 when an offline throw from left failed to nail a runner at the plate in the game’s only scoring opportunity.
