Today, a “sports” story in the right-wing Sankei Shimbun pointed out an incident at last Tuesday’s BayStars-Tigers game in Yokohama, when reliever Rowan Wick was adamant about leaving the mound when manager Daisuke Miura came out to pull him after he threw 16 pitches to three batters and Hanshin loaded the bases on two walks and a single.
According to the story, which purported to be a parable about how employers and bosses should deal with labor, Miura “showed visible emotion for the first time in his four years in charge,” and that emotion further energized the BayStars, who led 5-2 at the time to pile on five more runs in a 10-4 victory. To support that view, the article quoted second baseman Shugo Maki, the BayStars’ captain.
“It was the first time I saw the manager reveal his emotions on the field. It showed his hunger for victory, we felt we had to do our part,” Maki said.
The writer, Tetsuya Uemura, who noted that a fan in the seats behind home plate shouted, “He (Miura) should have acted like that from the very start!” and contrasted that old-school Tigers skipper Akinobu Okada.
The writer held Okada up as an example of a manager who understands the balance between the carrot and the stick – in Japanese “between candy and the whip” who will send regular players to the farm team at the drop of a hat who “mercilessly scolds players and coaches” and that’s why the team won the Japan Series last year after not winning the CL pennant since 2005.
What Uemura declined to mention is that Okada rarely criticizes individual players to the media, and while he scolds individuals, he does so in private, which is a huge plus for a team whose every failing is treated as inevitable in the local media because of some player or coach’s individual failing.
Okada can be emotional and angry, but he brushes aside the media’s demands to have scapegoats good naturedly to protect his players, which is not a story Sankei Shimbun is interested in.
Baseball has for as long as I remember, had an authoritarian strain. Perhaps because everything in it is thought of as linear and binary. A pitch is a ball or a strike, a ball is fair or foul, a player is out or safe. Every base is accounted for and blame and credit assigned to every play.
This makes it a good fit for a country where society’s wheels are greased by fault finding. When Kazuo Matsui took a leave of absence that everyone properly interpreted as a sacking, he was decried for failing to find fault and criticize players in public.
There is a need for those with authoritarian tendencies to put others in their place, to identify those deserving of ill treatment in order to cure society’s ills. In baseball, this takes the form of individuals standing up for the “right way to play.”
When some elements of full-contact sports were expunged from Major League Baseball by removing the egregious violence by base runners, baseball authoritarians were outraged that the game was becoming “woke.” Baseball was a great game before that violence had become normalized by MLB’s failure to enforce obstruction at home plate by catchers, and now that it is gone, the claims of the authoritarians who said the new standards would kill baseball are as hollow as the owners’ cries 50 years ago that free agency would kill their business.
Whatever stripe they come in, authoritarians often push an imagined ideal that is only blocked by some individuals who must be held accountable for their misdeeds. The key is not to promote the truth but to maintain a tight control of the narrative — and in this case to suggest that cracking the whip in the office is the “right way” to run a company.
I recently read Anne Appelbaum’s marvelous “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World,” and I strongly recommend it. It is, as the New York Times book review said, “deeply disturbing,” about how a network of states in various stages of their autocratic leanings share knowhow, technology, capital and resources to help each other evade economic sanctions, suppress popular dissent and political alternatives by spreading disinformation, subjugating the media and turbo-charging security forces and their surveillance capabilities.
Japan is not on the short path to authoritarianism, although that was a direction former prime minister Shinzo Abe leaned toward and the media exists in a framework that makes it vulnerable to manipulation. Abe, who was assassinated in 2022, stepped down 2020 ostensibly because of his ulcerative colitis condition but more likely because he feared prosecution over media exposure for his involvement in ordering police to quash a rape investigation.
Two keys to authoritarianism are degrading the rule of law and curtailing the ability of the media to report on corruption and bad actors.
The cure to authoritarianism is, Applebaum said, a dedicated effort to write laws that require transparency and by refusing to let the powerful shape the narrative in the media, something Japan struggles with.
It’s now the 20th anniversary of Japanese pro baseball’s biggest labor dispute, created when the owners decided they alone knew what was best for the baseball business in the same way that MLB owners knew that free agency would kill their business, when in fact it unlocked the forces that fueled its tremendous expansion.
In 2004, Japan’s owners worked behind the scenes to replace the 55-year-old two-league system with a contracted single league and bust the players’ union at the same time. When the plan began to be exposed through reporting on the players’ negotiations, the fans caught on to the bullshit and supported the players in their successful efforts to thwart the owners.
Today, a Lotte super fan, who writes on twitter as @lovelovemarines objected to Lotte’s decision to no longer honor coupons that came with purchased fan club memberships for the remainder of this season. This came as no shock.
Long after COVID forced adjustments to reporting, Lotte continues to suppress media coverage by making it hard to get to the field and talk to players. To get near players, reporters need to a trek around the stadium to get to the field instead of strolling the 20 meters or so through the corridors that lead to the dugouts.
For the most part, the only reporters willing to put up with this abuse of power are those required to be there because they are beat writers. A team can make a beat writer’s job hell if it wants to, but has zero leverage over other credentialed reporters who don’t depend on the club’s good graces.
These messages to the fans and to the media is a simple extended middle finger: We are good without you, and they smacks of normalizing bad behavior by teams and encouraging apathy by fans and the media.
