Why does the media sometimes get things wrong? We could just as easily ask why in Japanese pro baseball, which thrives on secrecy if anyone at any team can actually be counted on to know exactly what’s going on.
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I was chastised recently by a former NPB chief executive, treated as a member of the group of reporters who writes things they don’t know.
From the point of view of those working with teams, off-base reports in the media can fall in a spectrum from annoying to laughable, but the common kneejerk response “reporters make stuff up” is nearly as laughable.
Sure, I’ve seen people who call themselves journalists stretch the truth, but that’s amateur hour stuff. People who actually take pride in getting it right, rather than being proud of never being caught out, might, in a moment of stress or laziness, overestimate how well they understand something, but that is also fairly rare.
Most often, at least in Japan’s baseball media, reports are wrong because top executives with good access who should know the ins-and-outs don’t always, and then share their misunderstandings with reporters.
I was taken to task for expecting Atsunori Inaba to become the next Fighters’ manager. I never wrote he would but said rather that he seemed an obvious choice.
When Tsuyoshi Shinjo’s name came up, it sounded like a joke. Then, reports from a variety of outlets began surfacing that the Fighters’ parent company, NH Foods, had overruled the team’s decision to hire Inaba and insisted on Shinjo.
I asked Toshimasa Shimada, the team’s former chief executive, and he scoffed at the idea that anyone in the parent company had that kind of leverage, and suggested that reporters, as usual, were getting it wrong.
If it were one report, perhaps a writer was expounding on something someone said rather than reporting what a source actually said, but when everyone started jumping on that story, it became clear that if the stories were wrong, they were wrong because someone with authority in the Fighters front office thought he knew the whole story but didn’t, and was passing on that lack of knowledge to the media as a source.
I’ve seen this happen before in Japanese teams, where secrecy is part of the game.
In Japan, teams often don’t tell anyone how much they actually pay their players, and every player of any stature has an official annual contract shared with NPB and another secret contract detailing the benefits and obligations accruing to both parties.
If you don’t believe me, remember what happened after the Lotte Marines won the Japan Series in 2005. Bobby Valentine was being courted by his mentor, former Dodger skipper Tommy Lasorda, to come back to the States and work for the Dodgers.
When that news surfaced, Lotte’s chief executive, the infamous Ryuzo Setoyama, told reporters it was impossible for the skipper to walk away because Valentine had signed a three-year contract when he rejoined Lotte in 2004.
But Setoyama was just repeating his understanding of Valentine’s contract situation, something he was not privy to since the deal was a private one between Valentine and the club’s acting owner. Yet, reporters figured Setoyama knew of what he spoke and wrote it up as fact because there was no reason to think he was wrong.
When the Yomiuri Giants posted pitcher Shun Yamaguchi at the end of 2019 some of the team’s top executives publicly opposed the idea. They did so because they had no idea Yamaguchi’s secret contract, concluded when he joined Yomiuri as a free agent, required the team to post him.
