In March 2020, just as Japanese baseball was grinding through its preseason behind closed doors, trying to stay a step ahead of the coronavirus pandemic, former National League All-Star reliever Takashi Saito was entering his first season as a pitching coach, a job he said he only took because new Swallows skipper Shingo Takatsu begged him.
“It was hard, because I had never prepared for it,” Saito, now in his second season as DeNA pitching coach. “I never intended to coach.”
At the start of the 2020 season, Saito would be the one to go to the mound and talk to pitchers during innings, but by mid-season that role was assumed by Hirotoshi Ishii, who had schooled Saito in the coaches’ duties since he took the job. He lasted one year with Yakult.
After quitting baseball, Saito worked in the San Diego Padres front office. Because of that, I kept running into him at the winter meetings and later at the Padres’ spring training facility in Peoria, Arizona, when I visited in 2018 and 2019.
There, while we talked about how Japanese pro baseball might be so much better, he’d told me his ambition to be a general manager, and as a former Rakuten Eagle, I was surprised to hear he’d never been approached for the job that eventually went to Kazuhisa Ishii.
“I went to work with the Padres because I wanted to learn how to be a general manager,” the 53-year-old said Saturday at Tokyo Dome before DeNA’s game with the Giants. “I still want to do that. I’m still studying to do that.”
It was through Saito that I learned of the pre-draft panic that seized MLB front offices prior to the June draft, when teams would review hundreds of options, go over reports and video, in order to rank them, while working out those who would come to their home park.
“The GM would tell us to make sure to get our sleep, but there was no way anyone could sneak in more than an hour here or there,” he told me about his first experience of that with the Padres.
Two weeks after Japan’s trade deadline passed and was buried without comment, Saito said that teams don’t trade because of the way Japanese culture works. That the group is touted as being paramount, with an understanding that everyone, no matter how insignificant, has a job to do to contribute to the group success.
“Teams here think that trades make them weaker, because they focus on the player they are giving away and not on what they’re getting to make them stronger.”
Asked what his biggest thing he learned from the States either as a player or a member of the front office staff, Saito said, “I learned what it meant to really be in a meritocracy, where results are the only thing that matter.”
“This will probably be my last year doing this. If I don’t get a GM job, then I might fall back on being a (media) analyst.”
