When Japan’s sports editors want heroes, they get heroes. And when in hero mode, stories tend to be one-sided explanations about how one team or player won because they were gutsy/skilled/tenacious/clever enough.
Such stories often bear only a hazy resemblance of what really happens because they generally leave out glaring details about what their opponents did wrong.
We saw this on Saturday in an explanation of how the Yomiuri Giants on Friday mastered a pitcher Pacific League hitters have failed to solve, Lotte’s Roki Sasaki.
To be sure, the Giants hitters did put good swings on pitches, and some of those were faster than they typically see in the Central League. Credit to them for doing their jobs well and adjusting.
This story conveniently omitted that Sasaki was worse than he’s been all year. He couldn’t locate and his fastballs were straight as string. No, it was all about how the Giants hitters shortened their swings and tried to go to the opposite field. As Exhibit A, the writer produced Kazuma Okamoto’s hero interview.
If you’re familiar with hero interview etiquette, you know that Rule 1 is don’t take credit for what you did, and Rule 2, for those hitting home runs, is to say your intent was to create a better scoring opportunity for the hitters coming up behind you.
Had Okamoto pulled it into the third deck at Tokyo Dome, he would have said he was trying to hit behind the runner, and the home run happened by accident. He homered off a fat hanging forkball and did it hit it to the opposite field, so in a sense, he did go the other way.
“I was only trying to hit behind the runner. I’m glad to have hit a home run,” he said.
Okamoto’s quotes were typical hero interview fluff, and did not represent reality, but if one has decided that the Giants won because they were clever, then by all means use that top secret insight.
Better that than writing the truth–that Okamoto did a good job on a fat pitch– because one can’t have a “hero” story, if the losing opponent messes up.
This famously happened at the Beijing Olympics when Nana Takagi won the women’s speed skating mass start. Every story was about how she was a courageous and tenacious fighter, and how her training and effort led to the gold medal, without ever mentioning that she was seconds from taking silver when the leader skidded wide in the final turn.
Mentioning in the news story that the hero was second best and won by accident is not allowed if one has been ordered to lead with a hero. And so it goes.
The story of the Giants game was that only the Giants were clever and talented enough to beat Sasaki. The story DID tout how hard he threw but even his velocity was off.
