The former owner of the Yomiuri Giants, died Thursday at the age of 98, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun, proving to me he was not actually a vampire doomed to curse us for eternity.
Even before I began seriously writing about Japanese pro baseball in 1993. Because of his wit, charisma and turn of phrase, Watanabe was eminently quotable, and his latest bombast was often front-page news in Japan’s sports dailies.
In 1993, he used the Giants’ leverage as NPB’s most powerful organization to force free agency down the throats of other owners, see “R.I.P. Tsuneo Watanabe.” That was the same year I began writing the first of four editions of “Jim Allen’s Guide to Japanese Baseball,” an analytical guide.
Oddly enough, my employment as a baseball writer was indirectly thanks to Watanabe, but I’ll get to that later, after touching on a few other anecdotes about Nabetsune’s remarkable impact on NPB, most of which involved rule changes meant to benefit his team more than others that had unintended negative impact on Japanese pro baseball.
Watanabe was never all that astute at baseball, but he was expert at political machinations and promotion. When it came to selecting NPB’s commissioners, his was the only voice that really mattered.
Dodging the draft
Over the past decades, other teams objected to how NPB’s draft punished teams who failed to sign their picks by not giving them compensation picks the following year, but Watanabe and his successors would not permit any changes.
The lack of compensation was to discourage other teams from upsetting the Giants’ draft plans by selecting players who had publicly committed to only playing for Yomiuri. Players risking their top draft picks to go after those players would be punished if they could not get a deal done.
The lack of a compensation pick never deterred the Nippon Ham Fighters, but has left teams in a weak negotiating position when it comes to top amateur stars such as Roki Sasaki who have more options than the team holding their rights.
Throwing money at the problem
The Giants never wanted the draft, first introduced in November 1965 to deprive amateurs of their ability to get fair-market prices for their services, because Yomiuri could outbid every other team for amateurs, and its owners have fought every change to draft rules that increased competitive balance.
When the Giants and 10 other teams in the 1980s were routinely outfoxed by Japanese pro baseball’s master fixer, Rikuo Nemoto–read about this in “Mr. Nemoto’s mystery tour“—they sought a free-market solution, letting each team throw as much money as it liked at up to two players a year starting from the 1993 draft. This was more to Yomiuri’s liking.
The owners set a limit on first-year compensation to these players, but it soon became a joke, as players learned they could get far more than that limit. To smooth the process, some college and corporate team coaches began getting cash handouts to involve them in the recruiting process.
One result of this was a scandal after an accountant convinced a few players that he could hide the excessive payments from teams from the tax collector. This scam ended up with arrests and suspensions, most notably that of current Hawks manager Hiroki Kokubo.
Kokubo’s arrest led Watanabe to call Kokubo and the Hawks “tax cheats.” This was typical Watanabe, implying that his Giants were not, when the Yomiuri overlord could likely have given a master class on manipulating money under the table.
When I was at Yomiuri, the company one year handed each of us a bank book with an account it had set up with Mizuho Bank, through which our expenses and salaries would be paid. Some of the young women in the office, however, received one they were allowed to draw from and one or more they were warned never to touch or look into–since the money being paid into those accounts did not belong to them.
Even at his advanced age, Watanabe could have competed Olympically if there were an event for hypocrisy.
The Olympic effort
When Olympic baseball was opened to professionals for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the Pacific League, encouraged by another quality individual and future felon, Seibu Lions owner Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, decided to contribute one star player each to the national team while the PL took a week off from its regular season.
Asked for his opinion on this, Watanabe said all six PL clubs should be kicked out of NPB for violating the Baseball Charter’s rule that teams should devote all their energies to competing during the regular season.
Four years later, Yomiuri was an Olympic sponsor for the Athens Olympics and with former Giants manager Shigeo Nagashima to run the national team, both leagues took a break for the Olympics, while Yomiuri’s Nippon Television broadcast all of Japan’s games.
The trouble with Hara
Nagashima retired from managing the Giants after finishing second in 2001, and the Giants named popular former third baseman Tatsunori Hara to take over. In 2002, the Giants appeared to be Japan Series underdogs against the Seibu Lions but swept them in four games.
The following season was another story, when Giants were one of four teams that spent the season hovering around .500 while the Hanshin Tigers broke from the pack in May and never looked back. Like his mentor Nagashima before him, Hara showed no particular skill for game management, and Watanabe chose to blame him for failing to do better.
As the frustration mounted, reporters began following him everywhere and by the end of the season, no Tokyo edition sports daily was complete without a front-page haring from Watanabe saying how one more loss would cost Hara his job.
Hara put up with this until the season ended, and then submitted his resignation, something Watanabe never anticipated. The team hustled around to find a replacement, and Watanabe met the press to announce a managing change.
“This is all your fault,” he told the assembled reporters. “You guys have some nerve following me even to the toilet when I’m drunk and then writing down what I say. This wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for you.”
Under Hara, the Giants defense and team speed improved dramatically thanks to his commitment to using players who excelled in the minors regardless of their pedigree – in contrast to Yomiuri’s previous dependence on established veterans and youngsters who had been marquee amateurs.
His quitting reversed the process as Yomiuri loaded up on big, slow hitters, while manager Tsuneo Horiuchi and his coaching staff feuded with and blamed the players. This ended in a PR disaster end to the 2005 season when Horiuchi was booed by the fans at Tokyo Dome.
Nabetsune and me
Before I worked at the Daily Yomiuri, I was working in the summer of 1998 teaching English to Japanese students polishing their language skills ahead of going to colleges and universities in America.
While I wrote my annual guide to Japanese baseball and the Japan Times’ annual preseason preview, I expected to be an English teacher for the foreseeable future. Having heard the Yomiuri Shimbun had published an editorial portraying Japan’s Nanjing Massacre as a hoax, I went in search of an English text online, but instead found a want ad for a sports desk editor, responded and got my foot in the door.
Ironically, Watanabe’s zeal to downplay Japan’s wartime atrocities in the service of the campaign to repeal Article 9 of the Constitution, rejecting war as a right of the state, faded over the years.
Eventually, by 2006, saying he felt Japan’s collective willful amnesia about the war was counterproductive, Watanabe summoned the courage to investigate the war and expose truths Japan had dodged for 50 years, including a frank account of what happened in Nanjing in December 1937.
Watanabe behaving moderately and responsibly was as big a surprise as they come.
There will be more to follow.
