When Tsuyoshi Shinjo declared that he would prefer to be called “Big boss” at his first press conference, a number of those asking questions practically wet themselves when they called him that.
The nickname, he said, is what some people in Bali called him during his time there. And Shinjo said he would prefer to be called that, rather than “kantoku,” the Japanese word used for baseball managers.
This made me wonder how often people are actually using the name to refer to him, so through the magic of Google, I checked up on as many Shinjo stories as a I could stomach.
From Thursday through Sunday, I scanned 16 stories, seven used “Big Boss” in the headline, 11 used “manager,” including four that used both, while two used neither. In the text of the stories, manager, appeared a total of 25 times and big boss 10 times, although that can be misleading since most of the stories begin by identifying Shinjo as manager.
Two outlets, SpoNichi Annex, and baseball site Full Count declined to call Shinjo boss. Nikkan Sports, the nation’s biggest sports daily, liberally uses both.
If you say anything, people will write about it
The real thing I learned from the exercise was that Shinjo will talk about everything and anything, regardless how inconsequential, because most of the stories are sprinkled with fluff.
- Teams often break their training camps into groups, and give them simple labels. The Fighters’ major league camp is now the Big Group, and the minor league camp the Boss Group.
- On the first day of camp, he arrived at the Boss Group on a boss bike, a huge white tricycle motorcycle.
- Shinjo wore Prada sneakers while checking on a first-year pitcher in the bullpen.
- His preferred perfumes are Christian Diore, Rising Wave and Jennifer Lopez, the latter two, he said he applied that day to his upper and lower body, although that article declined to get more specific.
