By announcing the day before spring training that he would step down at the end of the 2022 season, Akihiro Yano broke a taboo by causing the media to talk about something else but their prepared storylines about the first day of camp.
Former Tigers pitcher Jiro Ueda wrote a measured response in the Sankei Sports, ” There is no reason for a manager with good results for three years to quit. I wonder if something was just too much. It’s unthinkable if one takes into account manager Yano’s strong sense of responsibility.”
Although there was talk of wholesale outrage, that was not entirely evident from stories on the net on Monday. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should disregard it entirely.
A lot of former players are waiting around for a former teammate to entrust them with a coaching job, and it’s probably inconceivable to them that anyone would walk away from being the manager.
In that sense, former ballplayers remind me of numerous relatives of Japan’s emperor, who have no chance of being anything but royals, and whose only joy in life seems to be to spout off about how the emperor and his spouse are not nearly imperial enough to suit them.
Another former Tigers pitcher, Takenori Emoto, whose TV commentary generally revolves around what people do wrong, said, not surprisingly, that Yano destroyed the team’s morale from the get-go.
But that’s Emoto’s racket.
Still, while saying how he’d have handled it better, Emoto admitted the difficulties of managing a team where the pressure stirred up by the media can be relentless.
“It could be his way of saying, I’m going to do this my way and the mass media can go hang,” Emoto wrote. “That in itself is not a bad thing.”
While there could be family things that are more important to the skipper than managing the Tigers, I’m guessing that the aggravation of the job is not worth it. Talking to the media, he said, “This is not something I wanted to for a long long time.”
More than any Tigers manager since Akinobu Okada from 2004 to 2008, Yano seemed the best equipped to do things his way without too much regard for the Tigers’ beat writers’ demands for scapegoats.
That was evident in his postgame press conferences: “What about that guy’s mistake? No. It didn’t cost us the game. He’ll do better tomorrow. Why would I throw out everything I know about the guy, his quality, his work ethic, and bench him because of one play? Not going to happen.”
A few years ago, Matt Murton told me how when the players arrived at the Koshien clubhouse each day, that morning’s papers would be spread out on a table where everyone could see who was the darling of the press that day or being written off as a traitor to the cause.
One Yukan Fuji story that seems to be popping up everywhere, said there were rumors Yano wanted out and that he had expressed that opinion when the team asked him to re-sign for 2022.
Some have suggested it’s a motivational tactic, the way Sadaharu Oh’s retirement year in 2008. But if so, I hope it goes better for the Tigers than it did for the Hawks.
Having come back from cancer surgery that removed most of his stomach, Oh said he would leave after the 2008 season. SoftBank, being another pressure cooker organization found a way to make every game about whether it would contribute to Oh’s living or dying.
One player at the time said, “Around here, it’s almost as if losing a game will kill the manager. Like it’s not enough pressure for players to feel responsible for a loss before throwing that at them.”
