I spent a few days thinking about what to write, but nothing particular came to mind, so I'll write about a note I read recently that I found interesting.
It's a note about the Hanshin Tigers, who happily won the league championship this year.
Every year around this season, NPB starts handing out release notices.
A Hanshin Tigers high-school draftee position player, Toi Reiji, was released in his fourth year.
He joined on a full roster contract out of high school, then dropped to a developmental contract, and left the team at 21.
The note he wrote became a topic.
Toi Reiji, looking back on four years as a pro
There's a second one too.
Toi Reiji, looking back on three years at Tenri High and Koshien
Maybe it's because I'm a Hanshin Tigers fan, but it was a really wonderful note.
Some Tigers fans loved it; at the same time, criticism pointing at the front office and the farm team's development environment (aimed at the organization, not Toi) also made it a topic.
In reality, first-team regulars are at a very high level, yet the pipeline of next-generation talent is thin — a serious problem for the Tigers.
Reading this note, you can see — without going beyond reasonable inference — that as an environment for young players to grow, it's far too harsh; put another way, even if someone develops, it feels less like the development environment and more like their own potential.
※ That said, Toi himself is extremely humble and expresses gratitude to the organization throughout, so he doesn't seem to hold negative feelings. It's very dangerous for fans to overread this as him criticizing the development environment. And in the first place, at the extreme of professional sports, how much room there is for an organization's development program to control outcomes is something a layperson like me has no idea about.
Reading the note, you feel the difficulty of high-school draftees in your bones.
High-school players lack physical strength and their bodies are small by pro standards, so they have to be built up
— the physical side —
and pro standards get higher every year, so it's extremely hard for a high-school position player to make it big
— the technical side, which you can imagine —
Facing those walls, high-school players are usually the youngest on the team, their peers are all older, and they also have to face the loneliness of not knowing how to communicate. Realizing that made me feel terribly sorry for them.
Even without working-adult experience, if you'd at least gone through university, you'd have more chances to pick up at least some knack for communication — which makes it all the more frustrating.
(※ Reading the note I also often felt he had no choice but to be passive in communication. It feels like a waste, but among baseball players who already have rare talent, those who also have the thick-skinned, aggressive communication ability — or mentality — are another rare handful.)
At 21, after experiencing a rare kind of challenge and setback that almost no one in the world has, if you can write your feelings at the time with this much reality and care, and with this much intelligence, I think there's no doubt his life going forward will go well.
As a parent, I learned a lot too.
The note mentions Toi's parents as well; they must have been on edge the whole time.
Empathizing with the parents, I often felt something hit me in the chest.
At the same time, if my own child grew into such a wonderful person, I think I'd be bursting with pride.
This too has me thinking about something I often think about lately.
I touched on it lightly above, but when watching sports I get too heated and sometimes think they should do things differently.
Even if you think you're being objective, of course people on the ground know more than we can observe, and there are all kinds of constraints.
Not just sports viewing — changing anything drastically is hard.
From the angle of changing rules and constraints, I recall something the late former Prime Minister Abe said.
He was on some political variety show, on a topic about imperial succession.
It's a somewhat sensitive topic, so I'll set aside how that should be.
Also, this isn't at the level of a simple change of systems or roster construction — it's a deep theme of tradition in Japanese culture, so the flavor is different from the discussion so far.
His claim was that if you try to judge Japanese tradition and culture that have continued for thousands of years by modern values and frameworks, however rational that thinking may be, before tradition it is mere shallowness, and one should be humble about one's own thinking.
I found this very important, and was impressed at the time that it's a way of thinking I like, applicable to anything.
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