The Yomiuri Giants
(????????, Yomiuri Jaiantsu
?,
) are a professional baseball team based in Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan. The team competes in the Central League of Japan's top-tier major league, Nippon Professional Baseball, and they play their home games in the Tokyo Dome, opened in 1988. The team is sometimes called the "Tokyo Giants" in the English-language press, but like the Hanshin Tigers and Orix Buffaloes, the team is officially known by the name of its corporate owner. The team's owner is the Yomiuri Group, a media conglomerate which includes two newspapers and a television network. The Yomiuri Giants are regarded as "The New York Yankees of Japan" due to their wide-spread popularity and past dominance of the league.
The Giants are the oldest team among the current Japanese professional teams. Lefty O'Doul, a former Major League Baseball player, named the team "Tokyo Giants". Yomiuri Giants name and uniforms were based on the New York (now San Francisco) Giants. The teams colors (orange and black) are the same colors worn by the National League's Giants, both in New York and San Francisco. The stylized lettering on the team's jerseys and caps is similar to the fancy lettering used by the Giants when they played in New York in the 1930s, although during the 1970s the Giants modernized their lettering to follow the style worn by the American Giants. The Giants' main rivalry is with the Hanshin Tigers, a team especially popular in the Kansai region.
The Giants are also unsurprisingly the richest club in the league after winning the championship continuously for the past years. They won nine Japanese Baseball League titles before the establishment of the two league system in 1950. Starting in 1965, the Giants won nine consecutive Central League pennants and Japan Series titles, in large part because of the hitting of Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh. The last Giants League victory was in 2008, which was the biggest comeback in Central League history (from a maximum of 13 games behind Hanshin Tigers). The Yomiuri Giants have won more pennants and Japan Series titles than any other team in the NPB.
The team is often referred by fans and in news headlines and tables simply as Kyojin
(??), Japanese for "Giants", instead of the usual corporate owner's name or the English nickname.
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YOMIURI GIANTS TICKETS
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Players of note
Current Manager
- 88 Tatsunori Hara (? ??, also former Giants player)
Current players
- 00 Takayuki Terauchi (?? ??) - 2B or 3B or SS
- 0 Takuya Kimura (baseball)
- 2 Michihiro Ogasawara (??? ??) - 3B
- 5 Alex Ramírez - OF
- 6 Hayato Sakamoto (?? ??) - SS
- 8 Yoshitomo Tani (? ??) - OF
- 9 Yoshiyuki Kamei (baseball)
- 10 Shinnosuke Abe (?? ???) - C
- 11 Yuya Kubo (?? ??) - P
- 12 Takahiro Suzuki (?? ??) - OF
- 17 Shun Tohno (?? ?) - P
- 20 Kiyoshi Toyoda (?? ?) - P
- 21 Hisanori Takahashi (?? ??) - P
- 22 Daisuke Ochi (?? ??) - P
- 23 Ryota Wakiya (?? ??) - 2B or 3B or SS
- 24 Yoshinobu Takahashi (?? ??) - OF
- 25 Lee Seung-Yeop (? ??) - 1B
- 26 Tetsuya Utsumi (?? ??) - P
- 29 Seth Greisinger - P
- 30 Kentaro Nishimura (?? ???) - P
- 31 Adrian Burnside - P
- 33 Takahiko Nomaguchi (??? ??) - P
- 36 Micheal Nakamura (??????) - P
- 37 Soichi Fujita (?? ??) - P
- 40 Ken Katoh (?? ?) - C
- 41 Hiroshi Kisanuki (??? ?) - P
- 42 Marc Kroon - P
- 44 Noriyoshi Ohmichi (?? ??) - 1B or OF
- 47 Tetsuya Yamaguchi (?? ??) - P
- 50 Ryuichi Kajimae (??? ??) - OF
- 51 Shigeyuki Furuki (?? ??) - 3B or 2B or SS
- 52 Manabu Iwadate (?? ?) - IF
- 53 Kazunari Sanematsu (?? ??) - C
- 63 Yushi Aida (?? ??) - C
- 68 Masafumi Togano (?? ??) - C
- 69 Tomoya Inzen (?? ??) - OF
Former players
- Chuck Cary - P
- Jesse Barfield - OF
- Phil Bradley
- Keith Comstock
- Warren Cromartie - OF
- Mariano Duncan
- Suguru Egawa (?? ?)
- Balvino Galvez
- Dan Gladden
- Gary Glover - P
- Luis González (infielder)
- Bill Gullickson - P
- Isao Harimoto (Jang Hun) (?? ?)
- Tatsuro Hirooka (?? ??)
- Damon Hollins - OF
- Tsuneo Horiuchi (?? ??)
- Gabe Kapler - 3B
- Masumi Kuwata (?? ??) - P
- Tetsuharu Kawakami (?? ??)
- Kazuhiro Kiyohara(?? ??)
- Norihiro Komada (?? ??)
- Davey Johnson - Manager
- Chris Latham (baseball player)
- Shane Mack (baseball player)
- Yukinaga Maeda (?? ??) - P
- Hiromi Makihara (?? ??)
- Hideki Matsui (?? ??)
- Shigeo Nagashima (?? ??)
- Kiyoshi Nakahata (?? ?)
- Hiromitsu Ochiai (?? ??)
- Hideki Okajima (?? ??) [Currently plays for the MLB Boston Red Sox]
- Sadaharu Oh (? ??)
- Roberto Petagine
- Jeremy Powell
- Tuffy Rhodes
- Masaki Saito (?? ??)
- Eiji Sawamura (?? ??) ,
- Kazunori Shinozuka (?? ??)
- Reggie Smith
- Victor Starffin
- Koji Uehara (?? ??)
- John Wasdin
- Roy White
- Clyde Wright
- Wally Kaname Yonamine (??? ?)
Retired numbers
- 1 Sadaharu Oh (? ??)
- 3 Shigeo Nagashima (?? ??)
- 4 Toshio Kurosawa (?? ??)
- 14 Eiji Sawamura (?? ??)
- 16 Tetsuharu Kawakami (?? ??)
- 34 Masaichi Kaneda (?? ??)
The Giants as "Japan's team"
Due to the Yomiuri company's vast influence in Japan as a major media conglomerate, the Giants are successfully marketed to the Japanese people as "Japan's Team." In fact, for some years the Giants' uniforms had "Tokyo" on the jersey instead of "Yomiuri" or "Giants," seeming to imply that the Giants represent the vast metropolis and geopolitical center of Japan, even though the
Yakult Swallows are also based in Tokyo and three other teams play in the
Greater Tokyo Area. This bandwagon appeal has been compared with the marketability of the
New York Yankees and
Manchester United, except that support for the Giants nearly exceeds 50% of those polled, while in the
United States and
England, support is judged to be between 30 to 40 percent for the
New York Yankees and
Manchester United, respectively. Correspondingly, fans of other professional baseball teams in Japan are often openly derisive and contemptuous of the Giants' bandwagon marketing tactics, and an "anti-Giants" movement exists in protest of the near hegemony established by the Yomiuri Giants.
[1]
It has also long been alleged that the Giants rely on underhanded tactics to recruit the best players, involving bribes to players and amateur coaches, or using their influence on the governing council of Japanese professional baseball to pass rules that favors their recruiting efforts. This may be one explanation for the Giants' abundance of success in league play.
Ironically in 2009 the Giants played the
Japan national baseball team in a warm up friendly before the
World Baseball Classic.
Oh home run controversy
In 1985, American
Randy Bass, playing for the
Hanshin Tigers, came into the last game of the season against the Oh-managed Giants with 54 home runs, one short of manager
Sadaharu Oh's single-season record of 55. Bass was intentionally walked four times on four straight pitches each time, leading Bass to famously hold his bat upside down. Bass reached over the plate on the fifth occasion and batted the ball into the outfield for a single. After the game, Oh denied ordering his pitchers to walk Bass, but Keith Comstock, an American pitcher for the Giants, later stated that an unnamed Giants coach had threatened a fine of $1,000 for every strike that any Giants pitcher threw to Bass. The magazine Takarajima investigated the incident and reported that the Giants front office had likely ordered the team not to allow Bass an opportunity to tie or break Oh's record. For the most part the Japanese media remained silent on the incident as did league commissioner Takeso Shimoda.
[2] A similar situation to this was presented in the 1992 movie
Mr. Baseball.
Trivia
- It has been said because of the lengthy MLBPA strike in the United States, and because of Japanese lore of the meaning of 60th anniversaries, the 1994 60th Anniversary Yomiuri Giants were the luckiest team in professional baseball. Many journalists called the 1994 team the World Champions of Professional Baseball.
- Contact information
: Yomiuri Giants, Takebashi 3-3 Building, 3-3 Kanda Nishiki-cho, Chiyoda, Tokyo 101-8462
Notes
- Whiting, ''You Gotta have Wa''.
- Whiting, Robert, "Equaling Oh's HR record proved difficult", ''Japan Times'', October 31, 2008, p. 12.
Books