The are a
professional baseballBaseball is a team sport which is played by several professional leagues throughout the world. In these leagues, and associated farm teams, players are selected for their talents and are paid to play for a specific team or club system.-North America:...
team based in
Bunkyois one of the 23 special wards of Tokyo, Japan. Situated in the middle of the ward area, Bunkyō is a residential and educational center. Beginning in the Meiji period, literati like Natsume Sōseki, as well as scholars and politicians have lived there. The publishing, printing, and leading-edge...
,
Tokyo, officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan and is located on the eastern side of the main island Honshū. The twenty-three special wards of Tokyo, each governed as a city, cover the area that was once the city of Tokyo in the eastern part of the prefecture, totaling over 8 million people....
,
Japanis an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
. The team competes in the
Central LeagueThe or is one of Japan's two major professional baseball leagues, the winner of which plays the Japan Series against the winner of the other league, the Pacific League....
of Japan's top-tier major league, Nippon Professional Baseball, and they play their home games in the
Tokyo DomeTokyo Dome is a 55,000-seat stadium located in Bunkyo Ward of Tokyo, Japan. It is the home field of the Yomiuri Giants baseball team, and has also hosted basketball, American football and association football games, as well as puroresu matches, mixed martial arts events, K-1 Kickboxing events,...
, opened in 1988. The team is sometimes called the "Tokyo Giants" in the English-language press, but like the
Hanshin TigersThe are a Nippon Professional Baseball team based in Koshien, Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, and are in the Central League. Hanshin Electric Railway Co., Ltd., the subsidiary of Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Inc., owns the Hanshin Tigers directly...
and
Orix BuffaloesThe are a Nippon Professional Baseball team based in Osaka and Kobe, Japan. They play in the Pacific League. The team is owned by the Orix Group, a leading diversified financial services company based in Tokyo....
, the team is officially known by the name of its corporate owner. The team's owner is the
Yomiuri GroupThe is a Japanese newspaper published in Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, and other major Japanese cities. It is one of the five national newspapers in Japan; the other four are the Asahi Shimbun, the Mainichi Shimbun, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, and the Sankei Shimbun.Founded in 1874, the Yomiuri Shimbun is...
, a media
conglomerateA conglomerate is a combination of two or more companies engaged in entirely different businesses together into one overarching company . Conglomerates are often large...
which includes two newspapers and a television network. The Yomiuri Giants are regarded as "The
New York YankeesThe New York Yankees are a professional baseball team based in the borough of the Bronx, in New York City, New York and are a member of Major League Baseball's American League East Division...
of Japan" due to their wide-spread popularity, past dominance of the league, and polarizing effect on fans (baseball fans who feel ambivalent about other than their local team often have an intense dislike for the Giants; on the other hand, the Giants have a large fan base even in areas with a local team).
The Giants are the oldest team among the current Japanese professional teams.
Lefty O'DoulFrancis Joseph "Lefty" O'Doul was an American Major League Baseball player who went on to become an extraordinarily successful manager in the minor leagues, and also a vital figure in the establishment of professional baseball in Japan.-Player:Born in San Francisco, California, O'Doul began his...
, a former
Major League BaseballMajor League Baseball is the highest level of play in North American professional baseball. Specifically, Major League Baseball refers to the organization that operates the National League and the American League, by means of a joint organizational structure that has developed gradually between...
player, named the team "Tokyo Giants". Yomiuri Giants name and uniforms were based on the
New York (now San Francisco) GiantsThe San Francisco Giants are a Major League Baseball team based in San Francisco, California who currently play in the National League West Division. One of the oldest baseball teams, the Giants hold the honor of having won the most games of any team in the history of baseball...
. 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 TigersThe are a Nippon Professional Baseball team based in Koshien, Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, and are in the Central League. Hanshin Electric Railway Co., Ltd., the subsidiary of Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Inc., owns the Hanshin Tigers directly...
, a team especially popular in the
KansaiThe or the lies in the southern-central region of Japan's main island Honshū. The region includes the prefectures of Mie, Nara, Wakayama, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyōgo, and Shiga. Sometimes Fukui, Tokushima are also included...
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 LeagueFor the current Japanese Professional League, see Nippon Professional Baseball. was a professional baseball league in Japan.It was established on February 5, 1936 as "Japan Occupational Baseball League". Then it was renamed "Japanese Baseball League" in 1939. It was run until 1949. There was no...
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, or is a seven-game championship played by the teams of Japan's two professional baseball leagues .The Series is the highest level of play in professional baseball in Japan. It is usually played in October or November. As in all of the best of seven series, the first team to win four games is...
titles, in large part because of the hitting of
Shigeo Nagashimais a former professional baseball player and manager.Nagashima was by far the most popular figure in Japanese baseball during his career. His contributions to the development of the sport in Japan are immeasurable, but his competence as a manager is often called into question.-Biography:Nagashima...
and
Sadaharu OhSadaharu Oh or officially Wang Chenchih , is a former baseball player and manager of the Yomiuri Giants in Nippon Professional Baseball and is the former manager of the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. He holds the world record for home runs in a top league, having hit 868 in his career...
. The Yomiuri Giants have won more pennants and Japan Series titles than any other team in the NPB. In 2008 season, they also managed to achieve a biggest comeback victory in Central League history, by recovering a 13-game defecit to Hanshin Tigers to the place of Central League Champion.
The team is often referred by fans and in news headlines and tables simply as
Kyojin (巨人), Japanese for "Giants", instead of the usual corporate owner's name or the English nickname.
Former players
[Currently plays for the MLB Boston Red Sox]
http://english.baseball-museum.or.jp/baseball_hallo/detail/detail_008.html,
http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/news/mlb_news.jsp?ymd=20021106&content_id=171904&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp http://www.starffin.com/
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 AreaThe Greater Tokyo Area is a large metropolitan area in Japan consisting of most of the prefectures of Chiba, Kanagawa, Saitama, and Tokyo . In Japanese, it is referred to by various terms, including the , , , and others....
. This bandwagon appeal has been compared with the marketability of the
New York YankeesThe New York Yankees are a professional baseball team based in the borough of the Bronx, in New York City, New York and are a member of Major League Baseball's American League East Division...
and Manchester United, except that support for the Giants nearly exceeds 50% of those polled, while in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, support is judged to be between 30 to 40 percent for the
New York YankeesThe New York Yankees are a professional baseball team based in the borough of the Bronx, in New York City, New York and are a member of Major League Baseball's American League East Division...
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.
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 teamThe Japan national baseball team is the national baseball team representing Japan in international competitions. They are one of the more successful baseball teams in the world, having won the World Baseball Classic in 2006 and 2009/ The team is currently ranked 4th in the world according to the...
in a warm up friendly before the
World Baseball ClassicThe World Baseball Classic is an international baseball tournament sanctioned by the International Baseball Federation and created by Major League Baseball , the Major League Baseball Players Association , and other professional baseball leagues and their players associations around the world...
.
Oh home run controversy
In 1985, American
Randy Bassis a former American baseball player and current politician. He is less notable for his career in Major League Baseball than for his success in Japan's Hanshin Tigers of Central League, where he had the most spectacular run of any American to ever play in Japan...
, playing for the
Hanshin TigersThe are a Nippon Professional Baseball team based in Koshien, Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, and are in the Central League. Hanshin Electric Railway Co., Ltd., the subsidiary of Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Inc., owns the Hanshin Tigers directly...
, came into the last game of the season against the Oh-managed Giants with 54 home runs, one short of manager
Sadaharu OhSadaharu Oh or officially Wang Chenchih , is a former baseball player and manager of the Yomiuri Giants in Nippon Professional Baseball and is the former manager of the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. He holds the world record for home runs in a top league, having hit 868 in his career...
'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. A similar situation to this was presented in the 1992 movie
Mr. BaseballMr. Baseball is a 1992 American film that starred Tom Selleck and was directed by Fred Schepisi.-Plot:Jack Elliot is an aging American baseball player who's put on the trading block by the New York Yankees in favor of a younger player , and there's only one taker: the Nagoya Chunichi Dragons of...
.
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
External links
Yomiuri Giants Official Website