Word: hanshin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Randy Bass was one of the most successful foreigners to play in Japan, but his lack of wa nonetheless did him in. A towering left-handed batter who once played for the San Diego Padres, Bass hit 54 homers for the Hanshin Tigers in 1985, and that year helped his team win the Japan Series. Then in May 1988, the idolized Bass left Japan to be with his son, who was undergoing brain surgery in the U.S. The team slumped, and Bass's absence offended many Japanese; they could not forgive him. The Tigers cut him and then quibbled over...
Besides, we tend in our moralism to forget how treacherous morality can be. Last year the Hanshin Tigers, a professional baseball team in Osaka, got rid of their longtime star, the American Randy Bass, because he stayed at his ailing son's bedside instead of returning to the team. For the Japanese, putting family before company was the ultimate sin; to Bass, no doubt, abandoning his son for a game would have seemed the greater treachery. Many fans these days believe that baseball players who turn their heroism to capital, selling autographs to kids (Mickey Mantle earns more from signing...
...sixth week as managing director of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, Shingo Furuya, 56, ended a phone call to his wife Akiko with the word sayonara (goodbye) instead of his customary oyasumi (have a good night's sleep). Sensing something wrong, Akiko summoned a taxi and sped 300 miles from the family home in Ashiya, in southwestern Japan, to his hotel in Tokyo. By the time she arrived, early on the morning of July 19, Furuya had leaped from the staircase outside his eighth-floor room to the garden 92 feet below...
...managers of U.S. teams, seldom arrange trades or put together rosters. Yet they are held responsible if the team fares badly. They usually have no background in the sport and are employed directly by the large corporations that finance the teams. Furuya, who had worked since 1955 for the Hanshin Electric Railway Co., the Tigers' owner, oversaw operations at Koshien Stadium before being appointed managing director. Furuya was "too earnest, sincere and had too strong a sense of responsibility," observed noted Sports Commentator Shinya Sasaki. "His title was managing director, but he was just another middle-class manager forced...
After 18 years pitching for Hanshin, Nankai, Hiroshima, Nippon and Seibu in the Japanese League, the 36-year-old Enatsu is trying to hurl his way onto the Milwaukee Brewers this spring...