"Fuji, the one who distrusts Fuji the most on this team is yourself." His words at the A's resonated with me. After his first season in MLB, Fujinami responded to a local TV station by saying.
When he is good, his pitches are dominant, and when he is bad, the ball flies in the wrong direction. Shintaro Fujinami is an enigmatic player. It is important to understand that he has a somewhat unique background among players from Japan.
Shintaro Fujinami captivated all of Japan with his overwhelming power in high school. In the United States, only the scene where Ohtani hit a home run off him is reported, but it was Fujinami's team that won that game. It is a well-known story that Ohtani cut out an article about Fujinami's joy at winning that game and pasted it in his dorm room as a reminder to himself. Fujinami won back-to-back national high school championships in spring and summer, attracting attention from all over Japan.
Fujinami and Ohtani were drafted in the same year, and Fujinami went to Hanshin and Ohtani went to Nippon Ham. I need to explain the team called Hanshin here. Hanshin is a baseball team with a long history and many enthusiastic fans.And the team is surrounded by a large number of media outlets. While some of the major newspapers provide honest coverage, there are also several newspapers that decorate their pages with scandalous articles (true or not) to stimulate purchasing interest, and these reporters follow the players from morning till night.
Fujinami became a popular player for the Hanshin Tigers right out of high school. Fans were excited about the young player's performance, and in response, the team continued to overuse him without a long-term vision. In response to the expectations, Fujinami struck out 138 IP and 126 strikeouts at the age of 19, 163 IP and 172 strikeouts at the age of 20, 199 IP and 221 strikeouts at the age of 21, and he took the strikeout title.During the 2016 season, when Fujinami was 21-22 years old, his Pitcher Abuse Points were the highest in the NPB, reaching an astonishing 569,740. This shows just how hard the Hanshin Tigers pushed young Fujinami.
At that time, there was no scientific way to evaluate pitchers in Japan. After winning more than 10 games three years in a row, Fujinami only managed to win 7 games the following year, and although his WAR was 3.8, one of the best on the team, he was given a pay cut by the team for not winning more than 10 games. The media blamed Fujinami.
Fujinami's pitching style was not originally to play with batters using his control. His style was to strike out with heavy fastballs, and sometimes his pitches were rough and he gave up a lot of walks. Kanemoto, the manager at the time, could not tolerate pitchers giving up four balls. Even when Fujinami finished a game without giving up a run, he did not praise him, but blamed him for giving up four pitches. Manager Kanemoto once had Fujinami throw 161 pitches as punishment in a game where his control was not good.The manager ordered the pitching coach to change Fujinami's pitching form and reduce the number of walks.
From there, the nightmarish process of form modification began. Under the guidance of a pitching coach, the process was to fundamentally change the way he controlled his body.
"I squeeze my adductor muscles and use a small axis inside my body. I describe it as wrapping my arms around the axis. But my coach told me it was correct to use the outside force, so I practiced every day to learn to do that. They also told me to straighten my back, but I always preferred to relax and have my back rounded. So the more I practiced, the more I thought, 'Huh? What? “and it went in a different direction."
「ざっくり言うと、自分のフォームって、内転筋を絞って、けっこう体の内側で軸を小さく使わなきゃいけないんです。コーチに外側の力を使うのが正しいんだって言われて、それを習得するために日々、練習してたりだとか。あと、背筋を伸ばさなきゃダメだって言われたんですけど、もともと自分はリラックスして、背中が丸まっているくらいの方がよかったんです。なので、練習すればするほど『あれ？ あれ？』って、どんどん違う方向にいってしまって。」
「さよなら、天才」中村計著 より
Fujinami's condition got worse and worse, and the more he practiced, the less he could control the ball. Fujinami's managers and coaches could not stand him. "Fujinami is a spoiled child," his manager told the media, and his coach sometimes scolded him to his face, saying, "You don't know anything about baseball". The media reported Fujinami's sluggish growth and said he had skipped practice. Fans read the articles and thought Fujinami was a fool. He became trapped. He suffered from alopecia areata and nightmares of his teeth falling apart, waking up screaming.
After the replacement of managers and coaches due to poor team performance, he spent time with an umbrella team picking up the pieces of his lost form and reconstructing it.
Even during those long, dark days, his potential was recognized and he continued to be approached by other teams and MLB agents who wanted to develop his talent. However, Fujinami was a popular player representing Hanshin for a time, so Hanshin did not accept the offer.
He has the personality of wanting to live up to the expectations of those around him, and up until that point he had been working in line with Hanshin's wishes. He continued to be called up to the first team only when there was a shortage of relief pitchers.But as he approached his 30s, he finally made a decision. "Shintaro Fujinami's life is meant to satisfy Shintaro Fujinami." He hadn't forgotten what Hideo Nomo told him in 2018. "You shouldn't be here, you should try your pitching in the MLB." He came to MLB without completely believing in himself. And a year passed, and he finally began to understand how extraordinary his powers were. He set the Japanese record for fastest pitching speed in a relief appearance against the Mets, helping his team win the district championship.
If he had been on a team that trained him for the long term, instead of a team that overworked young players for the sake of the team's popularity, wouldn't he have become a player who overpowered others by now? If he had become a professional baseball player in the era when scientific approach training methods were introduced in Japan, how much better would his results have been? If he had joined a team other than Hanshin, wouldn't the media have targeted him so relentlessly, and would he have been able to play baseball in a more stable mood?
When some Japanese people see him pitching well in the MLB, they feel a kind of guilt. He should have been able to develop his talent even more. And they watch his pitches with a prayerful feeling. Pitch with confidence, you're great!
…reference data…
The book features testimony from Shintaro Fujinami that clearly shows how the Hanshin Tigers organization, the media, and the fans systematically destroyed his rare talent.
This work of nonfiction is based on interviews with six players of the same generation as Shohei Ohtani.
This entry is a revised version of the one previously displayed below.
