Required Reading for NPB fans and followers: The Japan Times is currently running Robert Whiting’s four-installment series detailing the rise and fall of Bobby Valentine’s career with the Chiba Lotte Marines. Whiting’s meticulously researched account describes a clandestine campaign to oust Valentine.
Whiting takes readers through Valentine’s meteoric rise to stardom after leading the Marines to a title in his first season as manager, portraying Bobby’s tenure as Chiba Lotte’s skipper as a stranger-than-fiction soap opera replete with organizational inner turmoil, Valentine’s at-times egomaniacal quest for power and control, fan upheavals, culture clashes, and nefarious secret plots that ultimately led to the wildly popular manager’s demise.
A must read. Hat tip to Itchy for notifying me about this one.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Westbaystars // Feb 10, 2010 at 11:32 pm
I guess you haven’t seen Whiting’s historical archives at JapaneseBaseball.com, either.
2 John Brooks // Feb 13, 2010 at 1:30 pm
As I mentioned over at Daigo Fujiwara’s site
To re-iterate it will be only a matter of time IMHO before Setoyama is toast like Hirooka was in 1996 I believe, and Valentine will be back whether with Chiba or some other NPB team. I find it hard to believe this is the last we seen of Bobby V. in Japan. Because, whenever Chiba needs a saving grace, it seems they always call on Bobby Valentine to be that person. They think he’s larger than life when on top, and beat him while he’s on the bottom. As Don Henley sings in “Dirty Laundry”
3 Gary Garland // Feb 24, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Hirooka tends to wear out his welcome because he can’t keep his mouth shut. He is the male Sachi Nomura. I don’t think he and Setoyama are analogous at all.
Setoyama is merely the Peter Principle in action. If he gets the axe (most probably by being kicked upstairs in some quasi-ceremonial post or is forced into retirement, it will only be after fans go on the warpath like nobody has ever seen.
By the way, the Marines are losing NO money. Yeah, the team doesn’t pay for itself, but few of Japan’s teams ever do and yet the league is 75 years on and there isn’t any information that would lead you to believe that Lotte is actually considering offloading their ballclub. That is because of its value as an advertising vehicle is worth more than the “losses.”
The money thing was merely an excuse to get rid of Valentine, who got a little carried away in believing he had more power than he actually did. His initial success in Chiba made him forget that everything in Japan is done in a roundabout way and so that few people as possible lose face. His popularity among the fans, in a way, boomeranged on him because it caused a fatal leap in logic.
Bobby’s position was understandable, but the object lesson is that, even as good a baseball mind as Bobby is (and I would like to see him replace Selig as MLB commissioner), you first and foremost have to service the cultural and more kabuki aspects of the Japanese societal and business cultures to stick around. You have to almost be a diplomat more than a manager. This is why a cretin like Terry Collins was such a bad idea. That hire was doomed from day one and he arguably already lost his clubhouse when he took Mitsutaka Goto’s number away from him.
I am considering putting a “so you want to manage in Japan” section up on my website to accompany the one for players. But I want to think about it a while longer before I do.
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