Yomiuri Giants

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
For current information on this topic, see 2009 Yomiuri Giants season.
Yomiuri Giants
League Central League
Location Tokyo
Ballpark Tokyo Dome
Year Founded 1934
Nickname(s) Kyojin (巨人), Giants (ジャイアンツ), G
League championships 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1976, 1977, 1981, 1983, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1994, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2008
Post-season championships 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955, 1961, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1981, 1989, 1994, 2000, 2002
Former name(s) Dai-Nippon Tōkyō Yakyū Club (大日本東京野球倶楽部 1934-1935), Tōkyō Kyojingun (東京巨人軍 1936-1946), Tōkyō Yomiuri Kyojingun (Yomiuri Giants 1947-2002), Yomiuri Kyojingun (Yomiuri Giants 2002-)
Colors Orange, white and black
Logo Design Intertwined "Y" and "G" in orange on a black field
Mascot Giabbit (ジャビット)
Uniforms
Team colors
Team colors
Team colors
Team colors
File:Kit baseball socks.png

Home
Team colors
Team colors
Team colors
Team colors
File:Kit baseball socks.png

Away

The Yomiuri Giants (読売ジャイアンツ 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 professional team in Japan. 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 (巨人), Japanese for "Giants", instead of the usual corporate owner's name or the English nickname.

Contents

[edit] Players of note

[edit] Current Manager

[edit] Current players

[edit] Former players

[edit] Retired numbers

[edit] The Giants as "Japan's team"

Eiji Sawamura
Tokyo Dome, the Giants' home field

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.[1]

Ironically in 2009 the Giants played the Japan national baseball team in a warm up friendly before the World Baseball Classic.

[edit] 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. 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]

[edit] Trivia

 Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (March 2008)
  • Yomiuri Giants name and uniforms were based on the New York (now San Francisco) Giants. Lefty O'Doul, a former Major League Baseball player, named the team "Tokyo 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.
  • Giants are also unsurprisingly the richest club in the league after winning the championship continuously for the past years.
  • 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

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Whiting, You Gotta have Wa.
  2. ^ Whiting, Robert, "Equaling Oh's HR record proved difficult", Japan Times, October 31, 2008, p. 12.

[edit] Books

  • Fitts, Robert K. (2005). Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0809326302. 
  • Whiting, Robert (2005). The Samurai Way of Baseball: The Impact of Ichiro and the New Wave from Japan. Grand Central Publishing. ISBN 0446694037. 
  • Whiting, Robert (1990). You Gotta Have Wa. Vintage. ISBN 067972947X. 

[edit] External links

Search Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Yomiuri Giants
Preceded by
Shozo Saijo		 Japan Professional Sports Grand Prize Winner
1969		 Succeeded by
Taihō Kōki
v • d • e
Nippon Professional Baseball
Teams
Post-Season
Seasons
1950 • 1951 • 1952 • 1953 • 1954 • 1955 • 1956 • 1957 • 1958 • 1959 • 1960 • 1961 • 1962 • 1963 • 1964 • 1965 • 1966 • 1967 • 1968 • 1969 • 1970 • 1971 • 1972 • 1973 • 1974 • 1975 • 1976 • 1977 • 1978 • 1979 • 1980 • 1981 • 1982 • 1983 • 1984 • 1985 • 1986 • 1987 • 1988 • 1989 • 1990 • 1991 • 1992 • 1993 • 1994 • 1995 • 1996 • 1997 • 1998 • 1999 • 2000 • 2001 • 2002 • 2003 • 2004 • 2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008 • 2009
See also
v • d • e
Yomiuri Giants current roster
v • d • e
Yomiuri Giants
Formerly the Tokyo Kyojin and the Tokyo Giants • Based in Tokyo, Japan
The Franchise
Ballparks
Culture
Rivalries
Important Figures
Retired Numbers
1 • 3 • 4 • 14 • 16 • 34
Japan Series
Championships (20)
1951 • 1952 • 1953 • 1955 • 1961 • 1963 • 1965 • 1966 • 1967 • 1968 • 1969 • 1970 • 1971 • 1972 • 1973 • 1981 • 1989 • 1994 • 2000 • 2002
Central League
Championships (32)
1951 • 1952 • 1953 • 1955 • 1956 • 1957 • 1958 • 1959 • 1961 • 1963 • 1965 • 1966 • 1967 • 1968 • 1969 • 1970 • 1971 • 1972 • 1973 • 1976 • 1977 • 1981 • 1983 • 1987 • 1989 • 1990 • 1994 • 1996 • 2000 • 2002 • 2007 • 2008
Japanese Baseball League
Championships
1936 (fall) • 1937 (spring) • 1938 (fall) • 1939 • 1940 • 1941 • 1942 • 1943 • 1949
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Giants"
Personal tools