It was probably some time during the peak of my book-buying spree. I saw this title, this book cover, and couldn’t resist. You see, most of the books I buy are just a few yen plus shipping, and I figured, “Can’t really lose, can I?”
I wouldn’t say I lost by buying this book which shares data from the team’s best season, followed by 17 seasons of (mostly) terrible numbers. (Note: The book was published in September 2003, just days before the team clinched the pennant.)
With chapters on the league standings, top hitters/pitchers, imports, managers, trades and drafts, you can relive the darkest period in the team’s history with all the names and numbers you could possibly want. For a book produced in the pre-sabermetrics era, that is. And so the question is, would you want to pore over such stats?
The saving feature of the book is also its downfall at times. There are actual articles relating to each section at the end of every chapter. Some of them are mildly amusing (tales of Yoshio Yoshida‘s frugality among the funnier parts – he labeled all his cigarettes in the dugout with his name so teammates wouldn’t steal them), while others are kind of inflammatory and unnecessary (scandalous night-time escapades of superstars Yutaka Enatsu and Koichi Tabuchi) – this section read like a tabloid magazine.
On the whole, this book got me to thinking: if I were to write a book about this decade’s Tigers, how could I make it interesting enough for people to want to read it a decade or two from now? The answer is simple: the Tigers must become a more interesting team!
Unfortunately it is hard to recommend a book that has hundreds of names of guys who never amounted to much. I suppose if I were a long-time fan and those names evoked memories, it might be worth perusing. But I’m not, and it wasn’t.