Fighters’ new look only small piece of puzzle in Tsuyoshi Shinjo’s first season

Tsuyoshi Shinjo was not completely satisfied with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters’ updated look following the team’s big reveal of its new uniforms and logo on Friday.

The redesign drew mixed initial reviews from baseball fans and the Fighters manager, who accentuated the new look with bright red wristbands during a news conference, said he might go back to the drawing board next season.

“To be honest, it wasn’t the uniform I envisioned,” Shinjo said.

The first thing “Big Boss” has to do, however, is figure out what the Fighters will look like when they actually start playing.

Because whether the fans like the new look or not, there’s nothing more fashionable than winning games.

In that sense, the Fighters’ most important unveiling will come when spring camp opens Feb. 1, and Shinjo begins to lay out his grand vision for his first year in the dugout.

So far, everything has been all about Shinjo. In the Nippon Ham universe, he is the sun and everything else is merely in his orbit. Eventually, though, the Fighters are going to have to put a team on the field and play games.

The club is coming off three consecutive fifth-place finishes and this past offseason saw Hideki Kuriyama step down as manager and Hiroshi Yoshimura move out of the general manager’s seat. The club then handed the keys to the kingdom to Shinjo and new GM Atsunori Inaba, who both starred on the 2006 team that won Nippon Ham’s last Japan Series.

Fans saw more of Shinjo the showman during the uniform reveal news conference last week. He playfully bantered with pitcher Naoyuki Uwasawa and outfielder Kensuke Kondo and demanded Fighters supporters be referred to as “fans” instead of “customers.”

For all of Shinjo’s charisma and ability to dominate a room, however, everyone is waiting to see what type of manager he will be and how the players will respond to him.

The Big Boss show will most likely continue early on in camp, as attention remains fixed on what Shinjo will do or say next. The benefit, though, will be that the Fighters should be able to work in relative peace while the spotlight shines on the manager.

But the attention Shinjo will garner is not unwarranted. The direction he takes is both extremely interesting and also extremely important for a team trying to climb out of the lower half of the Pacific League.

Shinjo, who has no prior managerial or coaching experience, played for NPB legend Katsuya Nomura in Japan and went on to play in MLB, just like Tokyo Yakult Swallows manager Shingo Takatsu, who is celebrated as one of “Nomura’s Children.” Few, though, expect Shinjo to be a carbon copy of either Nomura or Takatsu.

So what will Shinjo be? Will he embrace the old NPB tenets of bunting at every opportunity or take a more aggressive approach? How will he apply what he learned in his playing days and can he effectively impart those lessons to his own players? What type of relationship will he forge with his foreign players, having been a foreign player himself in North America, and how will he aid their adjustments during the season?

He will — hopefully, at least — step into the job with his own managerial philosophy, and there will be a lot of interest in what his approach to the game will be.

During the more serious moments of his introductory news conference in November, Shinjo sounded like someone who understood the mental side of the game is as important as the physical aspects and said he wasn’t going to inundate the players with undue pressure.

Shinjo has also already prodded former first-round pick Kotaro Kiyomiya into shedding a few kilograms over the offseason and may try to work the 22-year-old back into the mix. Kiyomiya, slugged plenty of home runs in high school, but has yet to find NPB success, with just 21 homers from 2018 to 2020. He didn’t register a single top-team at-bat in 2021.

Slugger Sho Nakata was shipped off to the Yomiuri Giants last season after becoming far more trouble than he was worth, so there is a gaping need for a power hitter — be that Kiyomia or someone else — in a lineup that scored just 454 runs last year.

There is also plenty of room to give young players Yuki Nomura and Chusei Mannami, among others, more chances to show what they can do on the top team. Shinjo has also been gifted a talented young pitcher in Hiromi Ito, who had a solid rookie season and helped Japan win gold at the Tokyo Olympics.

The impact the new manager has on veterans like Kondo and Uwasawa also remains to be seen.

When the Fighters unveiled their new threads on Friday, they harkened back to the uniforms worn during the era of Shinjo and Inaba, Yu Darvish and finally Shohei Ohtani. The club is ready to embark on a new era with its former star at the controls and last week’s reveal figures to be just the tip of the iceberg.

“With these uniforms, I think we’ll build a stronger Fighters team starting from here,” Shinjo said.

Source : Baseball – The Japan Times