Yomiuri Giants

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The Yomiuri Giants ( Japanese. 読 売 ジ ャ イ ア ン ツ , Yomiuri Jaiantsu ) from Tokyo are the oldest and most successful team in Japanese baseball with 42 league titles in the Central League and 21 Nippon Series victories. In public they are often referred to as Kyojin ( 巨人 , Japanese for Giants) for short .

organization

The Giants are owned by the Yomiuri group of companies of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper . In their current form, they are a joint-stock company founded in 2002, the KK Yomiuri Kyojin-gun ( 株式会社 読 売 巨人 軍 ) based in Chiyoda , Tokyo Prefecture .

history

Placement of the Giants in the Central League since 1950.

The Yomiuri Giants emerged in 1936, when the Japanese Baseball League began operating with six teams, from the Greater Japanese Baseball Club Tokyo ( 大 日本 東京 野球 倶 楽 部 , Dai-Nippon Tōkyō Yakyū Kurabu ), which had been building a professional team since 1934. The Giants were already very successful in their first few years and won the league title nine times by the time the current league structure was founded in 1949, ie they only had to admit defeat in autumn 1937 and spring 1938 and between 1944 and 1948. (From 1936 to 1938 the game was played twice in spring and autumn. 1945 was not played because of the war.)

In the years before the war, the first Americans (often of Japanese origin) also played for the Giants. The most famous players of the team at this time were the pitcher Eiji Sawamura , after the Sawamura Award given annually to the best pitcher , and the Russian-born Victor Starffin , who was the first professional pitcher in Japan to achieve 300 wins.

With the restructuring of the Japanese league in 1949, the Giants began their second golden era in the Central League after their pre-war successes: between 1949 and 1959, they were the first to end the season nine times. They won from 1951 to 1953 three times in a row and in 1955 the Nippon Series .

The greatest triumphs lay ahead of them. In 1958, the third baseman Shigeo Nagashima , who was later called Mister Giants and is still one of the most popular baseball players in Japan, joined the team; a year later, the first baseman Sadaharu Oh began his career (initially as a pitcher) with the Giants. With these two players in the lineup, the Giants achieved a historic and to this day unrepeatable success: From 1965 to 1973 they won the league title and the Nippon Series nine times in a row.

In the 80s and 90s the dominance of the record champions waned; but the "New York Yankees of Japan", as they are sometimes called, have proven with eleven other league titles and five championships since then (most recently in 2002) that they can always be expected. Only once (1975 under Shigeo Nagashima as manager) did they end the season last in the Central League and in their history they achieved a win rate of .587 since 1936 (with 5062 wins, 3566 losses and 264 draws).

Famous former players

Eiji Sawamura, the namesake of the Japanese Pitcher Award, in the jersey of the Giants

Stadion

The Tokyo Dome in the Bunkyō district .

Home of the Giants is the Tokyo Dome , which was completed in the Bunkyō district in 1988 and has 55,000 spectators.

At the same location, the Kōrakuen Stadium with 30,000 (from 1970: 40,000) seats had previously served the team as the home stadium.

Manager

  • Sadayoshi Fujimoto (1936–42)
  • Haruyasu Nakajima (1943, 1946-47)
  • Hideo Fujimoto (1944-46)
  • Osamu Mihara (1947-49)
  • Shigeru Mizuhara (1950-1960)
  • Tetsuharu Kawakami (1961-74)
  • Shigeo Nagashima (1975-80, 1993-2001)
  • Motoshi Fujita (1981-83, 1989-92)
  • Sadaharu Oh (1984-88)
  • Tatsunori Hara (2002-03, 2006-)
  • Tsuneo Horiuchi (2004-05)
  • Tatsunori Hara (2006-2015)
  • Yoshinobu Takahashi (2016-2018)
  • Tatsunori Hara (2019-)

Web links

Commons : Yomiuri Giants  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Yomiuri Shimbun: 組織 体制 ( Memento from June 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive )