Two weeks ago, the Nippon Ham Fighters announced that they would like
to move lock, stock and bat barrel to the Sapporo Dome and become the local
team. Let's ignore for the moment that Tsutsumi has a vested interest in
keeping the Fighters out.
Currently, each of the 12 pro teams are free to stage as many
games in Sapporo as scheduling requirements and the availability of facilities
permit. But if Nippon Ham uses Sapporo Dome as the primary venue for its
title fights, other teams will only be able to host games in Sapporo with
the Fighters' permission.
Popular opinion in Sapporo is likely to be strongly in favor of the city getting its own team, and the best thing for Japanese baseball would be to have the Fighters go up there and do a bang up job, turning the city into a baseball hub.
But the altruistic Tsutsumi says never mind that. What counts most, according to the Lion King, is that Sapporo remain true to itself.
"Hokkaido has always been a place where people from the rest of Japan could come to settle and develop," Tsutsumi told a press conference at Sapporo Dome last Saturday. "Thinking of this history, one wonders if the best thing is to give the rights to this territory to just one team."
So Tsutsumi is standing out on a limb against the popular notion that the great city of Sapporo deserves its own team. You have to respect this man's moral integrity.
Never mind that the Lions in the last few years have moved toward staging more and more games in Sapporo and away from Seibu Dome, the white elephant Tsutsumi owns on the green shore of Tama Lake. Should the Fighters take up residence in Sapporo, Tsutsumi would have to look around for another metropolis with a first-class facility that's ripe for exploitation.
What Tsutsumi is saying is that Sapporo should remain starved for baseball so that teams going up there can be assured of reasonable crowds.
To be fair to Tsutsumi, the man is something of an expert on the benefits of this sort of baseball colonialism. After all, he was the one who deprived Fukuoka of its team when he bought the Lions and moved them to Saitama Prefecture.
Tsutsumi left a great baseball town without a team, no doubt so they could experience the joys that he is now proposing for Sapporo.
It is true that when the Hawks relocated from Osaka to Fukuoka, they were not an instant hit. When they played the visiting Lions, there would be more Seibu fans in the stands than people cheering for the local club. But through hard work, the Hawks have turned Fukuoka into a city that is certifiably nuts about its team.
If you ask people in Fukuoka now if they would prefer to dump the Hawks in favor of the way it used to be, you'd be hard pressed to find a lot of fans who would be happier without the Hawks.
Want another example? Sapporo has it's own J.League franchise, Consadole Sapporo. It's well supported and very popular with the locals. Do you think Sapporo's soccer fans would be happy to give up their club in order to enjoy periodic visits by other J.League teams from Tokyo or Sendai or Osaka?
The best thing about supporting a sports team is identifying with the players, following their dramas and struggles, empathizing with their failures and rejoicing in their victories.
Some ungenerous people might even stoop so low as to label Tsutsumi's stance on Sapporo as being patronizing, hypocritical and insulting.
But let's be generous to this man, who apparently has such an insight into the soul of Sapporo. He is, after all, sending his team to Hokkaido so the people there have more baseball than they did before. And his motives may be just as pure as when he became head of the Japan Olympic Committee just long enough to secure the bid for the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, where he and his companies have countless holdings.
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .