Deanna recently had a picture up on her website of herself with the Keio University manager, Shozo Etoh (it's a long post and the picture is near the end). According to Deanna, Etoh is the only current Tokyo Big 6 manager who played in the NPB, having played for the Giants in the late 60's (during the V9 years) and the Dragons in the 70's. He's also the younger brother of the late Hall Of Famer Shinichi Etoh - in fact, they were teammates on the 1969 Dragons.
Here's Shozo Etoh's card from the 2006 BBM Dragons 70th Anniversary set (#42):
2 comments:
That should read that he is the only current Tokyo Big 6 manager to have played in the pros, just to be clear. I am sure there must have been former pro players managing in the past, though I'd have to look it up.
Bizarrely, two others out of the current crop of Tokyo Big 6 managers were DRAFTED, but didn't actually turn pro. Hosei's Koji Kanemitsu was a first-round draft pick out of college by Kintetsu in 1977 but didn't sign. And this is an even weirder coincidence but Waseda's Atsuyoshi Ohtake was a 3rd-round pick out of high school by Kintetsu in 1976, and didn't sign because he wanted to go to Waseda for college, and after college he wasn't drafted and instead went to the industrial leagues. A neat tidbit about Ohtake is that he and Atsuya Furuta were the two catchers on Japan's olympic team in 1988.
But a lot of people don't like Ohtake because he's apparently a very strict jerk. At least that is what I've uniformly heard from everyone involved in Big 6...
I updated the text to make it clear that he's the only current manager with NPB experience. Thanks for the information on the other coaches.
Post a Comment