The Rhythms of Tigers Baseball

Kōshien Stadium, the home of the Hanshin Tigers, is Japan’s most storied sports venue, and chapter 2 begins with game day at this epicenter. Playing in and defending Japan’s most storied stadium brings immense prestige and unrelenting pressure, but it is crucial to realize that the spatial coordinates of the sportsworld are far wider than Kōshien. Hanshin Tiger baseball is distributed across visiting stadiums, practice facilities, dormitories, newsrooms, sports bars, and the living rooms of homes throughout Kansai. The nightly game itself, nine innings over three hours or so, may be the fundamental time unit, but baseball at this level is a complex matrix of multiple overlapping temporalities—at-bats, innings, games, series, seasons, and careers are among the units and sequences of action. These times and spaces of baseball action create the most developed matrix of numbers and narratives of all sports, a matrix that underlies the soap-opera structure of Hanshin baseball.