Last Sunday, Nihon TV did something interesting. At the last minute, they pulled the scheduled installment of their biography series "Shitteru Tsumori" and replaced it with a hastily produced documentary about "Mr. Baseball," Shigeo Nagashima, who a few weeks ago announced that he was stepping down as manager of the Yomiuri Giants.
I doubt there's anything about Nagashima's life that the Japanese public doesn't already know, considering how much media attention he draws -- and not only that of the sports media. But we're talking about Nihon TV, which is owned by Yomiuri, so access to the great man is a cinch, and the general feeling within the network seems to be that you can never have too much of Nagashima and the Giants.
But the timing was notable for another reason. This year, the only baseball star who outshone Nagashima in terms of public interest was Ichiro Suzuki, whose popularity reportedly bugs the Yomiuri brass to no end -- not so much because he's young and unconventional, but because he plays in the United States. As everyone knows, Ichiro has made American baseball a bigger draw in Japan than the Japanese kind.
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