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The story
It’s come to light that the Miyagi Prefecture High School Baseball Federation is considering revising baseball terminology that contains violent-sounding words like “kill” (殺), “death” (死), and “steal” (盗), sparking a wave of discussion on 5ch. Proposed replacements such as “suki ari” (roughly “opening spotted”) and “kōken bunto” (“contribution bunt”) drew a chorus of complaints that they’re just lame. Meanwhile, some more technical commenters pointed out that the very definitions behind stats like putouts and assists don’t make much sense either, and the thread took off in an unexpected direction.
What people said
There's already the term "okuri bunto" (sending bunt) for a sacrifice bunt — why isn't that good enough?
Sacrifice bunt → "sōda" (*short for "okuri bunto," sending bunt)
Stolen base → "tokuri" (*carries a nuance of "earning" a base)
How about that?
Just go with "Suki, hakken!" ("Opening detected!")
That works fine.
English would honestly be even worse, come on
Terms like "tōkyū" or "isshō" might grow on you once you're used to them, but "suki ari" is just way too lame
Couldn't they have come up with something a little cooler?
Newspaper copy has strict character limits, that's why
That's no different from "contribution bunt"
What would that even become in Japanese?
Maybe "sakusō" (squeeze-run), since you're squeezing the runner home?
If the federation's got time to debate stuff this dumb, they should just disband
Oh, this one fits way better
But the results they came up with — "suki ari," "kōken bunt" — are just lame
If you're gonna coin new terms, at least don't make them lame
They should get an actual wordsmith on this
Copywriters, sports reporters — there must be people with baseball connections
They should be asking folks like that
Exactly
If they'd picked words that felt natural, they wouldn't be getting dragged like this
Guess we need to fundamentally reform English itself
Should we start by filing a complaint with America?
Reminder: "dead ball" is Japanese-made English to begin with
Reminder: in actual English it's "hit by pitch"
Reminder: someone got confused because the ball becomes dead after a hit-by-pitch, and that's just how the name "dead ball" stuck
"Dead ball" itself was coined by Japanese people in the first place, you know
This is genuinely hilarious
Is this really how people who watch baseball think it works?
Though honestly I'm fine with it as-is
Batting average is weird too
Batting average → "hit rate"
Slugging percentage → "base rate"
That works, just call it what it literally is
Just calling it "assist" in English would be way clearer — soccer and basketball both have assists too, so it'd be even more intuitive
Honestly the definitions of putout and assist are backwards to begin with
Like on a shortstop-to-first groundout, the first baseman gets the putout and the shortstop gets the assist — but intuitively the shortstop's the one who got the out, and the first baseman just helped, so it's flipped
As a result, a putout earned entirely solo (like catching a line drive) and a putout that's just catching a throw get recorded as the exact same stat, even though their value is totally different
They should record "out earned" for whoever first touches the ball, and "out assist" for everyone else involved
A. Assist ← valuable
B. Putout earned solo ← valuable
C. Putout that's just catching a throw ← not worthless, but pretty low value
That's basically it
And since B and C both get recorded as the same "putout," the stat's value gets muddled
Making A and B the "new putout" and C the "new assist" would definitely make the record clearer
Yeah, this makes sense
Like "suicide point" (own goal) and "sudden death"
The Escobar killing was probably just too shocking (Andrés Escobar, the Colombian player murdered after scoring an own goal at the 1994 World Cup)
It's because they use English terms
Having a properly built organizational hierarchy really matters
Guess that'd be "suki nashi" (no opening) instead
Starts in Miyagi, then the national high school baseball federation, then NPB
Background and Key Points
Japanese baseball vocabulary was largely built from scratch in the Meiji era, when American baseball terms had to be rendered in kanji rather than borrowed as loanwords the way many other sports terms later were. Figures like the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (mentioned in the thread) are credited with helping coin much of this vocabulary around the 1890s, and the compounds that resulted lean on martial-sounding kanji: 刺殺 (sassatsu, “stab-kill,” the term for a putout), 補殺 (hosatsu, “assist-kill”), 併殺 (heisatsu, “double-kill,” a double play), 死球 (shikyū, “death ball,” a hit-by-pitch), and 盗塁 (tōrui, “steal a base,” using the kanji for theft). The Miyagi Prefecture High School Baseball Federation is one of 47 prefectural bodies under the national high school federation that runs Koshien, Japan’s most-watched amateur sports institution — so a wording change here is a local pilot, not a done national policy, even though posters speculate it could spread upward.
The thread isn’t really split on whether toning down violent kanji is worthwhile — that idea gets fairly broad, if grudging, support. The actual fault line is over execution: whether the specific proposed replacements, “suki ari” (opening spotted) and “kōken bunto” (contribution bunt), sound natural or just clumsy and juvenile compared to the terms they’d replace.
One thing foreign readers might miss: “dead ball” isn’t real English at all but wasei-eigo, English-looking vocabulary invented in Japan — actual English uses “hit by pitch.” So part of what’s being “fixed” here is Japanese-coined terminology being second-guessed by Japanese speakers, not a translation import gone wrong.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyō G) thread “Miyagi Prefecture High School Baseball Federation: “Reconsider baseball terms 💢 Stop using kill, death, steal 💢”.”
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