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The story
A tabloid magazine has reported that Hanshin Tigers pitcher Ryuto Ihara verbally abused a woman and pulled her hair at a drinking party this past January. The club’s head of public relations apologized at a press conference, stating that the club is “currently confirming the facts” and that no decision on the player’s future treatment will be made at this time.
In the thread, comments were mixed: some pointed out that since no police report has been filed, a settlement may have already been reached; others speculated he may have been “set up” — provoked into anger while being secretly filmed; and still others questioned whether the club’s response was too lenient.
A tabloid magazine has reported on trouble involving a woman and Hanshin Tigers pitcher Ryuto Ihara (26). According to the report, he verbally abused a woman and pulled her hair, among other actions, at a drinking party he attended with teammates this past January.
[Photo included] Hanshin fans sigh… Ihara gives up 4 runs in one inning for the second straight game
Club head of public relations Kuniyoshi Onishi, who addressed the press, apologized, saying, “We deeply apologize for the great concern this has caused our fans and everyone involved.” He went on to explain, “We are checking with [Ihara] and confirming the facts. Based on the facts we confirm, we will respond carefully and appropriately. As for his future treatment, that is not something we are in a position to decide at this stage, so going forward we intend to proceed while discussing it within the team.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Throwing away your career over something this dumb is just idiotic.
Let the courts sort out black and white.
So no problem then?
Rough story.
Can't shake the feeling someone deliberately provoked him and baited the whole thing.
Definitely smells fishy.
so the players actually put in the effort.
"Yakyuu" (a dismissive slang term for baseball) has nothing like that, so you get stuff like this all the time.
Hanshin players already get spoiled rotten by all their "tanimachi" patrons (wealthy fan-sponsors) as it is.
Handle the punishment cleanly and their reputation actually goes up.
Hiroshima botched the handling, though.
They got totally crushed by SoftBank in the Japan Series though.
Is SoftBank weak against Yokohama (DeNA)?
I heard with all their parent company's IT/AI backing, SoftBank has insane data management on every opposing player —
something about AI spitting out multiple answers before each at-bat based on data on the opposing pitcher and catcher?
Hanshin has its own version too — once the consensus forms in the izakaya grapevine that "we don't need Fujinami," they cut him loose. So their system kind of works too.
and then SoftBank would just scoop him up.
Ah, I see — the Yamakawa pattern.
So he just walks away scot-free?
If so, I guess that's a win-win?
Both Haruto and Saiki are off the active roster right now.
Haruto is pitching Sunday.
They just shifted his start to line up with the Giants series.
Sponsors flock to Ohtani precisely because of how disciplined and safe he is — heading straight home after every game.
This happened back in January, remember.
I want Oyama to explain that one himself.
He only announced his divorce recently,
so any new relationship would still be in the early stages.
His close friends on the team who are the same age all have wives and kids and prioritize family,
so nobody invites him out after work, and he ends up eating alone.
This isn't something to brush off.
Did the woman do something wrong too?
Well, he's a drunk jock type, after all.
If no police report gets filed, it'll probably just end with a stern warning.
Kind of like Sugawara no Michizane's exile to Dazaifu, lol (a famous historical exile used here as a joke about being sent away as "purification").
Background and Key Points
Hanshin Tigers scandals get filtered through Japan’s weekly tabloid ecosystem (shūkanshi like this one), which specializes in breaking athlete and celebrity misconduct stories before police or leagues act — the club here is reacting to a magazine scoop, not an official complaint. Ihara’s case sits alongside a string of recent NPB precedents readers won’t recognize by name: Hiroshima’s Carp handled a similar off-field incident and, per posters, “botched” the response; Yomiuri’s Yamaguchi and Seibu’s Yamakawa each had different outcomes for comparable trouble; and one poster’s crack about “Sugawara no Michizane’s exile to Dazaifu” references a 9th-century courtier banished from the capital — a stock joke for players quietly traded away as a face-saving punishment, as some suspect happened with Fujinami.
The thread’s real fault line isn’t whether the incident happened but what “no police report” implies. One camp reads it as evidence of a paid-off settlement, meaning Ihara faces no real consequence beyond embarrassment; another suspects he was baited into losing his temper while secretly filmed, making him the target rather than the aggressor; a third simply thinks NPB and Hanshin go easy on players compared to how harshly abusive fans are treated.
What outside readers may not grasp is how normalized settlements are in Japan for exactly this reason — paying a complainant to withdraw interest in pursuing police involvement is a routine, culturally accepted way to avoid prosecution and media escalation, not evidence of guilt or innocence either way. The thread also never engages with “tanimachi,” the traditional wealthy-patron system that bankrolls players’ off-field lifestyles, which one poster blames for enabling this kind of behavior in the first place.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geisports Sokuho+) thread “Hanshin’s Ihara Ryuto Hit with Report of Trouble with Woman — Tabloid Alleges Verbal Abuse at Drinking Party; Club Apologizes, Says It’s “Confirming the Facts””.
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