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The story
The BC League’s Saitama Musashi Heat Bears announced on August 27 that manager Ikuhiro Kiyota (40) would suspend his managerial duties for the time being, following certain media reports. Kiyota was also the subject of repeated affair reports during his time with the Chiba Lotte Marines, and the thread saw discussion spread not just over his own denial of the reports, but also over pay and name recognition in Japan’s independent baseball leagues.
Published 7:36 PM, Thursday, August 27
Sponichi Annex
The independent Route Inn BC League’s Saitama Musashi Heat Bears announced on the 27th that manager Ikuhiro Kiyota (40) would suspend his managerial activities for the time being.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Car sex every time — what are you, a dragon?
Actually, this guy's never technically committed a crime
Having an affair isn't illegal, lol
A liar is the first step toward becoming a thief (old Japanese saying)
Maybe he got hired because the team president is Kado, a Lotte junior of his.
So it's kind of like JRA versus regional horse racing?
– Caught COVID, then lied to the team's internal investigation, claiming he hadn't eaten out
– A weekly tabloid exposed that he'd actually been secretly meeting his mistress and eating out with her every day during a 3-day Sapporo road trip
– On top of that, once his own infection was confirmed, he told his mistress not to get a PCR test to keep it covered up
[Baseball] Lotte's Ikuhiro Kiyota — there was more: embarrassing LINE messages with his affair partner surface [Laughing Gorilla★]
https://hayabusa9.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/mnewsplus/1611283915/
When you say Kiyota, it's the Puzzle & Dragons affair that comes to mind
Is he gonna hold a little memorial for 'Taiyo-kun' now? (a callback to that old scandal, where Taiyo-kun was a character he'd named)
Even setting aside that it's an indie league, putting him in charge of a team with a fair number of ex-pros this soon was too rushed.
How is this league different from corporate/amateur (shakaijin) baseball?
The difference is zero spectators versus a dozen-ish people, mostly family 💦
In corporate baseball you're employed by a top company and draw a real salary, so you can actually live on it.
Indie leagues technically count as 'pro,' but you're only pulling in something like 100,000 yen a month during the season, so you can't make a living.
Guys on top companies' baseball teams get paid well.
I saw on TV that Honda's manager tells his players things like, 'Over a lifetime, you'll actually earn more staying at Honda than you would going pro.'
Honestly, corporate-league ball at a top company is basically semi-pro, while the indie leagues are just amateur ball with a 'pro' label slapped on.
——
'Wait, is this going in Friday? Please, have mercy.'
'There's no point talking to me about it. It's literally my first day back. I'm finished.'
Spell out exactly which part of the report he's denying.
Average attendance: 100 people.
…yeah, I guess you'd want to have an affair too.
That's just using it as an excuse for cheating.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s independent leagues sit below Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) in a two-tier system: NPB clubs pay livable, often lucrative salaries, while independent circuits like the Route Inn BC League—founded in 2007 as a proving ground for players cut from or aspiring to NPB—pay players roughly ¥100,000 a month during the season, a wage that by several posters’ accounts leaves them unable to live on baseball alone. Kiyota is not a name associated with this tier; he built his reputation in Chiba Lotte’s NPB uniform, where a 2021 scandal made headlines—he was accused of lying to his team’s internal COVID-19 contact-tracing investigation to hide meetings with a woman he was having an affair with, and of asking her to skip a PCR test to avoid exposing the cover-up. That history, not the current allegations themselves, is what the thread keeps circling back to.
The actual point of disagreement isn’t whether Kiyota did wrong this time—posters mostly assume he did—but whether it rises to anything more than embarrassing. One user’s claim that “this is what happens when you make a criminal your manager” was directly rebutted: adultery carries no criminal penalty under Japanese law, only civil consequences like divorce settlements. The other axis of debate was economic rather than moral: whether the indie leagues’ poverty-level pay and near-nonexistent crowds (attendance is cited around 100 spectators) explain or merely excuse personnel lapses like this one.
What’s easy to miss without Japanese context is how normalized the club’s likely response is—posters predict a quiet suspension through season’s end followed by a non-renewed contract, a common face-saving exit that avoids a formal firing.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports Livejupiter+) thread “[Baseball] BC League’s Saitama Musashi manager Ikuhiro Kiyota suspends activities — club issues statement following reports, he denies the content.”
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