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The story
On October 13, the Chunichi Dragons announced that four coaches — Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Ryosuke Hirata, Eiji Ochiai, and Yutaka Nakamura — will be leaving the team at the end of this season. Matsunaka spent his entire playing career with Daiei/SoftBank and was crowned the sole Triple Crown winner of the Heisei era in 2004; he had served as Chunichi’s batting coach for the past two years since 2025. The team’s announcement gives no reason for the departures, but on 5ch the main topic became speculation about bad blood between Matsunaka and Kimiyasu Kudo — currently with SoftBank and expected to become Chunichi’s next manager. Opinion was split between those who blame Kudo’s side for the rift and those who say the problem lay in Matsunaka’s own conduct as a player.
On the 13th, Chunichi announced that four coaches — Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Ryosuke Hirata, Eiji Ochiai, and Yutaka Nakamura — would be leaving the team at the end of this season.
Matsunaka spent his entire playing career with Daiei/SoftBank and was crowned the sole Triple Crown winner of the Heisei era in ’04. He became Chunichi’s batting coach starting in ’25 and spent two years coaching the team’s position players.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
There's a lot of speculation, but here's the thing:
in 2015, Kudo's first year as manager, Matsunaka started the season in the farm league and never got called up even while hitting close to .300.
He finally got a first-team spot in a meaningless late-season game after the standings were already decided.
He was hoping to keep playing, but retired right after.
Just from that alone, it's hard not to assume there was bad blood.
It's not just Kudo — he's disliked by pretty much everyone connected to the Hawks.
It's all on Matsunaka.
At the very least, it looks like he's decided these four aren't needed under him.
They should also rethink their reinforcements and draft strategy.
Like this year's Yakult — if Murakami had stayed, they probably would've made the Climax Series, no?
Ochiai was planning to leave together with Tatsunami, but only stayed on because Inoue asked him to — so of course he's leaving now.
What's surprising is Hirata leaving, and are they not cutting Asao?
Asao's still popular, so…
Forget banned — he's been erased from the legend tier, scrubbed from the team's history entirely.
Of course he wasn't invited to the recent Hawks alumni game either.
Even TV won't touch the subject, despite his wife being a former Fukuoka announcer.
None of the Hawks players even bring him up.
The only exception is Matsuda, who — being the airhead he is — mentioned him briefly about some offseason training thing.
Jojima from the Hawks front office seemed happy about the idea that the two teams could cooperate on various things, saying it's easier since they're in different leagues.
I thought Kudo was being harsh, but
seeing Matsunaka's behavior afterward, it seems like there was a lot of fault on his side too.
Matsunaka's the one with way too many problems.
He's beyond just selfish —
he disrupts the atmosphere and breaks the organization down.
Maybe he's turned over a new leaf since then, though.
Unless he's willing to cheerfully take on equipment-manager duties like Irai did, I doubt Kudo would ever accept him.
Matsunaka isn't even self-aware enough to have turned over a new leaf.
Doesn't look like he thinks he's in the wrong at all.
Now maybe the players will actually start practicing seriously.
The Dragons' hitting slump isn't Matsunaka's fault ("Chuni Dora" is a nickname for the Chunichi Dragons)
(´・ω・\`) (a shrugging emoticon)
As a third-base coach, his situational judgment was terrible — basically a broken traffic signal
Kudo's the bigger egomaniac himself, as always
If that logic held, there's no way Inoue would've been picked
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Matsunaka was the slugging centerpiece of the old Daiei/SoftBank Hawks, crowned the sole “Triple Crown” winner of the Heisei era in 2004, and had served as Chunichi’s batting coach since 2025. The team’s own announcement gives no explanation at all for the departures and doesn’t even mention Kimiyasu Kudo by name. The repeated talk in the thread about bad blood with Kudo is speculation built on the assumption that Kudo will become Chunichi’s manager next season, with posters pointing to the fact that back in 2015 — Kudo’s first year as SoftBank manager — Matsunaka hit close to .300 in the farm league yet was never called up to the first team. Views on the cause are split, though: some blame Kudo’s handling of the situation, while many others say Matsunaka’s own conduct as a player created friction within the organization. What readers should be careful not to misread is that the direct causal link between the departure and Kudo is not a fact confirmed by the team’s announcement — it remains pure speculation on 5ch.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Baseball] Chunichi Dragons Announce Departure of Four Coaches: Matsunaka, Hirata, Ochiai, and Nakamura.”
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