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The story
On October 3, the Hiroshima Carp came back to beat the Hanshin Tigers 6-4 in their final home game of the season at Mazda Stadium. In the post-game ceremony, manager Takahiro Arai (49) apologized to fans over an in-team scandal, saying, “We the Carp will be reborn next season.” On the 5ch thread (Geisoku Sokuho+), discussion centered less on the apology itself than on claims that nothing will really change unless the team’s upper management — owner Motoo Matsuda and executive director Seimei Suzuki — changes too, with debate also continuing over how the team should handle the player said to be at the center of the scandal.
October 3, 2026, 18:21 — Baseball
Sponichi Annex News Team
[Central League: Hiroshima 6 – 4 Hanshin (October 3, 2026, Mazda Stadium)] Hiroshima faced Hanshin on the 3rd in their final home game of the season. With the Tigers arriving needing just a magic number of 1 to clinch the pennant, the Carp came back to win 6-4. In the post-game ceremony, manager Takahiro Arai (49) apologized to fans over the in-team scandal and other matters.
Source: sponichi.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Nothing changes unless both Motoo Matsuda and Kikuchi are gone.
Fans shouldn't buy season tickets for next year.
Look forward to Halloween at the end of the month.
Well, but it's precisely because he's someone with a track record of sketchy behavior that he ended up photographed getting chummy with anti-social types like drug dealers — and conversely, there's no going after people who don't have photos like that floating around.
And someone who had ties to anti-social forces but still held a press conference with that kind of attitude is, by any measure, a rotten orange (a bad apple that spoils the whole bunch). Now that they've managed to push a player like that out, I think the atmosphere will improve at least a little.
Only the root cause rotting everyone else around him survives.
Wonder if Takiguchi's going to sound off about this again.
Yeah
Arai going soft on him is one reason Kikuchi got so full of himself.
Full-on Imperial-GHQ-style 'baseball math' propaganda that would put even old Kawasaki Stadium to shame.
Even counting the visible lower deck of the outfield seats, that's maybe 3,000 people.
Doesn't matter how many show up, as long as they pay the stadium usage fee properly and help recoup the construction costs. A team like Sanfrecce that never intended to pay toward construction costs in the first place is out of the question, even playing to a full house.
That guy's off in his own world, acting like he's not running away or whatever.
Just that one line alone pisses me off, and I'm not even a Dragons fan lol
If the team had just taken the lead right away — investigated, made it public, and sent him down to the minors — I don't think this would've blown up this big.
Old-school companies especially love to cover things up, which just drags the news cycle out and ends up handing the tabloids more material, so the team winds up taking the maximum amount of damage in the end.
If they'd dropped the announcement and the punishment themselves right at the start, the initial hit would've been strong, but the news value would've faded fast after that, so the overall damage would've been smaller.
Because of what happened with the Marines, mid-season contract termination isn't really an option anymore.
He's a regular starter too, so benching him without a stated reason is tough.
In the end, he got mentally worn down, his stats tanked, and that gave them an excuse to send him down lol
The teams below them are the real disaster.
Ikeyama sitting pretty at 5th with zero issues is pretty wild.
Chunichi's a lost cause at this point.
I can't picture them climbing back up at all.
And he went to say he wanted to quit three times, too.
Arai wants to quit, but there's no one else willing to take the job, so it just got dumped on him.
He's actually said himself that he tried to quit multiple times during the season but wasn't allowed to.
The zombie situation isn't over yet.
It'd be cruel to make a new manager deal with that, and there probably aren't many people who'd even take the job anyway.
Background and Key Points of This Story
Manager Takahiro Arai’s apology came in response to an “in-team scandal,” but the original article itself never actually spells out what that scandal involved, and the thread’s discussion centered mainly on frustration with the player’s own conduct and with how the front office handled things. Where opinion split was over the question of who should actually be held responsible: many argued that a manager bowing his head alone won’t prevent a repeat unless management itself changes too, pointing to the owning family said to have transferred its shares to the city of Hiroshima, and to Seimei Suzuki, who has held the executive director post for years. On the other hand, almost no one spoke up for the player said to be at the center of it, with some even arguing that the manager’s leniency helped make him worse. The article doesn’t spell out how far “we will be reborn” actually extends into concrete organizational change, so whether next season’s roster moves and front-office shake-up really follow through looks to be the thing worth watching.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geisoku Sokuho+) thread “[Zombie] Hiroshima manager Arai apologizes to fans: “For the great worry and trouble caused on and off the field” — “We the Carp will be reborn next season”.”
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