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The story
Former Yomiuri Giants player Daisuke Motoki reportedly looked back on the 1989 draft during an appearance on the BS10 show “Dugout!!!”, saying “I briefly thought about joining Daiei.” Motoki belonged to the draft class in which eight teams competed for pitcher Hideo Nomo; on draft day, every sports newspaper predicted the Giants would make him their No. 1 pick, but he himself was torn over his path forward, including the option of sitting out a year as a free agent (“ronin”). The 5ch thread buzzed with takes on whether sitting out to join the Giants paid off — pointing to his later success as a TV personality — alongside talk of Daiei’s roster situation at the time and Motoki’s famous episode of lazy baserunning back in his Koshien high-school days.
Daisuke Motoki: “I briefly thought about joining Daiei” — Looking back on the draft 37 years later… Even though the Giants’ first-round pick was Omori, he says “it was my own lack of ability”
Former Giants player Daisuke Motoki appeared on BS10’s “Dugout!!!” (Mondays, 9 p.m.), airing on the 2nd, and looked back on his own draft experience.
At the 1989 draft meeting, where eight teams competed for Hideo Nomo, every sports newspaper on that day predicted the Giants would make Motoki their No. 1 pick.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
what an era that was
Sitting out a whole year just to get into the Giants
Nagano pulled the same move — refused Nippon-Ham because he wanted the Giants, refused Lotte the next year too, and only joined the Giants the year after that.
Is it really worth going that far just to play for the Giants?
And then he got traded to Hiroshima anyway
But as a ballplayer, if he hadn't wasted that year in Hawaii and had joined Daiei instead, he'd have been treated like a superhero.
"Manager Motoki leads the SoftBank Hawks to a Japan Series title" down the road could easily have happened
Yunotani, Fujimoto, Ogawa, Hamana, Moriwaki, and others
Could any of these guys have done TV personality work? Absolutely not.
Sitting out a year to join the Giants was 100% the right call
going to a weak Kyushu team was probably seen as a step down
5th place in '88, 4th in '89
Yeah, he's famous for popping up a fly ball and not running at all
Back at Uenomiya High School, Motoki was the one and only player to ever make a Koshien play-by-play announcer furious over his lazy baserunning
Commentator Kajisha desperately tried to cover for him, saying stuff like "Maybe he thought it was a foul ball?"
Re: #33
According to the man himself, "I just lost sight of the ball"
Yomiuri footed the bill, of course
is his family rich or something?
Was he actually attending some kind of school?
I mean, Daiei back then was a mess in its own way, just different from the Giants
if he'd stuck it out there, he'd probably have gotten chewed out by Kudo after he came over as a free agent lol
Tetsuro got treated like public enemy No. 1, but
Kintetsu and the Giants actually got along pretty well
Omori talked even more than Motoki about only wanting the Giants, yet he went and accepted a trade just like that
maybe the reason he never broke out was that he was satisfied just by making it onto the Giants
Yeah, what you'd call today's "king of the minors"
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The 1989 draft was the year eight teams competed for pitcher Hideo Nomo, and Daisuke Motoki was the player media coverage at the time widely expected to be the Giants’ No. 1 pick. He ultimately sat out a year and joined the Giants in 1991. Daiei at the time was in a slump, finishing 5th in 1988 and 4th in 1989, not long after the franchise had been renamed from its previous incarnation as the Nankai Hawks. Opinions in the thread were split on how to judge his choice to sit out: some questioned his actual on-field performance, while many pointed to his later success as a TV personality after retirement and argued that “joining the Giants turned out to be the right call in the end.” Anecdotes only loosely tied to the draft itself — like Motoki’s famous lazy-baserunning incident from his Koshien days — were also a major focus of the discussion.
※This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (Geinou/Sports Sokuho+) thread “[Baseball] Daisuke Motoki: “I briefly thought about joining Daiei” — Looking back on the draft 37 years later… Even though the Giants’ first-round pick was Omori, he says “it was my own lack of ability”.”
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