Fights, gambling, disappearance from the baseball team, questioning by the police… During his high school days, Takeshi Aiko was a notorious bad boy despite his extraordinary talent. What made him stick to his roots and devote himself to baseball? Here are some excerpts from “Professional Baseball Outlaws: Heretic Men” (Taiyo Tosho), which interviews 23 “unorthodox baseball players.” (Part 1 of 2 / Continue to Part 2) A notorious bad boy during his student days
Among the many “baseball books,” there is no book with as much impact as Takeshi Aiko’s debut work, “Stray Dogs of the Baseball World” (Takarajima Sugoi Bunko). The cover reads, “Bosozoku, Anpan, disappearances, violence, baseball gambling, and muscle-enhancing drugs are banned from the baseball world!” And these phrases are not exaggerations at all. They are all true.
I would like to quote the first two lines of the “Introduction” on page 1.
Fighting, drugs, gambling, and doping.
I have done what I wanted to do, believing that everything I do will contribute to baseball.
Looking at it from the perspective of the current Reiwa era, where “compliance” is the slogan… no, even in the Showa era, there has never been a time, past or present, where fighting, drugs, gambling, or doping were thought to be “fertilizer for baseball.” I can say this with certainty.
Aiko calmly reflects on this book.
“I thought that if I wrote it in a roundabout way or embellished it, I would get into trouble, so I just wrote what I saw and experienced myself, rather than what I heard from others. That’s why I haven’t been sued by anyone, and I haven’t had any trouble. Well, to start with, I didn’t actually write it, I just spoke to the writer about it (laughs).”
During his junior high school days and his time at Yokohama High School, where he became a star at Koshien, Aiko was a known bad boy, as everyone knew.
“But it’s not like I was the only bad guy. Everyone else who was worse than me just quit the baseball club halfway through. But if I hadn’t played baseball, I’m sure I would have gone down that path.”
2024-06-28 05:23:18
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