The March 14, 2016 Disclosure - ¥5,000 for a Win, ¥1,000 for a Loss
On March 14, 2016, NPB disclosed that since 2012 many players on Yomiuri's first team had been exchanging cash tied to the results of the club's own official games. Before each game, the player assigned to lead the huddle with a rallying shout, known as koe-dashi, received a ¥5,000 congratulatory payment per player when the team won and paid ¥1,000 to every player when it lost. As much as ¥140,000 changed hands at one time.
NPB's investigation committee and Yomiuri had already learned of these payments during the investigation in the autumn of 2015. Even so, the committee treated them as gen-katsugi, a good-luck ritual, left them out of its investigation report and concluded that they did not amount to game-fixing (intentionally losing). The fines imposed on Yomiuri totaled ¥15 million, but both were for the gambling by four pitchers; the huddle payments drew no penalty at all.
A rule under which one side collects on a win and pays on a loss is a wager on the outcome of the team's own games. A criminal law scholar said it met both conditions of the crime of gambling, yet the committee let it go because the sums were small. How the four pitchers' gambling came to light and how they were punished is covered in our article on the Yomiuri gambling crisis; this article deals only with the huddle payments.
How Koe-dashi Worked - Payments Passed Around the Huddle
According to Yomiuri's explanation, players chipped in cash for each game. Before the game, pitchers and position players formed separate huddles, and the player who led the huddle with the rallying shout received ¥5,000 per player when the team won. When it lost, the shouter paid ¥1,000 to everyone in the huddle.
Shoki Kasahara, who left the club in November 2015, acknowledged the huddle's good-luck ritual in interviews with the Sankei Shimbun and Sankei Sports. "At first you received ¥1,000 for a win, but with consecutive wins it became ¥3,000, and with three straight wins ¥5,000... there was a system in which the contributions kept growing," he said.
Yomiuri sent a letter of protest over the article that carried Kasahara's remarks, calling it defamatory and demanding a correction.
The Committee's Ruling - Too Small to Be Game-Fixing
Motonari Otsuru, chair of the investigation committee, disclosed that the committee had concluded the payments were not game-fixing (intentionally losing), citing among other reasons that each player's contribution of ¥5,000 per game was a small sum for a professional baseball player. The committee also left the payments out of its report as a good-luck ritual. "Good-luck ritual" was the term the club and the committee used; it does not describe what the rule actually did, which was to tie money to wins and losses.
The dates show how the disclosure unfolded. The gambling case began when Satoshi Fukuda's gambling came to light on October 5, 2015, and on November 10 three pitchers, Fukuda, Kasahara and Tatsuya Matsumoto, were banned indefinitely. The committee and Yomiuri were already aware of the payments at the stage of the investigation in the autumn of 2015. On March 8, 2016, Kyosuke Takagi's involvement in gambling was announced, and three top executives, Tsuneo Watanabe, Kojiro Shiraishi and Tsunekazu Momoi, resigned to take responsibility. The huddle payments were disclosed six days later, on March 14, and Takagi was banned for one year on March 22. Tsuneo Watanabe is covered in our article on Watanabe's grip on NPB.
Both Yomiuri and NPB held back a fact they had learned while investigating three pitchers' gambling until a fourth player's gambling came to light. Whether the payments counted as game-fixing and whether to disclose what had been found are separate questions. By leaving the payments out of the report, the committee gave outsiders no way to check its judgment until the disclosure on March 14.
A Criminal Law Scholar's View - The Two Conditions of Gambling
Hisashi Sonoda, a criminal law scholar and professor at Konan University Law School, set out two conditions for the crime of gambling. The first is exchanging money on an event whose outcome the parties cannot control. The second is that both sides share the possibility of losing.
In Sonoda's view, a rule that has the huddle pay the shouter after a win and the shouter pay the huddle after a loss, with the result of the game as its object, meets both conditions. On the decision to let the payments go because the sums were small, Sonoda said that it "would mean that a very wealthy person could bet hundreds of millions of yen without it counting as gambling," and that the amount was irrelevant.
Even so, NPB and the committee imposed no penalty on the huddle payments themselves. Yomiuri's fines were ¥10 million in November 2015 (the three pitchers) and ¥5 million on March 22, 2016 (Takagi), ¥15 million in all, and neither was for the huddle payments. The committee's stated reason was the small size of the sums, and the scholar's point rejects that reason head-on.
The Spread to Other Clubs and the Leagues' Response
From the day after NPB's disclosure, other clubs followed with disclosures of their own. By the time DeNA announced on March 20, eight clubs had made disclosures, and on March 22 Hanshin and Seibu disclosed further facts while Yakult disclosed new ones. What was disclosed differed from club to club, and some, like Chunichi, announced that no cash had changed hands.
| Date | Club | What was disclosed |
|---|---|---|
| March 15 | Hanshin | Cash exchanges tied to wins and losses |
| March 15 | Seibu | Cash exchanges tied to wins and losses |
| March 16 | Chunichi | No cash exchanges; fines of a few hundred yen for errors in pregame fielding drills, donated to a children's home |
| March 16 | SoftBank | Cash exchanges tied to wins and losses |
| March 17 | Hiroshima, Lotte, Rakuten | Cash exchanges tied to wins and losses |
| March 20 | DeNA | High school baseball pools and fines for errors |
| March 22 | Hanshin | Three more cases, including high school baseball pools |
| March 22 | Yakult | 10 players bet on high school baseball in summer 2015 |
| March 22 | Seibu | A person connected with the club played mahjong for money 4 times with Kasahara and a restaurant owner |
The Central League board of directors (March 17) and the Pacific League board (March 18) kept the March 25 opening day unchanged, decided to ban cash exchanges between players and agreed to issue a message about cleaning up the game. A re-investigation of 299 people, whose results were announced on March 22, found 14 who had played mahjong for money, 42 who had bet on golf and about 10 who had used illegal slot machines (Takagi among them). Hanshin and Seibu later banned cash exchanges tied to wins and losses.
How to Read This Article and Its Limits
The names and number of the players who led the huddle shout have not been made public. NPB's disclosure went no further than "many first-team players," and this article goes no further either. The sources for this article say nothing about whether there was a criminal investigation.
This article has not examined the investigation report directly; the committee's judgment is described from the chair's explanation and press reports. The amounts and the mechanism come from the club's explanation and Kasahara's account, which do not describe the sums in the same way. How far NPB's penalties can reach a club is discussed in our article on the powerlessness of NPB commissioners.
What the two league boards banned was cash exchanges between players; when Yomiuri later ended its huddle rule is outside the scope of this article.