Hiroki Kokubo, manager of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks professional baseball team, appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi), which aired on March 12th. He spoke about the greatness of Shohei Ohtani, who is currently playing in the World Baseball Classic, and his memories of his late mother.
Otani thinks that his success as a home run hitter in the United States is the most impressive thing. Hideki Matsui, who hit over 50 home runs in Japan, had the most in the United States with 31. Otani has hit over 50 home runs for two consecutive years. No one in baseball thought that a Japanese player would win the home run title in the major leagues.
In 2015, he lived with Ohtani for about two weeks. He would put the food he was eating at the buffet onto a plate, place it at his seat, and then take a photo of it from above with his smartphone and send it to him. When asked where he sent it, he said he sent it to the nutritionist. "That was 11 years ago. Even back then, he was eating this food, training, getting bigger, and working towards becoming a home run hitter in America one day. I saw with my own eyes that his usual attitude, or approach, was completely different," he said, in amazement.
His parents divorced when he was young. His mother, who raised him alone, passed away in 2017 at the age of 70. He found out she had cancer well before she passed away, so he took her to hot springs in Akita and other places she wanted to visit. At first, he was a little nervous about whether he could handle being alone with his mother, but he got used to it as they traveled together. He says that because he knew she had cancer, he was glad he had so many memories and time to spend with her before she passed away. "If she had passed away suddenly, it would have taken me a long time to recover," he reflects.
He once said something that hurt his mother. It happened when he was 6 years old and had just started playing baseball. "It left a strong impression on me. I knew that saying it would definitely hurt my mother, so I said it anyway," he said. He wanted to quit baseball, so he said, "Let me start playing baseball on my own and send me back to my dad's place now." He knew it would definitely hurt her, but that's how much he didn't want to go to the field.
His mother told him, "Once a man says he's going to do something, he has to see it through to the end," and he was put in the back seat of the car and taken to the field. "If it weren't for that day, I wouldn't have continued playing baseball," he recalled, "I was just a six-year-old kid, but even now as an adult, I still remember what I said."
