Fired Yomiuri Giants GM says his troubles strike at heart of sports management

Fire up the glorious Mark Read bat-signal!

Just before his dismissal as representative and general manager of the Yomiuri Giants, Hidetoshi Kiyotake spoke to the Mainichi at the team’s Tokyo office, saying he hoped his dispute with Yomiuri Shimbun Group Chairman Tsuneo Watanabe would be seen as not just about pro baseball, “but about all sports, and what a general manager is meant to be.”

When he was appointed Giants representative in 2004, the club was being run “like a small business, relying on subjective views and instinct,” Kiyotake says. He took a hard look at the management style and decided to implement a more objective, statistics-based system for baseball decisions inspired partly by the New York Yankees front office, among other teams.

“I can’t say everything I did was right, but it does make a good foundation for further discussion,” he said, adding that he based changes to the team’s composition, the draft and a host of other management decisions on his stats-based system.

...When asked who pro baseball belongs to, Kiyotake replied, “It belongs to the teams, it belongs to the players, and it belongs to the fans. It is definitely not owned only by the teams’ parent companies.”