While the 2021 MLB season winds down with the World Series and the French Division 1 Baseball has already crowned its champion, the Nippon Pro Baseball playoffs are just getting underway.
Notably, we see the two most popular teams in Japan, the Yomiuri Giants and the Hanshin Tigers, facing off in the first round. These two teams also feature in Episode 4 of the Culture Baseball podcast, which tells several tales of Japanese baseball through the novel ‘The Housekeeper and the Professor’ by Yoko Ogawa, published in France in 2005: the glory and misfortunes of star pitcher Yukata Enatsu, a fan favorite of one of the novel’s protagonists, his rivalry with Yomiuri Giants legend Sadaharu Oh, the epic 1985 season of the Hanshin Tigers, and the visit to France by another legend, Yoshio Yoshida, former manager of PUC and the French national team.
The podcast also explores a famous curse linked to a statue and revisits one of the biggest scandals in Japanese sports. And that’s not all—through the novel, the podcast delves into the deep and ancient connection between baseball and mathematics. A rich episode centered around a magnificent novel. Plenty to read and listen to.
Episode 4 of Culture Baseball by Gaëtan Alibert
