Tokyo team asked for memories about dads and baseball, found out they’re not all good ones.

Japan celebrates Father’s Day on the same day as the U.S., U.K., and Canada, so last Sunday the Yomiuri Giants, Tokyo’s professional baseball team in the Central League, wanted to give a shout-out to baseball-loving dads. The club’s official Twitter account sent out a tweet saying “Today is Father’s Day. Do you have any memories about your father and the Giants?” The account even got the ball rolling with an illustrated example, showing a middle-aged man sitting on his sofa with a bowl of potato chips on the table and a Giants game on TV, a smile and his face and his fists pumped, with the caption:

“The Giants determine what kind of mood my dad is in.”

The intent, no doubt, was to bring up heartwarming memories of Pop having an extra spring in his step after a big Giants victory, or maybe even to accentuate a cute, still-a-kid-at-heart aspect of his personality as he was a little blue when his favorite team came up short in a close game.

Unfortunately, though, by inviting anyone and everyone whose dad’s emotional state is affected by the Giants’ on-field performance into the conversation, the tweet brought up a lot more than heartwarming family memories, and instead caused some much less pleasant, more traumatic flashbacks for many commenters, whose replies included:

“All of my memories about my dad and the Giants are terrible ones.”
“So if the Giants didn’t exist, that dad would have had fewer reasons to get into a bad mood.”
“That tweet describes my dad perfectly. If they lost, he’d find some tiny excuse to kick me…That’s why I lost all interest in baseball.”
“It was the worst if they were playing a night game, my dad would monopolize the TV. Then he’d fall asleep in the middle of the game, and when I’d change the channel, he’d suddenly wake up and go berserk, yelling ‘I was watching that.’ I hate baseball.”
“Instead of a dad who just loves baseball, he was a bullying dad who’d change how he treated his family based on how a single baseball game turned out.”
“My dad is a Tigers [the Giants’ rival] fan, and if they lose to the Giants he gets pissed off about all sorts of things he normally wouldn’t get worked up over.”
“Episodes of Dragon Ball would get preempted if the Giants game ran late, and dads would yell if they lost, so I think there are a lot of kids who think of the Giants as their sworn enemies.”
“Getting so into the game that you can’t control your emotions – that’s baseball!”
“It almost seems like the person who created this tweet actually hates the Giants.”

It wasn’t all bad memories, as one commenter chimed in to say that neither they or their father are the type to get angry over sports, and so they’re a family of “calm but passionate Giants fans.” Perhaps the most significant reaction came from someone saying the tweet felt like something from the Showa period, which lasted from 1926 to 1989, but feels out of place in the current Reiwa period, which started in 2019. Japanese societal expectations about the role of fathers has shifted quite a bit in the last 100 years, and while most dads in Japan still feel a strong pressure to provide for their children economically, there’s also an increased sense that they need to be good role models for interpersonal and communication skills, too, which would include having the maturity to not get bent out of shape because their favorite baseball team lost, and to not let such frustrations negatively impact how they treat the other members of their family.

In the Giants’ defense, the intent of the tweet pretty clearly wasn’t to give dads a pass for having a short fuse if the team loses, and the goal was no doubt to humanize dads by showing that they’re fun-loving, passionate people too. In order to get that message across, a more accentuate-the-positive choice of words probably would have worked better, something like “My dad’s smile gets even bigger when the Giants win,” so hopefully they’ll come up with some better phrasing by the time next Father’s Day rolls around.

Source: Twitter/@TokyoGiants via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso
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