Seibu infielder Kento Watabe, 24, aka “Okawari-kun III,” has replaced Hotaka Yamakawa, 31, who has been suspended indefinitely after being charged with forcible sexual intercourse. He was thought to be the team’s savior, but in late June, “Bunshun Online” reported the whole story of his pick-up attempts using SNS DMs ( direct messages). He then injured his left adductor muscle during a game against Softbank on July 1, and was struck from the roster on July 2.
He played with a smile on his face even after the fiasco was revealed.
He was a friend of mine through an Instagram DM. He was trying to call a woman he met through Instagram DMs to the team’s dormitory. It was painful to see him desperately trying to catch her, saying, ‘If you come to my room, I’ll give you my uniform.’
In Seibu in ’21, two married men, Junichiro Kishi (26) and Ken Sasaki (27), were found to have been picking up women on SNS while declaring a state of emergency. Last year, Nobuya Hasegawa (21) was found to have been picked up on SNS, but he denied it, advocating a “hijacking theory. All three were suspended by the baseball team.
After the news broke, Watabe, who had learned nothing from the mistakes of his colleagues, was called in by the top management and scolded harshly, “What have you don e? They scolded him harshly. A team official said, ‘No matter how much I complained about the risks of DM pickups, it didn’t resonate. What should we do? …… ” ( sports newspaper reporter).
After the embarrassing pick-up exchange was made public, Watabe was forced to withdraw from the event due to injury. The Yokohama DeNA team front office, which had nothing to do with the pick-up, was relieved to learn of his scandal.
“Watanabe, a native of Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture, went to Yokohama Commerce University High School after graduating from junior high school. A year later, he transferred to Nihon Wellness High School, a correspondence school. He then went on to Toin Yokohama University, where he played an active role, being assigned the No. 4 position from his freshman year.
Naturally, DeNA, which has acquired many promising local players, had marked him for the draft, but in fact, in the course of their investigation of Watanabe, they learned that he had had many problems with women in the past, especially with his girlfriends.
In the summer of 1919, DeNA was in the middle of a dispute with a team official about a player who was underage and the team’s staff, In the summer of 2007, a weekly magazine reported that a player had an affair with 18 people, including a minor and a team employee, and the team removed him from the lineup in the off-season.Since then, the team has been careful to investigate the backgrounds of its acquired players. The reason why DeNA did not select Watanabe in the draft is because of such a history , and they anticipated this scandal to some extent,” said a baseball team official.
The strategy of acquiring a talented player who has a few problems but excels in one area, such as a fastball or a long ball, with little regard may be becoming outdated.
