The Black Mist Scandal — Match-Fixing and a Crisis of Trust in Baseball

Up to now, we have watched baseball rise again from the ashes and win back the nation’s fervor. Yet in the shadow of that prosperity, something was quietly advancing that would shake the very trust the game depended on: a series of match-fixing cases that came to the surface from the end of the 1960s into the early 1970s. Later known as the Black Mist Scandal, this affair is remembered as one of the largest scandals in the history of Japanese professional baseball. In this installment, we look at what happened and why it happened — not to condemn individuals, but to see it as a problem of the structure that lay behind it.

What Happened

The origin of the affair goes back to the middle of the 1969 season. It is said that senior figures at one club came to suspect that there was something unnatural in the play of their own players, and began a secret investigation. What eventually emerged was a suspicion that some players were connected to people outside the game and were involved in deliberately trying to lose — losing-on-purpose conduct, in other words, match-fixing.

As a result of the investigation, one pitcher is reported to have received, at the end of that year, the first permanent expulsion in the history of professional baseball. The problem did not end there. The following year, 1970, the measures reached several players from the same club as well, and were officially settled in forms suited to the weight of each one’s responsibility — permanent disqualification, suspension for a fixed period, or a stern warning. The suspicions then spread to other clubs too, and the whole baseball world fell into a grave crisis of trust.

What matters here is not to go beyond the scope of the confirmed sanctions and lightly decide who the ‘true mastermind’ was. Among the people said to have been involved, there were some who, while admitting that they had received cash, consistently denied any involvement in the match-fixing itself. Parts of the full picture of the affair remain, even now, open to differing assessments. What is certain is the fact that multiple players were sanctioned and that the trust placed in baseball was deeply wounded.

Why It Happened — The Structure of Conditions and Gambling

So why did such an affair come about? Seeking the cause only in the weakness of individual hearts will not reveal the essence of the matter. The question we should rather ask is whether the baseball world of that time had a structure into which temptation could easily creep.

One thing often pointed out is the problem of players’ conditions. It is said that the high pay and generous security enjoyed by today’s professional players had not, at that time, reached every player. Among young players in particular, and those not blessed with opportunities to shine, it is said that not a few harbored anxiety about the future. Where the economic foundation was weak, invitations from outside could slip in — there are those who see this as soil in which such openings could easily form.

Another is the point of contact with gambling. Professional sport, by its nature, makes the outcome of a contest itself an easy object of the exchange of money. A player who can sway the result of a game appears, to those betting on that result, as an extremely attractive figure. The hotbed of the affair is thought to lie precisely where the legitimate world and the money squirming outside it unexpectedly came into contact.

Furthermore, there was also the circumstance that, at the time, the very mechanisms for preventing such contact before it happened were not as well developed as they are today. To care for the personal circumstances of players, to keep an eye on involvement with suspicious outsiders, and to catch dangerous signs at an early stage — such a defensive framework had not been sufficiently built up, and there remained an opening to be exploited. If the power to cut off temptation is entrusted to individual conscience alone, and the framework that supports it as an organization is weak, the risk of wrongdoing rises. The affair can also be described as an event in which that weakness became reality.

The Crisis of Trust, and Steps to Prevent a Recurrence

The successive sanctions left deep wounds on the baseball world. The trust that fans had placed in the game wavered, and the doubt of ‘was the result of that game real?’ threatened the very foundation of the sport. The moment the seriousness of a contest is doubted, the very emotions that spectators have poured into it risk losing their meaning — that, precisely, was the most frightening thing about the wrongdoing of match-fixing.

Faced with this crisis, the baseball world had no choice but to confront the rebuilding of trust and the prevention of a recurrence. Vigilance against ties between players and suspicious outsiders was strengthened, and a stance that cautioned against contact with gambling and antisocial forces came to be more strongly conscious than before, it is said. This painful series of events confronted the baseball world anew with the question of what the fairness a sport must protect really is.

The Black Mist Scandal was one of the darkest tunnels that Japanese professional baseball passed through. Yet what the game learned from it was not small either. That the fairness of a contest is just as important a foundation as the brilliance of stars or the fervor of the stadium — no, even more so. And that, unless one addresses the very structure that breeds wrongdoing, the same mistake risks being repeated in a different form. This lesson continues to hold meaning for a long time, even when we consider the various problems the baseball world would face in later eras. Next time, we move on to another major theme that lies outside the contest itself — the story of the draft and money, surrounding the price of players.