December 19, 2013: Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture – Information is power, so most LRS teams are fairly tight-lipped when it comes to their off-season planning.  Against that backdrop, the new Kawaguchi Transmitters front office has been unusually open with their fans, often giving TransmitterTalk.com early access to information not commonly held.  So it was not particularly shocking to receive an email inviting us to follow the team’s management during their off-season activities.  General Manager Ron Collinsmet with us and offered complete transparency.  We were free to go anywhere, talk to anyone, take any note and publish anything.  The only rule, he said, was that he did not want a word released until events had passed that made the material acceptable for public consumption.

It was an offer too good to pass up.

What you’re reading here is the first installment of a compilation that our reporting staff put together over the months from the gut-wrenching end of the season to the life-affirming beginning of the 2014 spring training regimen.  The series will be released in segments so you can relive the process, getting a feeling for how the Transmitters front office thinks and works.

First, we need to talk about the management team itself.  “The team here includes the obvious folks – the scouting guys, the data hounds and all of our on-field management and coaches,” Collins said in our preliminary discussions.  “But I extend that out to include anyone and everyone associated with the team.  I mean everyone.  I’m open to listening to the administrative staff, the business folks and the janitorial crew.  Good ideas don’t care where they come from.”

Collins clearly believes in teamwork and has even configured the building that houses the team’s front office to support this approach.  Kawaguchi is a working city, an industrial entity outside Tokyo.  It is a place of great growth over the past half-century.  Its architecture is a mixture of traditional and modern, its skyline very much like any other city in the world, yet it has its areas of great elegance.  Transmitter Central is one of the later.  “I wanted to find a place the team could be itself,” Collins said.  And he couldn’t have picked a better place.

When you enter Transmitter Central, you’re struck by two conflicting thoughts.  The place is expansive – the offices are spacious even by U.S. standards – and designed to feed off natural lighting throughout the day.  The second thing you notice is that the decor is spare.  Walls in the front lobby are appropriately adorned with images of the grand past of the organization and a photo of Mr. Kyokai and his recently deceased father.  Entering the compound, you find that the corridors are generally barren.  The conference areas, which are big skylit rooms with multiple projectors and ringed with high-speed dataports, are decorated only by total wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor whiteboards that are filled with scrawl, doodles and other diagrams that Collins or one of his team dashed off in some moment of Rube Goldberg-infested fever.

“Ron is an engineer by degree,” said one team member.  “Which means he can’t talk without drawing.”

Collins laughs when we informed him of that quote.  “It’s true,” he admits, “but we find it’s a very effective way of teaming.  There’s something about physically putting ideas on the wall in blue, red, orange, or whatever, that makes the information stick with you.  I actually wake up with images of something I or a teammate wrote down in a meeting.  Often I find that I don’t remember the precise detail of the thought, but I can see exactly where we were when we were discussing it, and I can see my teammate writing what they wrote.  We’ve already learned that you don’t erase stuff on the whiteboards unless you get the writer’s permission.”

He laughed again.  “In fact, the decision to offer Kantaro Sakei a contract was partially influenced by whiteboard teaming.  Shigematsu (Akiyama, the team’s scouting director) had filled a board with information about Sakei that showed what a difficult time he had in his stint with the PEBA’s San Antonio unit.  He was worried that perhaps Sakei was hurt, and we had a long discussion with (field manager) Biao Ci and (pitching coach) Mitsuoki Ueda about whether he would be a good fit.  We weren’t sure, you know?  It was iffy.  But one of our interns came along later with a red pen and filled in some BABIP numbers in red ink that showed us that the San Antonio numbers were most likely just dumb bad luck.  It made us rethink our situation.  We offered the deal, and Sakei was one of most effective pitchers in the last month of the season (2-2, 2.57 ERA in six games).  Even better, the guy’s only 31.  We think he’s got real value as we go into 2014 – which is why we gave him two years.”

Collins sat back in his chair.  “I can still see those red BABIP numbers when I close my eyes.”

So there you have it.  The team’s approach is inclusive.  Its management team is one of clashing ideas expressed in the open.  Even the building itself gets in on the act.  As you walk through the place, you begin to gather a sense of power in the austereness of the expansive surroundings.  It feels broad.  It feels electric.  It feels like hope.