The Blank Day
A single day with no games and no pitches thrown exposed a loophole, a power struggle, and the cost of winning at any price.
This is a companion piece to my Suguru Egawa profile in the Japan’s Favorite Players series. It focuses entirely on the “Blank Day” incident—and how everything went sideways before he ever took the mound.
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On November 21, 1978, Japanese professional baseball briefly lost track of itself.
No games were played. No pitches were thrown. The calendar said it was the day before the draft; the rulebook said it was a day when nothing should happen. But by midmorning, the Yomiuri Giants had signed Suguru Egawa to a contract, called a press conference, and announced that the most coveted pitcher in the country was theirs.
By nighttime, the Central League had rejected the deal, the Giants had declared the next day’s draft illegitimate, and Nippon Professional Baseball found itself arguing not about wins or batting averages, but about legality, ethics, and whether the sport’s most powerful franchise was willing to burn the system down to get its way.
Long before he was accused of leaving too soon, Suguru Egawa was accused of arriving the wrong way.
The event would come to be known by several names: the Egawa Incident, the Egawa Problem, the Egawa Turmoil. But the phrase that stuck was the most ominous and the most accurate: kuuhaku no ichinichi—the Blank Day.
The name sounds almost poetic, as if it describes a pause in time. In reality, it marked the most chaotic single day many within the sport could remember. Careers were rerouted, a commissioner resigned, a league nearly split, and a single pitcher became the most polarizing figure the sport had ever produced, all before he had thrown a single professional pitch.
Suguru Egawa did not invent the Blank Day. He did not design the loophole, write the contract language, or summon the political muscle that made the moment possible. He was 23 years old, recently returned from a year of baseball exile in the United States, and surrounded by adults who believed they knew how to outmaneuver the system. What Egawa did was want one thing, openly and stubbornly: to fulfill his childhood dream and play for the nation's most beloved team, the Yomiuri Giants.
By the time the Blank Day arrived, Egawa had already been drafted twice and had refused to sign twice.
Suguru Egawa was famous before he was finished growing. At Sakushin Gakuin High School, his fastball inspired rumors more than measurements. There were no radar guns then, only testimony: hitters who swore it was faster than anything they had ever seen, crowds that gasped when bats merely nicked the ball. He threw no-hitters and perfect games, struck out batters at rates that sounded exaggerated, and acquired the nickname Kaibutsu—the Monster—half in jest, half in awe.
When the Hankyu Braves* selected him first overall in the 1973 draft, Egawa calmly announced that he would not go. He wanted to attend university and keep his options open. He said, with remarkable clarity for a teenager, that he did not yet trust himself to choose.
*Hankyu sold the team to Orix in 1988, after which it played two seasons as the Orix Braves before relocating to Kobe and becoming the Orix BlueWave—the team Ichiro would later star for. After the 2004 season, the BlueWave merged with the Kintetsu Buffaloes to form the present-day Orix Buffaloes. That story deserves an essay of its own.
Four years later, as the ace of Hosei University, Egawa was even more dominant. He won 47 games in Tokyo Big6 play, striking out 443 batters. He refined his power, learned restraint, learned how to reach back only when it mattered. He stopped trying to humiliate every hitter and started controlling games instead. He was, by any reasonable definition, ready.
What complicated everything was that Egawa still wanted only one destination.
In November 1977, his collegiate career ended. The draft loomed again. Egawa visited Naka Funada, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives and chairman of Sakushin Gakuin. Egawa asked Funada to handle negotiations with professional teams on his behalf. Funada agreed.
Funada made the unprecedented decision to speak aloud what was normally left unsaid: Egawa strongly preferred the Yomiuri Giants. The reaction was swift and hostile. League officials and rival clubs insisted that no one player, no matter how gifted, could be allowed to choose. The commissioner said that no matter how powerful Funada was, even if he had been the Prime Minister himself, the baseball world would not bend. Central League and Pacific League executives insisted that expressing a preference was one thing, but no team was obligated to honor it. Rules were rules, the draft was the draft, and preference was irrelevant.
The Crown Lighter Lions, a struggling Pacific League team based in faraway Kyushu, won the first pick. Egawa refused again.
The reasons were not only practical but also human: distance from Tokyo, distance from people who mattered to him, distance from the league he grew up watching. His girlfriend (later his wife) lived in Tokyo. Later, he would say that he would have signed with a Central League team other than the Giants (Yakult or Taiyo) but the Lions were never going to work. Fukuoka did not fit his life.
The refusal raised uncomfortable questions. Did the draft system violate the constitutional right to choose one’s profession? Could a player be compelled to play for a team in a distant city, in a different league, at the cost of his personal life? Those questions reached the Japanese Diet. They did not find easy answers.
Egawa chose exile instead and became something of a baseball ronin. He graduated from Hosei, took a nominal position at his high school, and went to the United States to train, pitching in scrimmages at the University of Southern California but barred from official games.
The Lions, meanwhile, were sold to the Seibu Group and relocated to just outside Tokyo, and Seibu executives flew to Los Angeles to meet Egawa personally. He did not budge. Later, Egawa would say he could not join Seibu without “crushing the people around him.” By November 20, 1978, Seibu publicly surrendered its negotiating rights.
That surrender set the stage for the Blank Day.
