"It SEEMS that rikishi in past years fought better..." (Hagaki-Yoi! - Sept. '24 - The Dohyo: E156)

hello from the work desk it's time for a hagaki yoy a special viewer mail segment where I answer questions from you the people the best I can we're going to start with a couple questions I have gotten for on the hagaki way but they keep coming back up so we may as well talk about them first what is your favorite kimat uh my favorite kimat are the nag or the throws uh I just like I like Kim that are like three-dimensional involve a bit of tossing uh uh Yodi Kiri oshidashi totally fine but a bit two dimensional a little bit boring I like the throws how did you get into Sumo okay I have been asked this one many many times and I have answered this one both on the show and on other people's shows so I'm going to link to a grand Sumo breakdown episode I did where I talk about it in great great detail so if you want to check that out uh the tldr is I got kind of fed up with American football and still had a hole in my heart for large men hitting each other in a sport so there you go next up from viewer first mate reallyy 500 what does a Ricochet must have that makes you a fan of him now I I like to think I'm a fan of most Ricochet unless they have proven themselves to be somehow like a jerk or evil in real life uh but but uh what makes me like especially like a wrestler would probably be uh are they fun to watch uh do they have a fun story like outside the ring like something to grab on to like I do it for your coach who sick you know something like that that's fun uh do they seem sort of cool as a human like would I ever want to hang out with this person in real life or are they just so ridiculously intense he'd be like have fun buddy do do your sumo most stuff and it certainly helps if the wrestler could plausibly be in contention to win a you- show at some point it's always it's always more fun to be able to cheer for someone who might actually win the whole thing so that being said uh my current favorites are takao uh we know not not quite doing as well as H but takao uh UDA and uh back in the day toi notion Tango government 5650 asks how important is a nice high shico in determining your favorite sumo wrestlers uh well since I just said like one of my favorites is taka show not that much that isn't to say that aesthetically I do not love a nice high shico uh I think abies is the best and yeah I do like Obby disco golf Doug 6193 asks what is the hardest Japanese word for you to pronounce uh it's probably a Japanese word that I do not know what it is I'm very bad at Japanese it's I have gotten better if you want to check back to some of the early episodes I have done my best to get better but I I I am not good at Japanese so the hardest word for me I guess uh the hardest thing for me in Japanese isn't a word it is just a specific letter and it's the letter R uh I mean I come from California so like all my Spanish language stuff was like Spanish so it's like I'm used to the Espanol and the AR we must dig into them uh and I spent a lot of time in the midwest in my adult life and ours are very important there you know so when we get to Japanese it was a little difficult for me to sort of get that like perfect mix of a light d and a light L that goes for an r and we don't say kirishima and we don't say hu it's like kishima H you but when you put that R sound at the beginning of a word like you didn't I can't I can't quite get there so like it reud in so yeah a a first R sound in a Japanese word is hard for me Brandon Winstead 7137 asks what is your favorite character from The Stage Cinema anime and why uh clearly I'm very biased but the character of Dewey Finn from School of Rock has absolutely changed my life with the opportunity to be able to play that character on on stage uh so I guess stage character would be that but that also counts as a cinema character so I'll pick another one that's also both stage and Cinema uh one of my favorite movies is the movie Amadeus from the 80s and I always loved the character of Antonio saleri who's a sort of the lead in the movie amadas I always found something fascinating about a character whose personal hell was being able to appreciate great art but never created himself I wonder wonder why maybe I somehow sympathetic to that and as for anime that an easy one from Neon Genesis Evangelion misato and her penguin friend penpen uh I love the idea of misato for those of you who don't know misato works at like this uh government agency called nerve that is in charge of like keeping the entire world safe from giant aliens so at work she's a total badass she's totally great at her job but the second she gets home she uh she is a hot mess a functional alcoholic and did I mention the penguin she owns who is also a functional alcoholic so the dichot of that character is incredibly watchable go I love Misan viewer hob Bob Gob 3236 asks do you have any lower division favorites judio and or makusha Rikishi who haven't been in makuchi yet I've been very forward about my love for onatu he should be up in makuchi next tournament uh down in makush I really like the new guy from isama sat ruuji he's he's good he's only 20 he seems to have already sort of grown into like a full big sum he's a big boy our current defending makusha to Champ let make sure I get this right daon uh he's only 24 and has already come back from an injury uh he seems very strong after this injury and I would expect him to be charging up through the judio ranks fairly soon and a couple of guys in makush uh one Waka ikar and the other one otsuji uh they're younger guys and I'm just waiting for them to to fill into their bodies a little bit put a little more weight on and then I think they're going to make a push but suji is only 20 and he's managed to grow a little bit he's finally broken 300 lb so I could see him making some movement in the next few tournaments Waka iadi is only 5'9 242 lbs right now so I think we're going to need to wait a little bit on wak iati longtime viewer Joanna Edwards 6325 asks a whole bunch of very personal questions uh and I will answer a few of them uh am I single married connected to anyone uh besides acting singing and Sumo what you like to do for fun and what city is your home uh I think I can answer all those in one sort of giant answer uh well one of the major things I do when I'm not talking about Sumo here uh I am a musician a performer and a singer songwriter and I'm currently working on a folk musical called Sarah and the seed check it out at ww. Sarah andth seed.com and I'm working on this with my writing partner who also happens to be my life partner Juliet masers Schmidt we actually became writing Partners before we started becoming life partners and that was a sort of interesting journey in itself but we will have been together now uh we are almost up at 10 years thanks for asking we live here in New York City the concrete jungle where dreams are made of and yeah please if any of y'all Doo heads are up in New York hit me up I got recommendations and if I'm free let's totally meet up viewer Ricky Marcel pitcher 8584 asks how many different Cup winners will we see between now and the end of 2025 I.E will a new Top Dog rise or are we going to see six plus different winners in the next t nine tournaments uh if my math is right between now and the end of 2025 is eight tournaments but I would guess that we are going to see five different wrestlers win those eight tournaments and if I had to guess they would be onosato kotak hodu I'll say atami Fuji I'm going to put that out there I think atami Fuji is going to win his first championship in the next eight and then there' be one wild card so that could be just a weird MGA Shira one that could be T Fuji sticking around for 11 that'd be cool but yeah I uh uh if I had to put a number I'd say five and in a related question viewer read Ishmael Reed asks do you think we will see a Zen show you show before the end of 2025 no no I don't I don't think we have anyone right now who is dominant enough to get to 15 we're going to talk about this in a little bit but yeah uh generally the the bar used to be between 13 and 14 wins now it seems to be between 12 and 13 wins for a standard - show so 15 just seems to be a bit much for anyone we have wrestling right now viewer Jacob gotwald 1847 asks a very tough question uh can you make a tier list of wrestlers from the view of their primes this could be just current wrestlers or retired it can also include people who are in other divisions I like this idea because usually the downfall of wrestlers is injuries that they never recover from uh the simple answer is uh no no I can't um I first of all I uh I have not been able to come up with a way just judging on the very few stats Sumo puts out there it's not like baseball where we have a whole bunch of advanced stats we can dig through to get a larger picture the only stats we really have in Sumo are did you win or lose and what was the technique used to achieve that win that's sort of it so yeah I I can't I wouldn't be able to have any way of knowing if fut bayama could beat Ryden and if Ryden could beat tanaz and tanaz could beat hako there there's just no way to to do a direct comparison like that that would be make sense and be correct I mean I could just write a list of like all the Yokozuna and put them in order but I have no way of kn going and I very much agree that the downfall of most sumo wrestlers is in fact their injury history but I don't think you can take injury out of it injury is so much of just the life of a Suma wrestler I don't think anyone who wrestles for more than a year is not dealing with some form of physical injury so uh it it has to be part of the story it's like we can't just ask would Teran NE Fuji be better than hako if his knees were better they're not that's part of the package and that leads us to our final question and yeah it's another doozy JS 3217 asks jwag I may be seeing things or even biased in some way but from watching videos of old Sumo matches from the 90s onward to today it seems that Ricochet in past years Flatout fought better and tried harder to win than the current crop watch some of these videos with chuji akono hakuho ASU Hara Fuji at all those were some barn burner matches today's matches seem somewhat tamed by comparison what's your take on this all right so this is an excellent question but it's also sort of a large question that requires a a beefy answer as I just mentioned it is really really hard to judge talent level across eras and there are a few reasons why uh matches from the past might automatically seem better and more interesting than matches we see today uh number one I like to call the patula Clark effect uh when I was growing up my my dad was in the classic rock uh and he got me into classic rock and we listen the classic rock station and growing up I'm like oh man the 60s and70s were so great every single song that got released in the 60s and70s was a banger well no it's just I didn't live in the 60s and only very very little bit of the 70s so I didn't get to hear uh the the the multitude of crap that was also released on the radio alongside the stone cold Classics but now 40 50 years later what are we doing we're only listening to the stone cold Classics and we're not listening to the patula Clarks of the past and I'm not casting shade on Pula Clark wonderful singer who doesn't love downtown but it's not the thing you necessarily hear on the classic Radio of the 60s so I don't know how many people are like going back and watching like full days of a tournament from like 1992 uh and we were probably just going back and watching the best matches and we already know they're the best matches because they've already happened that brings us to the next effect the epilog effect when we look into the past we know exactly why each match was important and what happened to those wrestlers through the end of their career so when we watch these matches from the past like these chuji like these akono matches even the har muuji hako matches we know how that story ends we know what context that match was in and what the result of that match does for each of these wrestlers Legacy today when we're watching them we can't know what each individual match how important that's going to be uh we can barely even tell dayto day how important it's going to be in that boso so when we don't know the ending point it's harder for us to see that certain matches are more important and the other effect I want to talk about which makes it really hard to go from between erors uh to talk about baseball again there was a pitcher named Walter Johnson he was considered the fastest pitcher in baseball back at like the beginning of the 1900s famous fastest fastball in baseball and Walter Johnson pitched until about 1927 well about 10 years later this kid comes up named Bob Feller and everyone starts saying he's got the best fast ball in baseball now this was in the days before radar gun so they couldn't just measure the spe to the pitch so they ended up asking people who had faced both of them and they usually said Bob Feller is throwing way faster than Walter Johnson but if we look at when those players played they were playing the beginning of their career facing Walter Johnson who's at the very end of his career when he was 38 or 39 these players 10 years later are now facing Bob Feller who was 17 or 18 when he started his career and seeing that young man's fastball versus the fastball of someone who had already pitched for 20 years so even though those people had faced both pitchers they had not faced the same fast balls so I could mathematically create a chain from taiho to hakuho and figure out well if Taio beat this person this many times and then this person beat this person this many times then move it all the way up through the generations I could probably come up with some sort of mathematical proof that said well if this person could beat Taio then this person could also have beaten hakuho many years there's way too many variables for us to figure it out like that the Walter Johnson effect okay and after saying all of that I have to agree with you I do think the overall level of sumo is not as good as it was in the 90s in fact I don't think it's as good as it was even eight or nine years ago when I started watching Sumo I know I mentioned there aren't that many stats in Sumo but there are a few indicators that show I think the relative strength of abans number one are there a lot of Yokozuna on the bans and are they winning you show right now no and no right now we have one Yokozuna who shows up every third boso and usually wins but that's not that much and attached to that are there a lot of mishira you show happening at any given period of time and you have to say that in the past few years we have had a lot of myir us show and yes I have stats so if you look at modern Sumo 1958 until now let me get the stats out in all that time the 398 Y show from 1958 until now we had 26 MGA Shira yho in all of that time that's 6.5% and we had 252 Yokozuna show that's 63.3% in modern Sumo now since the beginning of 2018 which was the very first year hakuho went Cujo in three out of six tournaments and his attendance record did not get better after that so from 2018 till now we've had 39 boso and we've had nine mishira yho in there that's 23% and the number of Yokozuna yho 14 out of 39 which is only 35.8% so once again our maira Y show ratio has gone from 6% to 23 and our Yokozuna have gone from uh roughly 2/3 to roughly 1/3 of the time we can also look and see that uh we don't have that many 14 and 15 win Y show anymore most of them are 12 and 13 and yes I have the stats in P chart form now if we look at this pie chart we've had 398 boso since the beginning of 1958 and as you'll see more than half of them are 13 or 14 win you show and then if we look at this pie chart which goes from 2018 till now we will see that more than half are 13 and 12 when you show the math is there we're winning fewer matches to win Y show now of course this could mean that the top level of sumo is so much better than it used to be that we just don't have anyone who is dominant in this group after all wins me measure relative dominance to the people you are facing but I don't think this group is significantly better than the group we've just had and I think this is recent enough where we don't have to deal with the Walter Johnson effect two years ago hakuho finished out his career with a Zen show against Teran Fuji this past B show Teran Fuji came back and I'm guessing terui is not better now healthier than he was two years ago he came back and won his sort of like comeback Yokozuna tournament but he didn't get a Zeno he only got 12 and three against aans that was weaker because it didn't have hakuu in it and you'd expect it to be stronger at this point than it was two years ago because now we ostensibly have wrestlers like takao kishima hodu onosato uh all these guys supposed to be kotaka all in their Peak as opposed to a few years ago when they were still coming up through the ranks so yes judging from that I would say that yeah Sumo is in a bit of a lull right now but that doesn't mean that it can't come back what will it take for Sumo to get back to its last level uh we talked about this uh in another episode about why uh young Japanese men may or may not be wanting to join Sumo in the modern [Applause] era but let me know what you think why do you think Sumo might be weaker than it was a few years ago I got my thoughts but I'd love to hear your take thank you for joining us for this hagaki oi please stay tuned to the channel uh not only do I have this new Yokozuna episode coming up that you're not going to want to miss where we talk about outlier Yokozuna runs but also we are heading up to the September boso the bons is supposed to drop today very excited about that you're not going to want to miss any of this coverage so everyone stay safe stay strong stay healthy and I will see you next time on the doo [Applause]