Herouth brought up a great point about Akebono in the comments of my last post. So I went back and added the most recent Yokozunae to the Visualization. We’ve got Akebono, Takanohana, Musashimaru, Asashoryu and Harumafuji in there now. Akebono clearly has more oshidashi wins than many of the others who were focused yorikiri experts. (Hope you’re getting well; We’re pulling for you!)
Musashimaru also seems to be of a similar style, and this is not surprising when you look at his disciples now (Musashikuni, Wakaichiro). But they do seem heavier on the oshi-zumo than he had been. This was another point Herouth made and I hope to go back in and pull out more of the oyakata. I should have already done Naruto but I just realized that now. Anyway, I will be back and will continue to make upgrades and improvements.
To go back to Abi and Takakeisho, though, as Herouth also pointed out, Takakeisho doesn’t have Abi’s reach so yorikiri really isn’t as much of an option. Abi does need to develop this skill but if Takakeisho does become Yokozuna, he’ll really be creating his own mold. As an aside, I’m a bit surprised at how similar Goeido’s charts are to Asashoryu and Harumafuji.
So it seems like the recent Yokozuna fall into two categories. There are the “pure yotsu” guys like Takanohana, Asoshoryu, Hakuho, and Harumafuji, who mostly won by yorikiri, and the “balanced” guys like Akebono, Wakanohana, and Musashimaru who won by oshidashi and yorikiri at similar rates. We think of the latter as “oshi”, but that’s only a relative thing. Would be interesting to see, if it were possible to do this more systematically, if any of the upper ranks (Yokozuna or Ozeki) won predominantly by oshidashi…
Chiyotaikai comes to mind. 265 oshidashi to 42 yorikiri.
Interesting. Even more lopsided (188:24) as Ozeki, and the other top kimarite are also heavily oshi-oriented. I’ve seen him mentioned as the model/ceiling for Takakeisho on sumo forum. Looks like he had a couple of stretches that were close to Yokozuna runs. http://sumodb.sumogames.de/Query_bout.aspx?show_form=0&group_by=kimarite&shikona1=Chiyotaikai&rank1=O&onlyw1=on
The Harumafuji x Goeido connection feels weird on the surface, but actually it makes a lot of sense. If you were to ask me which feature each of them possesses, I would probably list “speed” among the first of their best attributes. It’s a weird one because in sumo a lot of people tend to focus on the kimarite, the “ends” – but while the detailed analysis includes the “means,” that kind of information doesn’t show up in places like SumoDB (for example). I think the next level of sumo analytics will be able to get into this stuff much in the way you see next level analytics in sports like baseball (spin rate, launch angle, etc). How fast is Goeido vs his average tachiai and also the average makuuchi tachiai, his opponents average tachiai and the average ozeki tachiai? And how do you judge that speed for the metric, and improvement? I think these are some of the next questions.