Gachinko

A nice thing about eBay is that I can purchase old photos from anywhere in the world.   (That is when I can afford 'em, which isn't often.)   Anyway, I found this nice photo of young baseball players from a seller in Japan.  At first I was a bit confused.  Why were  these Japanese baseball players wearing jerseys with English lettering?  Was it possible that this picture was taken in someplace like Fresno, and mailed back to family in someplace like Tokyo?   Then I did some research and discovered that the logos for all the teams in the Japanese major leagues are in English.  The only explanation I could think of was that baseball originated in the United States and Japanese baseball fans crave authenticity, so English it is.

But what does that word mean?  The first thing I had to do was determine the first letter.  Is that an F, so Fachi, or maybe Jachi, or Tachi?  The only other letter I thought it could be was G,  so I typed Gachi into the search engine and found a match on a site dedicated to Japanese slang.  Gachi, a game played earnestly, from sumo wrestling, short for Gachinko.  It might not be right, but it fits.