Baseball (19 page)

Any way you look at it, the Yankees' annual profit would seem to be in the millions, in a period when many teams insist they are losing money. The Yankees might even be more valuable, considering the future value of the YES Network.

Steinbrenner, who turned seventy-five on July 4, 2005, tended to stay closer to his home base in Tampa, Florida, behind layers of officials, publicists, bodyguards, and handlers. His two sons did not seem eager to take over the club, and he sometimes referred to his son-in-law, Stephen W. Swindal, as his heir apparent. The Yankee organization suffered from the impractical tilt of two poles of power, the Tampa faction and the Bronx faction, but nothing happened at Yankee Stadium that did not have the approval of the Boss.

Under his stewardship, the Yankees became ever more entrenched as the signature team of the United States—with touches of power, patriotism, quasi-religion, commercialism, dignity, and bad taste, often linked together in mind-boggling sequence.

For example: in the days after the attack of September 11, 2001, all baseball teams made the patriotic gesture of playing “God Bless America” during the traditional seventh-inning stretch. Years later, Steinbrenner was still observing this gesture, followed by a version
of the secular baseball anthem “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” itself followed directly by the squawking video of what is apparently a drunken cowboy lurching to the jangled cadence of “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

Yankee Stadium has become a sacred place, like Westminster Abbey, with its memorials to ancient heroes tucked into Monument Park behind the left-center-field fence. The dignified side of the stadium was permanently set by the nonagenarian public address announcer, Robert Leo Sheppard, a speech teacher and lay Roman Catholic lector, who delivered the lineups for a full half century. Sheppard's august tones were balanced immediately by the blatant cheesiness of mustard commercials, cartoon subway train races, electronic burps and tics, plus the vulgar chants of the Bleacher Bums.

Despite Steinbrenner's earlier campaign to discredit the Bronx, the Yankees seem destined to remain in that borough for a long time. A deal with New York City, announced in 2005, approved a new Yankee Stadium, just to the north of the old one, opening in 2009. The Yankees would pay for the stadium itself and the city would pay for the roads and parking, while taking away a park that had long been used by the community. The new stadium would retain many familiar features and angles but would be placed behind walls, like a theme park—a totally American dichotomy of dignity and bad taste, something for everybody. Yankeeland.

I
chiro arrived in America with a request. He wanted to be known, like a rock musician or Brazilian soccer star, by his first name only. He had left his family name, Suzuki, with his old team, the Orix Blue Wave. When he spoke at all, Ichiro spoke in brief riddles, almost like Buddhist koans, presenting himself to North America as a mystic from the Kabuki or Noh theater. He was also a control hitter, somewhat of a baseball throwback, not only to left-handed sluggers like George Sisler and Stan Musial but also to Wee Willie Keeler, a full century earlier.

How do you say “Hit 'em where they ain't” in Japanese?

He joined the Seattle Mariners in 2001, the first significant Japanese hitter ever to take his cuts in the so-called major leagues of North America. Sadaharu Oh never came. Shigeo Nakashima never came. But Ichiro came.

Slender and small, Ichiro arrived in a time of bulging muscles. Clearly, this was a man with nary a steroid in him. He trained on rice balls, bringing his own stash to the clubhouse, to the amusement of his burger-eating teammates. They did not smile patronizingly after he took his first swings, slashing the ball past infielders, racing to first base, stealing bases. In right field, he threw out runners like a latter-day Roberto Clemente.

By the turn of the new century, the game was thriving in two very disparate places, Asia and Latin America, not because of overt proselytizing like the Spalding barnstorming tours but because the game was fun to play. Ordinary people, often starting as students in America, had carried the game overseas with them. To baseball's credit, it had leaped the oceans, proved as attractive in Havana or Tokyo as it did in Boston or Chicago.

Baseball went first to Asia, starting in China in the international commercial city of Shanghai, where the Shanghai Baseball Club was formed around 1863. The sport arrived in Japan shortly afterward. The Japanese credit Horace Wilson, an American English
professor at Kaisei Gakkô, now Tokyo University, with teaching the game between 1867 and 1873.

The first baseball game recorded in Japan was on September 30, 1871, between expatriates living in the international section of Yokohama and the crew of the U.S. battleship
Colorado.
In 1878, a railway engineer, Hiroshi Hiraoka, who had attended college in Boston and was said to be a Boston fan, organized the first Japanese team, the Shinbashi Athletic Club Athletics. As contact between the United States and Japan grew in the early twentieth century, the American leagues sent barnstorming teams. The A. J. Reach Co., rivals of Spalding, sent New York Giants and Chicago White Sox stars for nineteen games in 1908.

The game was quickly adopted by Japanese educators as an ideal and decidedly amateur outlet. By the 1920s, uniformed young men were playing for every school, with intense competition, leading up to the national high school tournament at Koshien, near Osaka, that is today the Japanese version of America's college basketball madness, the tournament leading up to the Final Four.

Professionalism came along when prominent companies saw sponsorship as a way to gain publicity. Matsutaro Shoriki, a newspaper publisher, had become friendly with Lefty O'Doul, the hitting star from San Francisco, who had toured Japan and fallen in love with the country. O'Doul urged Shoriki to form a professional team, which the publisher first named Dai Nippon Tokyo Yakyu Club—the Great Japan Tokyo Baseball Club. O'Doul, who was finishing up his major league career with the New York Giants, urged his friend to name his team the Tokyo Giants, and to adopt the orange and black colors of the Giants. Now called the Yomiuri Giants, after the vast publishing empire, the Giants play in a domed stadium in central Tokyo and have become the great national team of Japan, much like the New York Yankees in the United States.

In 1934, a group of Americans toured Japan, playing a memorable game in which Eji Sawamura, only nineteen years old, struck out four future Hall of Famers, Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, and Lou Gehrig, in succession. Shoriki's Giants made a 110-game trip to the United States in 1935, with the help of
O'Doul, and the next year Shoriki organized a professional league, with O'Doul serving as his advisor. The Tokyo Giants even took spring training with the Seals before the 1936 season. O'Doul visited Japan every year until war broke out, and he returned in 1949 with his Seals, mourning the death of many of his old Japanese friends during the war, and inspiring Japan to begin a two-league baseball season starting in 1950.

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As with everything else the Japanese adapted, baseball became a uniquely Japanese institution. Their greatest professionals lived in team dormitories (at least until they were married) and participated in repetitious drills almost year-round. A merry collegiate-style blend of noise and cheerleaders was encouraged at professional games but fans rarely booed players or managers. In a nation that prizes group solidarity, people considered it quite normal to have one dominant team, the Giants. The explanation was (and still is) that it is healthy for one team to be measured against all other teams. (Yankee fans would surely agree.)

The Giants attracted the greatest players, including Shigeo Nagashima, a powerful third baseman, who became the embodiment of Japanese charisma and talent. He was joined by Sadaharu Oh, the power hitter with a Chinese father and Japanese mother, whose name means “king” in Chinese and Japanese.

Oh's tale of failure and success is classically Japanese. As a child, he had tried to overcome the perceived flaw of being left-handed by batting right-handed. One day, a player in the highest Japanese league, Hiroshi Arakawa, was walking his dog near the local park and observed Oh batting right-handed but throwing left-handed. Arakawa told the youngster not to be afraid of being left-handed, advice that unlocked Oh's talent and led to his signing with the Giants, the highest possible honor for a teenage prospect.

As a rookie, Oh was given uniform No. 1, but his high-living habits in his late teens held him back. He was headstrong, resisting advice, the way he had refused to try the Stan Musial crouch when the Cardinals visited Japan in 1958. It was not until 1962, when Oh was failing, that Arakawa returned to his life. The Giant manager,
Tetsuharu Kawakami, knowing nothing about the earlier meeting between Oh and Arakawa, appointed Arakawa to be Oh's hitting mentor. This total coincidence would turn Oh's life around. Kind and caustic in turn, Arakawa ordered Oh to use the flamingo-style batting stance, raising his right foot, as part of his preparation to swing. This stance was adapted from a form of martial arts called Aikido, the Way of Spirit Harmony. Most mornings, Oh would work out with a wooden sword, learning to make such disciplined, powerful motions with his body that his sword would slice through paper. Then Oh would take the normal Japanese routine of workouts and play in the Giant game that night. Arakawa's advice finally took hold, with Oh hitting 868 home runs in his career, leading the league in home runs 15 times, being named the Most Valuable Player nine times, leading the league in walks 18 straight seasons, and winning the Diamond Glove, as the best defensive first baseman, 9 times.

In the people's eyes, Nagashima was the soul of the Giants. “He and I were never really friends, though,” Oh wrote in his autobiography. “We have never drunk together or had a social evening together in the more than twenty years we have known each other.”

“It wasn't so much Oh's Chinese blood as it was Nagashima's charisma and his ‘seniority,’” explained Robert Whiting, an American who has been a prominent Western observer in Japan.

One of the early Americans to play in Japan was Wally Yon-amine, a Hawaiian of Nisei ancestry, who arrived in 1951, not speaking a word of Japanese. Yonamine became a fine hitter and in 1974 managed the Chunichi Dragons to a rare pennant. In the late 1950s, the Japanese teams began bringing over foreigners, often for their power and potential at the gate. Japanese fans have fond memories of George Altman, Clete Boyer, Willie Kirkland, Roy White, and the Lee brothers, Leon and Leron, who learned the customs and some of the language, but many other Americans took the money and did not try to fit in.

Some American players ran into the insularity of the Japanese culture. In 1985, Randy Bass, who had appeared in 130 major league games, approached Oh's record for home runs in a season
but Japanese pitchers blatantly walked him, not allowing the foreigner to surpass Oh, himself not considered fully Japanese. This tactic was generally accepted by the Japanese people.

The first player to come to the American major leagues was Masanori Murakami, a twenty-year-old left-hander, who was assigned by the Nankai Hawks to the San Francisco Giants' system in 1964 as an experiment to see what he could learn from American teachers. Murakami did so well that the Giants promoted him from their Fresno farm team to the majors in September. He pitched effectively for the Giants in 1965 but the Hawks forced him to return after a legal battle in 1966. After a long career, Murakami became a broadcaster in Japan.

No other Japanese players crossed the Pacific for several decades, but then some established pitchers became restive with their highly restrictive contracts in Japan. In 1995, Hideo Nomo declared free agency and won 13, losing only 6, with the Dodgers, paving the way for other pitchers. After that, several of Japan's top hitters, including Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui, also came over, with great success, covered by a phalanx of Japanese reporters in every city in North America.

Through television, newspapers, and the Internet, Japanese fans became extremely knowledgeable about American baseball, investing some of their scant free time in news and games at odd hours from Seattle and New York and other American cities. Japanese players negotiated seven-year limits on their contracts and began to count the years until they could try their skills in North America. Some fans began to forsake their old teams, producing lower attendance and a few shifts of established franchises as well as labor un-rest—all signs that baseball in Japan would never quite be the same.

That Japanese fans bought into American ways was evident in 2000 when the Chicago Cubs and New York Mets opened their regular season with a two-game series in the Tokyo Dome. The Mets' manager, Bobby Valentine, who had previously managed the Chiba Lotte Marines, was widely popular because he had learned to speak passable Japanese. In an official American game in Tokyo, with first base open, Valentine ordered his pitcher to intentionally
walk Sammy Sosa, the Cubs' slugger. Normally, Japanese fans do not boo strategic moves by managers because that would violate the code of respect for authority, but the fans who had paid their way into the Tokyo Dome were hip enough to know that in the States a manager can be booed for avoiding a power hitter like Sosa. The fans let loose a chorus of boos, albeit with no malicious overtones. It was “American night” at the ballpark.

Valentine later returned to Chiba as manager, downplaying some of the accepted Japanese traditions like long drills before every game and having pitchers throw almost every day. In 2005 he brought along an American friend as promotions manager, his pal even bouncing around the ballpark in a mascot uniform to entertain the fans. Valentine's dashing ways led the Marines to a four-game sweep of the Japanese series. Having managed the Mets in the 2000 World Series, Valentine then called for a true “world series” between the North American and Japanese champions.

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