The Arm (22 page)

It took an enormous amount of trust in the Diamondbacks' front office for Hudson to sign what amounted to a handshake deal. He didn't dwell on losing his roster spot. He emphasized the positive parts of staying with the Diamondbacks. Ken Crenshaw, his trainer, knew him and his arm better than anyone anywhere else. Kirk Gibson trusted him. Kevin Towers believed in him. Hudson's name came up often among Diamondbacks personnel, even after the second surgery, and Towers's right-hand man, Bob Gebhard, had a specific role for Hudson in mind. “Gebby thinks he's our next closer,” Towers said. “He's got the mentality. He's
got the stuff. How hard would he throw if he had one inning?”

Pitchers couldn't dodge executives' desire for velocity, though in this case, Hudson refused to argue with anything asked of him. Time was beating the stubbornness out of him. Hudson progressed from five minutes at forty-five feet the first week to six minutes from sixty the second. “I wanted to stretch it out,” Hudson said, “but they didn't want me to, and so I have to listen to them.”

On December 13, 2013, Hudson officially re-signed with the Diamondbacks. He would earn $700,000 in 2014 and $800,000 if Arizona exercised his 2015 option. For now, it allayed the fear that paralyzed him over the summer and gave him good reason to stop looking at old emails. He wasn't making millions. And that was OK.

“Sara tells me all the time, ‘If you had tried at all, you could have been anything you wanted to be, you know?'” Hudson said. “I didn't want to do anything but be a baseball player. That's all I ever wanted to do.”

N
O ONE CALLED. THE EARLY
start and the bad body and especially the velocity at his showcase imprinted Todd Coffey with the very label he wanted to avoid: done, just another guy scraping to hold on to whatever little life remained in his arm. When Rick Thurman didn't hear from a single team, he reached out to all fourteen that sent scouts and heard the same things.

Philadelphia said his arm looked slow. Atlanta had him at 86–90. Miami thought his slider was fringy. Seattle was iffy. Tampa Bay figured he needed more time to get in shape. Scott Reid from Detroit wondered whether he might take a minor league deal. Even if he would've, the Tigers never offered it.

“I shouldn't have had the showcase,” Coffey said. It was March 6, six weeks later. He was guilty again of not listening to his arm.

Following the showcase, Coffey had flown to Fort Lauderdale,
Florida, and met ElAttrache to figure out why his arm had locked up. Coffey guessed he had popped through scar tissue, and ElAttrache agreed. There was no structural damage. Following the Tommy John and flexor and bone-chip surgeries, cells rich in collagen—the most common protein in the human body—rushed to surround the inflamed area. The cells weave together to form scar tissue, the body's attempt to buttress injured areas. What scar tissue brings in stability it lacks in malleability, and its loosening—through manual therapy or, in Coffey's case, blunt manual force—is painful and temporarily inhibits range of motion.

Coffey wasn't a pussy or weak or any of the other flaws he feared others saw in him. He was shortsighted, proud, stubborn, the holy trinity for pitchers. At an event held specifically to show teams he was healthy, he had pitched hurt.

“It's happened to all of us,” Cy Young winner Max Scherzer said. “It's happened to me before. You're trying to compete out there. You think you can keep going. And you can't. The toughest thing to do is to say, ‘I can't pitch. I can't go. I can't give you an extra inning.' That's something I've gotten good at. I know my arm. I know when the situation dictates I'm not going to be at my best. You've got to learn how to do that.”

At thirty-three, Coffey still hadn't, and because of it he was back in Rutherfordton, joining Michael Melton for a morning workout, throwing to David Mendez in the afternoon, following spring training from afar for the second straight year. He watched games on MLB Network, wondering what some of the pitchers in camps had that he didn't. His sinker climbed back to 91 miles per hour just that week.

Nothing broke Coffey's outward optimism. Whether he was trying to write his own truth wasn't the point. Coffey didn't have a job, didn't have any prospects, didn't have the stuff he needed—and he continued to believe anyway. That's what the fat seventeen-year-old kid from North Carolina did. The moment Coffey stopped, he let Eric Cooper win.

“How many years does he have left to play?” Jennifer wondered. “He has to be precise and particular and so careful. One more thing goes wrong, and he's done.” She never said this to him. And even if she did, he would've swatted it away like a gnat in the summer. Coffey spent his days straddling the not-so-bright line between optimism and self-delusion.

“Every week, we've gained a consistent mile to two,” he said. “This week, we've gained a consistent one. If the strength continues to build like it is, next Thursday we'll hit ninety-two, maybe a ninety-three. Do another week, and hopefully it's ninety-three. Hopefully in the next ten to fourteen days do another showcase.”

In the next ten to fourteen days, he did not do another showcase. Opening Day passed, another season beginning without him. He was out of sight and out of mind. Coffey kept catching games on TV—Atlanta and Cleveland and Pittsburgh, all teams that had shown interest in the past. As he watched a reliever blow a lead one night, he sighed: “I could get outs with the stuff I have today.”

Maybe it would be in the United States, and maybe he'd go halfway across the world. Every player on the sport's fringe at least considers the idea. Hudson and one of his best friends in baseball, Chicago White Sox catcher Tyler Flowers, had discussed the game's capriciousness, how it glorifies players one day and discards them the next. They know their careers in the major leagues could suddenly end anytime. And if that happened, they agreed, they'd consider seeking redemption together in Japan, a culture that reveres baseball even more than that of the United States and pays its stars millions. It was the kind of thing they discussed after a good meal and a few drinks, with their wives nodding along, happy to oblige their husbands' fantasies of Japan and sushi and being a
gaijin
—foreign player—in Nippon Professional Baseball.

In the spring of 2014, as positivity clashed with reality, it was something Coffey considered for a few moments before discard
ing the thought. He enjoyed his creature comforts: the glow of American TV late at night, the taste of American food. He wanted to play baseball but feared that the culture clash might be too strong.

“Japan,” Coffey said, “is a whole different world.”

O
UTSIDE THE BARN, THE OLD
man smiled. He could hear the soundtrack of his life around the corner in his makeshift baseball facility. The grunts of teenage boys. The metal pipes thwacking golf balls. The whip-crack of baseball meeting glove. Everything unfolded with militaristic precision on this, the 212th consecutive day of practice, with another 148 in a row left before year's end. The old man didn't bother craning his neck toward the two dozen kids inside. He didn't need to see to know exactly what was happening.

“Baseball in Japan is called
yakyu
,” the old man, Masanori Joko, said. “There is a saying that yakyu can explain life. How much you can be patient in the moment and make good use of those moments in life. Even a little pitch can become a big moment. It's important to find those bad moments to save the other experi
ences. The good moment, even though it's a little good moment, it can connect to a very big moment. You can learn how to connect those little chunks to the better moment. You can say that in life and in baseball.”

I came to Japan to learn about yakyu and life and the most fascinating baseball culture in the world, one that holds the arm sacred. Few embodied the spirit of yakyu like Joko. He was sixty-seven years old, with tan skin, sunken eyes, and a full head of graying hair. Even when angry, Joko smiled. He grew up here, the seaside town of Matsuyama, on the smallest of the Japanese islands, Shikoku, and moved back after his wife died of cancer. If he couldn't be with her, he would be with his children.

That's what he called the boys of the Saibi High School baseball team. They made him famous throughout Japan. Every spring and summer, teams around the country travel to Nishinomiya, just outside Kobe, to participate in the national high school baseball tournament at Koshien Stadium, the country's most sacred sporting grounds. For nearly a century, Koshien has hosted twice-annual championships that marry the interest of the NFL, the urgency of the NCAA basketball tournament, and the parochialism of the World Cup. Baseball is Japan's greatest athletic passion, and high school baseball is its purest incarnation.

Saibi reached the finals of Spring Koshien in 2013, thanks to a boy named Tomohiro Anraku. The V-shaped brim of his Saibi cap was the only youthful thing about him. At sixteen, he was noticeably bigger than the other kids, his shoulders so wide that his arms had the stubby appearance of a T. rex's. At Koshien, almost every team chooses its best pitcher and rides him the entire tournament. For Anraku, that meant a nine-day span in which he pitched five games and threw 772 pitches.

This number became famous in Japan and notorious elsewhere. The number 772 symbolized a cultural chasm as wide as the Pacific Ocean. “This is child abuse,” said Don Nomura, a longtime agent to top Japanese players.

In Japan, the public crowned Anraku
kaibutsu—
literally, the monster. No finer compliment exists for a baseball player. Only the most fearsome pitchers at Koshien earn the sobriquet. It's not just about dominance or achievement; it's mound presence and intimidation and the core principle of yakyu, fighting spirit, a combination of desire and will. In the United States, Anraku was seen as the latest victim of an anachronistic system that treats arms with reckless disregard. Any coach who dared misuse a teenager's arm to that degree was either stupid, crazy, or both.

“I don't regret it at all,” Joko said. He believed in the power of yakyu to make better people. Whatever pain a player felt in practice, it would prepare him for worse pain in life. However dreadful a loss felt, it would train him to better handle the inevitability of true loss.

It's why his children took three hundred swings before workouts and another seven hundred over the course of daily practices that drag on for twelve hours, why their white uniforms were dirtied dark by the end of the day. “Japanese players have less stamina than American,” Joko said, so he put them through a drill he named the Saibi Circuit, with lunges and squat thrusts and leg lifts and modified jumping jacks and faux push-ups, all on the sandy, brown-black field.

Joko barked orders. He needed to play aggressor and protector, to be the ultimate
kantoku
—the manager, not just of his team but of traditions and expectations threatened by the vigorous creep of American baseball philosophy. He lived for this. It was the perfect introduction for the next ten days, when I flew around Japan and tried to comprehend what Joko did a year earlier.

In the last game of the 2013 Spring Koshien, Anraku pitched for the third consecutive day and the fourth time in five days. His fastball, which sizzled at 94 miles per hour in his first game, wafted in at 80 miles per hour in the finals. Saibi lost 17–1.

Anraku cried. Then he apologized to Joko.

T
WO HUNDRED FIFTY MILES FROM
Matsuyama, in a manufacturing town called Koryo best known for its knit socks, a man named Hirokazu Tatsuta peeled away from his small house at two a.m. in an eight-ton truck stocked with three hundred bags of flour to deliver across the country. After he quit smoking, these rides felt a lot longer.

I met Hirokazu in Koryo at the end of his fourteen-hour shift. I wanted to ask about his son Shota. Hirokazu used to take young Shota on some of his shorter trips in the truck. Mostly they talked about baseball. Even in elementary school, Shota towered over the other kids, and Hirokazu tried to nurture the size advantage. They started running together when Shota was in second grade. They played catch daily, after school, when Hirokazu's shift ended. When Shota was nine or ten, he felt pain searing through his elbow, and Hirokazu figured it was the proper time to tell him a story.

Once upon a time, he was a good pitcher. He threw and threw and threw, hundreds of pitches a day. And then after one throw, he felt a pop in his shoulder. It was his last pitch. Without baseball, he didn't know what he wanted to do, so he started driving trucks and never stopped.

Shota didn't understand the moral. It was his dad's job, and that's all he knew, and he was too young to judge, too sweet to fathom his father's regret. And it stayed that way until a team in junior high school rode Shota to a youth tournament title and his elbow barked again.

This time, Hirokazu skipped the parable. “I told my son that you, not the team, have to take care of your arm,” Hirokazu said, “and do whatever you need to do.”

Thus began Hirokazu's grand experiment, one that would challenge the many institutions of Japanese baseball. Shota Tatsuta would not pitch every game. He would not participate in marathon sessions of
nagekomi
, the daily throwing in order
to perfect mechanics that some Japanese players bastardized into marathon sessions of one hundred–, two hundred–, even three hundred–plus pitches. He would not kowtow to a system that left his father hauling product for a living. He would not fall prey to the yakyu ideals that evolved over more than a century after a visiting American professor named Horace Wilson introduced baseball to the country in the early 1870s.

About twenty years later, after a prep school team beat a group of Americans living in Japan, baseball's popularity surged. Japan wanted its own style, one that borrowed from other aspects of its culture. A college coach named Suisha Tobita stressed Bushido, the way of the samurai, virtue-laden and intense. He put players through
shi no renshu—
death training. If they didn't puke and piss blood, they were slacking.

Generations passed down the same tenets, an endowment that practice, repetition, and training ensure success. It's why, after his elbow started hurting in 1981, star pitcher Choji Murata kept throwing, ignoring the advice of his doctors and the wishes of his wife. She told him to stop. He refused, and when excessive throwing didn't cure his issues, he tried acupuncture and massage instead. She told him to go to Los Angeles, meet Frank Jobe, and get Tommy John surgery. He refused.

“A man should pitch until his arm falls off,” Murata said.

This is the culture that Shota and Hirokazu Tatsuta—a teenaged boy and his dad from a place with a sign that reads “Welcome to Socks Town”—vowed to fight. Despite shunning the customs that surrounded him, Shota was one of the best amateur pitchers in the country, his fastball sometimes hitting 90 miles per hour, his arm seemingly healthy. Skepticism still accompanied every pitch he threw. It's not like the American way worked, either. All their science and pitch counts and babying amounted to what? More elbow injuries than ever? And
that's
a system worth following? Hirokazu asked himself those questions. He never pretended to know much about biomechanics. He didn't know what valgus
stress was. He just knew what an open road looked like and didn't want his son to end up staring at it every day because he refused to question institutional stubbornness.

“I might be the last hope of the family,” Shota said. “If I become successful, my family becomes glad at my success, and I can make my family happier.”

Rather than leave home for one of the private schools that recruited him, Shota chose to attend Yamato-Koryo High School, a five-minute walk from his home. Hirokazu went to Yamato-Koryo, too, and Shota wanted to do what his father never could: carry the school to its first Koshien.

“I'm sure my father is actually hoping I can achieve his dreams as well,” Shota said. “I am pursuing this career for myself and for my father, because he's been with me for all of the time. This is what I am.”

I
HOPPED OFF THE TRAIN AT
Shibuya Station, a gateway to the splendor of Tokyo, to meet one of the country's most famous baseball players. Shibuya spills into the busiest intersection in the world, and at one corner sits a statue of a dog named Hachiko. He was an Akita with a gorgeous golden coat and a droopy left ear. Every day, Hachiko walked from his home to Shibuya Station in Tokyo to meet his master, a professor named Hidesaburo Ueno. In 1925, a cerebral hemorrhage killed Ueno. That did not stop Hachiko. For the next nine years, nine months, and fifteen days, all the way to his death, Hachiko trundled to Shibuya Station at the same time every evening, waiting for Ueno to come off his train, only to turn around and return home when he didn't arrive.

Of the seven Bushido virtues, loyalty may well reign supreme, and I wanted to ask Daisuke Araki whether he remained loyal when the culture that gave him everything also took so much of it away. One glance at Araki and it was easy to see why an entire nation of girls once swooned over him. At fifty, he is still
that annoying kind of handsome, effortlessly so, with black hair parted down the middle and a square jaw. He can at least go out in public now with only a mild fear of recognition. When Araki was fifteen, he needed an army of friends to encircle him from female admirers when he stepped outside, as well as from TV cameras and writers, all frothing for a little piece of a boy who just wanted to play baseball.

Daisuke Araki wasn't like
a
Beatle. He was John, Paul, George,
and
Ringo. Of the many stars in the 1984 combined Spring and Summer Koshien contests, perhaps none enraptured Japan like Araki. He pitched in five consecutive Koshien tournaments, the most possible for a high schooler. He stood atop the mound and felt it rumble. This wasn't like the Little League World Series, where he had pitched a few years earlier. Whistles and chants and claps echo at Koshien. Cheerleaders and spirit squads and parents bellow. Sellout crowds of forty-eight thousand fill the stadium daily. People from nearby Kobe and Osaka, people from far-flung Hokkaido and Kyushu, people from everywhere get together to celebrate baseball, which might as well be a celebration of Japan.

“For me, Koshien is a kind of a religious place,” Araki said. “I just think, ‘Can I put my feet on the mound?' My foot was shaking.”

Araki pitched his school, Waseda Jitsugyo, to the Summer Koshien finals in 1980. The invitation-only Spring Koshien welcomed him the next two years, and his school earned two more Summer Koshien berths through regional tournaments. Araki turned into a viral phenomenon before such things existed. Legions of new fans tuned in to watch him pitch that first year, including an eight-months-pregnant Tokyo woman named Yumiko Matsuzaka. Like thousands of other mothers across Japan over the next two years, she would name her son Daisuke.

Eighteen years later, on August 20, 1998, Daisuke Matsuzaka found himself on the mound for a semifinal game at Summer Koshien. Long before the Boston Red Sox spent more than
$100 million on his rights, Matsuzaka was best known for a high school game. He threw seventeen innings that day, willed himself to 250 pitches, a kaibutsu personified
.
The performance sounds mythical. It is not. Koshien invites it. Bring all of your arms, your strong, your weak, and let them compete. Let courage and respect and sincerity and righteousness and benevolence and honor and loyalty, the Bushido code, guide them. And hope for a year like 2006, when a boy named Masahiro Tanaka reached the Koshien finals and lost after throwing 742 pitches. Yuki Saito, like Araki of Waseda Jitsugyo, was nicknamed the Handkerchief Prince because of the cloth he kept in his back pocket to dab his face. He won Koshien when he struck out Tanaka on his 948th pitch of the tournament.

“I can't say abuse, but that's too much,” Araki told me. “Even to Japanese baseball players. That's one reason why Koshien fans get so excited. But this is time to make better for the future. We have already lost a lot of good prospects at Koshien. All of the baseball people think that because we have Koshien, we produce the best pitchers. But now there are some people who have different opinion, like me.”

Araki put his coffee down and flipped his palm to reveal the underside of his right arm. A jagged scar cut across his elbow. The pain started in 1988, when he was twenty-four. He met with Japanese doctors. All of them told him it was tendinitis. He rested for a month. His elbow still hurt. So he went to the United States and met with Frank Jobe.