Category Archives: baseball

Like the other states, the Northern Territory had played baseball informally for many years before joining the national competition. Japanese fisherman and, later, American servicemen were first to play the game there. Organized baseball in the Northern Territory started in 1953 through the efforts of Charles Se Kee, a leading citizen of the Darwin Chinese community and president of the Darwin Basketball Association. Northern Territory baseball was limited to far-flung Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine, and Tennant Creek….

Darwin baseball began humbly with a competition among four teams. Equipment was expensive and difficult to obtain. While there were enough teams for a decent competition, lack of adequate facilities was a major problem. One player remembers: “We didn’t have any baseball diamonds. We had the old Darwin Oval, used as an area for public functions. In those days there was no grass on the field, and it was just dirt and rock. We had to paint the lines. We didn’t have lime in those days. It didn’t matter because there was no grass. We played on the oval with a cliff behind us, and any foul balls would probably go off into the sea. The games were held up while we got kids to go down and try to find the ball.” From its beginning baseball in Darwin was played at the wrong time of year, during the wet season from 1 October to the end of March. Darwin Baseball League tried a supplementary dry season competition in 1956, playing at Coonawarra Oval with moderate success. Subsequent supplementary dry season play was attempted in 1964-68 but was dropped in favor of wet season competition, which players supported [probably so they could keep playing cricket during the dry season–J.]. As baseball became more competitive, though, Darwin changed permanently to dry season baseball in 1984.

SOURCE: A History of Australian Baseball: Time and Game, by Joe Clark (U. Nebraska Press, 2003), pp. 78-79

1930s:

The Claxton Shield [national baseball competition] was inaugurated without fanfare at the 1934 carnival in Adelaide. Held between 4 and 11 August 1934, the first series was won by South Australia.

Shortly before the second Claxton Shield, a Japanese team visited Sydney as part of the Japanese Training Squadron. New South Wales played their representative Claxton Shield side against this team and won 9-2. As the other leading baseball nation of the world besides the United States, Japan was highly regarded by Australian baseballers. The Australians made numerous efforts to play visiting Japanese sides and recruit Japanese residents into Australian teams. Japan reciprocated this support, with the Japanese consul general sponsoring the Sydney first-grade competition, to be known as the Nippon Cup, the most significant trophy in New South Wales baseball to date.

1950s:

In 1954, nine years after the end of hostilities against Japan, the ABC [Australian Baseball Council] arranged for a Japanese baseball team called the Tokyo Giants to tour Australia. Prime Minister Robert Menzies gave assurances that the tour would proceed without hindrance or incident, but he did not count on the powerful Returned Serviceman’s League (RSL), who had objected to the tour from the outset. Nor did the Japanese team improve their standing with the RSL by arriving in Australia on Remembrance Day, 11 November. The visitors defeated the Queensland team 10-1 before only five hundred spectators. Three easy victories over Sydney teams were followed by the first “test” against Australia on 17 November. This test proved the most exciting game of the tour, with the score tied 8-8 after ten innings. The Giants would score 6 runs in the eleventh inning to win the game.

Traveling to Canberra for games on 19 and 21 November, the Japanese met Prime Minister Menzies, along with his minister for the interior, Kent Hughes, a former prisoner of the Japanese. Both warmly welcomed the visitors. Tokyo’s schedule had included games in Melbourne and Perth, but relentless pressure from the RSL forced the cancellation of the rest of the Australian tour.

SOURCE: A History of Australian Baseball: Time and Game, by Joe Clark (U. Nebraska Press, 2003), pp. 53, 64

It’s not surprising that Australia has its own particular Strain of baseball jargon. Here’s a sampling.

• “BALLS OUT!” – called by umpire to tell fielding side to throw practice balls back into the dugout as the inning is about to start.
• BLUE – Umpire, because of blue umpire’s uniform, even used when the umpire is not wearing blue. Victorian Baseball Association umpire, Greg Howard, has the car number plates “HEYBLU”!
• DEAD – Out, as in “How many dead, Blue?” “Two dead”.
• FOUR – colloquial reference to home plate. Only used in context of game situation though, as in “Look at Four! Look at Four!” from the third base coach to a runner running full speed into third, or “Four! Four!! Four!!!” from a catcher calling for a throw with a runner going home.
• HOOKIE – Left handed batter, announced as “Hookie!” or by swallowing the first consonant ” ‘ookeeeee!”. Called by fielding side so outfielders can shift to the right side.
• LOADED BASES – Bases Loaded. (Australian baseballers always place the adjective first here).
• SIDE (Batting or fielding) – possibly a cricket term, referring to “the fielding side” (defence) or “the batting side” (offence).
• SIDE – Called by the umpire to indicate three outs have been made in a half inning and it is time to swap from offence to defence and vice versa.
• “TIME AND GAME!” – Most Australian club games are timed, usually two hours or less. When a timed game is over, the umpire yells “Time and game!”. Mixed reactions are predictable when this is yelled, from jubilation by the winners to painful shrieks of ‘C’mon, Blue!?!” and other prevarications by the losers who may feel unjustly denied their right to try and win.

The Australian Baseball History website contains a fuller list.

In 1888, an American baseball player and businessman set out to promote baseball across the Anglosphere.

The Spalding Tour was the event which brought baseball to Australia. It introduced the nation to the game that seemed forever destined to live in the shadow of cricket. It was big and brash, expensive and lavish – the Spalding Tour was all of the things that other nations expected of Americans. Albert Spalding (1850-1915) had been a successful baseball player during the formative years of the sport. By the time of his famous tour, he was a team owner, a baseball entrepreneur and a sporting goods businessman. According to the English-born baseball journalist, Henry Chadwick, the Spalding Tour of 1888 was the “great event in the modern history of athletic sports”

As a leading player and later, manager, Spalding was so convinced that the world would turn to baseball that he took the entire Boston team to England in 1874. He gained some support there for the sport, even a match at Lord’s. This baseball tour also had the distinction of beating a top rated cricket team at cricket. The English were polite but reserved in their enthusiasm for the new American game.

This Spalding tour did not yield any profits but it did introduce the game overseas. Spalding remained committed to encourage future tours. He later reflected upon the England Tour of 1874 in his Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide of 1890. Here he noted that attempt to introduce baseball to England was a failure. Several years later, after the Spalding Tour had visited England in March 1889, this view was still accurate. Indeed, the British press made this dubious assessment of baseball:

“The pitcher seems to have it all his own way … there is an extraordinary amount of “work” on the ball. The result is that the unfortunate batsman, be he ever so skilful, makes but a lame and feeble display … the odds against him are so great that our English love of fair play is offended … For this reason, baseball will never be popular in England.”

Spalding always denied he was trying to displace cricket in Britain and Australia. He only wanted to make it “one of the kindred field sports of the country. The reader cannot help but think that Spalding was showing his true feelings when he noted: “Baseball is a sport for the masses, cricket for the leisure classes. Baseball takes 2-3 hours, cricket takes 2-3 days. Spalding also was concerned that, with the development of team sports, there seemed to be few sports in common between the major English speaking countries such as Canada, America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

SOURCE: Time and Game: The History of Australian Baseball, by Joe Clark (U. Nebraska Press, 2003), online edition, chapter 1

Bobby Valentine, manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines (and nicely profiled by Japundit), sounds just a bit pumped up after seeing his team take the Japan Series in 4 straight games, outscoring the Hanshin Tigers by 33 to 4. The Asahi Shimbun reports his challenge to both Japanese and North American pro baseball.

NISHINOMIYA, Hyogo Prefecture–Bobby Valentine is nothing if not ambitious.

The 55-year-old manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines issued a challenge Wednesday to the winner of the World Series: “Let’s do battle in a real World Series.”

Valentine, who on Wednesday became the first foreigner to manage a team to a Japan Series title, says the level of play in Japan has risen to that in North America and the time has come for a best-of-seven series between the Japanese champions and the World Series champions….

The Marines swept the Tigers in four games to claim their first championship in 31 years. Valentine says his club has what it takes to compete against either of this year’s World Series combatants, the Chicago White Sox and the Houston Astros.

“(Lotte) is as good a team as I’ve ever managed,” Valentine said. “I don’t like to rate the teams I’ve managed, but it compares very favorably to the teams playing in the World Series.

“The White Sox have a little more power than us, but so did Softbank [Hawks] and so did Seibu [Lions],” he added, referring to the two teams the Marines beat in the Pacific League playoffs.

“The only reason I am saying this is because I am the only person to have managed in both the World Series and the Japan Series,” Valentine said. “I’ve watched our guys all year and I’ve watched the two teams in the World Series on TV and the level is equal. The competition would be great, it’s time to do battle.”

The Japan Times adds more player reaction.

Valentine’s players also think a champion-versus-champion showdown would be beneficial.

“I would like to play against the major league champions,” said Lotte pitcher Hiroyuki Kobayashi, the winning pitcher in Game 3 of the Japan Series. “The (Chicago) White Sox have home-run hitters with (Paul) Konerko and (Joe) Crede. Some matchups would be more problematic,” Kobayashi admitted.

Former Fukuoka Daiei Hawks star Tadahito Iguchi, now with the White Sox, would worry Kobayashi more than anyone, he said.

“He hit me pretty good,” Kobayashi said. “I faced him enough.”

According to Lotte outfielder Benny Agbayani, who played for Valentine’s New York Mets in the 2000 World Series, the biggest winners if such a series were to take place would be the fans.

Jack Gallagher reports in the Japan Times on the quick demise of the once-brash upstart Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. (I prefer to call them the Igloos, which sounds much the same in Japanese.)

Last fall, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles emerged on the Japanese pro baseball scene as the first expansion team in 50 years and optimism abounded that a new era in the game had dawned.

The Eagles hired the first non-Japanese general manager ever in American Marty Kuehnert, then brought rookie manager Yasushi Tao out of the television booth to lead the team.

They marketed the club like it had never been done before here.

The term “fan service” was actually brought into the lexicon and seemed certain to have an impact on how pro baseball teams in Japan treated their supporters.

These moves were definitely not out of the traditional Japan pro baseball textbook and had the establishment feeling a bit uncomfortable, to say the least.

Eagles owner Hiroshi Mikitani seemed to be the face of the future. A 38-year-old business magnate who was determined to drag the game into the 21st century.

But, lo and behold, a funny thing happened on the way to changing history.

The more time passed, the more the Eagles began to look like the other 11 franchises in Nippon Pro Baseball….

[T]he team did not enjoy the benefit of an expansion draft — where they could choose players from the existing NPB teams — like new franchises do in Major League Baseball.

No, the Eagles were constructed almost entirely from the leftovers of the merger between the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Orix BlueWave.

The only two true stars the team had were ace pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma and outfielder Koichi Isobe, who refused to play for the Orix Buffaloes — the team created by the merger.

The results were predictable.

The Eagles finished their inaugural season with a record of 38-97-1, the worst mark in the NPB in 40 years.

Read the whole sorry story, if you have any interest in Japanese baseball.

UPDATE: And here’s another sad story by Gallagher about the nasty treatment of foreigners by Japan’s sports media.

Canada.com carries an AP report on Game 2 of the Japan Series.

TOKYO (AP) – Saburo Omura, Matt Franco and Lee Seung-yeop all homered in the sixth inning Sunday, leading Bobby Valentine’s Chiba Lotte Marines to a 10-0 win over the Hanshin Tigers in Game 2 of the Japan Series.

The Marines, bidding for their first Japan Series title in 31 years, take a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven championships.

After scoring single runs in the first two innings, the Marines blew the game open in the sixth with five runs.

Read that lede once again, savoring the names as they stumble off your tongue. Okay, now let’s compare the AP lede for Game 2 of the World Series in frosty Chicago.

CHICAGO Oct 24, 2005 — Scott Podsednik made it two electrifying home runs for the White Sox and two World Series wins. Podsednik’s home run off Brad Lidge in the ninth inning gave Chicago a thrilling 7-6 victory over the Houston Astros on Sunday night and put the White Sox halfway to their first World Series title in 88 years.

“I don’t think anyone in the ballpark was thinking about me hitting the ball out of the ballpark,” Podsednik said.

After yet another questionable umpiring call, Paul Konerko capped a momentous week with a seventh-inning grand slam on reliever Chad Qualls’ first pitch, giving the White Sox a 6-4 lead and sparking the crowd of 41,432 to life on a drizzly, dreary night.

A few old-fashioned MLB names there.

Just to rub it in, here’s a 2004 profile of the White Sox by the Yankeecentric YESNetwork‘s Steven Goldman.

THE BEST: Nothing. Okay, Paul Konerko, maybe Aaron Rowand, Shingo Takatsu.

THE WORST: A random starting rotation — pitchers to whom consistency is a dirty word, an outfield without much pop, a manager who thinks he’s living in the dead ball era. To be more specific, Orlando Hernandez won’t feel up to making a third of his starts, Jose Contreras will run up the white flag like he thinks the French Foreign Legion is attacking. Trading for Scott Posednik is risking getting exactly what you think you need, and Ozzie Guillen apparently slept through his entire career, which involved increasing numbers of baseballs being whacked over his head.

EX-GIRLFRIEND/BOYFRIEND: The one whose vanity far outweighed any realistic appraisal of their charms.

FINISH: Fourth in the Central.

And here’s YESNetwork contributor Will Weiss rubbing it in, too.

World Series showcases what could have been

Jose Contreras and Roger Clemens will start Game 1 of the World Series Saturday night in Chicago, Andy Pettitte will start Game 2 for the Houston Astros, and lurking in the Chicago White Sox’ bullpen is Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez.

And the Yankees will be watching them on TV like every other baseball fan.

Following Contreras’s complete-game, pennant-clinching victory for the White Sox in Anaheim, numerous message board threads on YESNetwork.com and other Yankeecentric Web sites popped up about the possibility of Contreras, El Duque, Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens squaring off in the World Series. The Astros’ win in Game 6 of the NLCS in St. Louis made that notion a reality (Pettitte stood as the winning pitcher in Game 5, until Albert Pujols’ monster shot sent the series back to Busch Stadium).

Yankees fans have every right to stew at the fact that what could have been 80 percent of the 2004 rotation will have a say in who wins the World Series, albeit for teams not bearing an interlocking NY on their caps. A majority of fans might look at the postseason performances of Contreras, El Duque, Clemens and Pettitte, and the way they led the White Sox and Astros to the World Series and say, “This figures.” In Contreras’s case, countless fans said, “Where did this come from?”

Game 1 of the Japan Series was called in the seventh inning on account of fog, but the Chiba Lotte Marines were given the win because they were ahead 10-1 at the time. The Japan Times reports:

The game was interrupted by fog in the seventh inning as umpires pulled players off the field after Benny Agbayani’s two-run homer.

Almost 40 minutes later, home plate umpire Minoru Nakamura called the game.

Lotte’s Tomoya Satozaki, Agbayani and Lee Seung Yeop all homered, and Saburo Omura doubled in a pair of runs for the victors….

“It was too bad we didn’t get to play nine innings,” Lotte manager Bobby Valentine said. “[Starting pitcher] Shimizu was fantastic.”

Lotte’s powerful offense had little trouble putting runs on the board, as the Marines reached base in every inning.

Starting with the bottom of the fifth, Lotte scored in three straight innings, taking control of the game.

Good for the Marines. And good for the White Sox in the World Series. I hope Game 2 in Chicago is not called on account of snow.

UPDATE: The Japan Times also explains the frustrations of trying to keep up with either Japanese or American baseball on Japanese broadcast channels. (Frustrations other than the broadcast-channel tendency to end coverage exactly on the half-hour, even if it’s a tie game in the 9th inning with the top of the order due up to bat.)

This is 2005, the 21st century, the age of cable and satellite and, if you are a baseball fan looking to see the games live, but you don’t have extra-terrestrial reception capability, it is going to get worse.

Probably, within a few years, fewer and fewer games will be telecast on the conventional channels, and more and more will be on cable or satellite.

But, to look at it from the opposite angle, it is going to get better. It has gotten better. A lot better.

Go back about 25 years, and all we got on TV throughout Japan were the Tokyo Giants games, home and road, picked up an hour into the game and usually cut off long before the final out was recorded.

Today, if you have the right systems, you can get all six Japan pro baseball games any day of the season, from the first pitch all the way through the hero interview, even if the game goes 12 innings or five hours.

We can also get two or three MLB games per day during the season, all the playoff games and the World Series, live and in English.

What more do you want?

Japundit‘s JP blogs the Korean Baseball Organization’s latest attempt to clean up its act: by banning performance-enhancing cabbage! Apparently, Babe Ruth used to get away with a similar practice.