Category Archives: baseball

Japundit contributor Ampontan has a wonderfully informative series about Japan’s baseball revolution from below that erupted last year. Of course, the baseball revolution reflects changes in the larger society as well. I’ll excerpt pieces from each of Ampontan’s installments. Even if you’re not that interested in Japanese baseball, the whole story illustrates how much Japanese society has been changing during the economic doldrums.

No Joy in Mudville

Last year at this time, it seemed as if Japanese baseball was teetering on the edge of a precipice, doomed to collapse in a heap of splendid splinters. Reaching the tipping point would have resulted in a plunge in popularity and prestige, relegating the sport to irrelevance as its best players fled to the United States, taking fan interest with them. Instead, a mass movement by the fans and a player strike enthusiastically supported by the same fans saved Japanese baseball from itself and even put it in a position where it can thrive in the future.

The Old World Teeters

Confronted by declining attendance caused by factors that included a poor economy, competition from a professional soccer league, and the flight of its top stars to the United States, the old guard of Japanese baseball, led by Yomiuri owner Tsuneo Watanabe (photo with cigar), came up with some self-serving solutions. They decided to merge the two Kansai area teams in the Pacific League with poor fan support, push for the merger of two other Pacific League teams, and convert Japanese baseball to a single 10-team league….

In the Japan of just 10 years ago, this plan probably would have gone through. But the old guard had not foreseen what would happen next: no one else liked the plan–not the fans and not the players–and this time they were prepared to do something about it….

The [players’] union handled their opposition to the merger brilliantly. Not only did they back the fans’ movement, winning their support and sympathy, but they appeared calm and rational in contrast to Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), Japanese baseball’s ruling body. The union submitted a list of demands that baseball officials rejected. These included postponing the merger, forming a special committee to discuss merger issues, and allowing Kintetsu to sell naming rights, which the league also had dismissed without seeming to give the idea serious consideration….

That’s when Yomiuri owner Watanabe made his second mistake, and perhaps the biggest mistake of his career. Asked what he thought about the players’ opposition to the merger, he sneered, “Taka ga senshu.” (They’re nothing more than players, after all.) Watanable couldn’t possibly have chosen three more ill-advised words. The condescension oozing from this comment not only summed up the attitude of the owners toward their employees, the players, but encapsulated their belief that sole authority for the course of Japanese baseball resided with them, regardless of how it affected their employees and on-field performers, and the consumers, or the fans. In fact, it symbolized perfectly the attitude of the power structure in the old Japan.

Strike One

The Japanese players’ union felt so strongly, they threatened to hold a baseball strike, which had never happened in Japan before. They had collected 1.2 million signatures from Japanese baseball fans to prevent the elimination of one team, but were given the cold shoulder by Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), the organization governing the sport….

The owners seemed intent on joining hands and walking off the cliff together. They held a meeting two days after the players voted to go on strike and formally approved the Kintetsu-Orix merger. Perhaps they thought they were calling the players’ bluff, but if so they badly misread the situation. The vote was 11-0 in favor of contraction, with the abstention of the Hiroshima Carp [my perennial underdog, old-hometown, Central League favorites]. The Hiroshima team thought it stood to lose too much fan support because of local opposition to the owners’ plan to eliminate one team….

The other Pacific League teams wanted the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks [my former Pacific League favorites], a successful and popular team with financially struggling owners, to merge with the Chiba Lotte Marines, but Daiei insisted they wanted to retain ownership of the Hawks and to keep it a separate entity.

The Dust Settles

After more than three months of preliminaries, charges, countercharges, threats of a strike, negotiations, and unnecessary turmoil caused by the owner intransigence, the weekend strike by the players caused the owners to rapidly focus on the problem. It didn’t take them long to figure out that they held a losing hand no matter how they tried to play it.

Thus, only a day or two into the negotiations following the strike, the owners quickly caved in to the players’ demands and agreed to allow a new team to be established to take the place of the one being eliminated through the Kintetsu and Orix merger….

The Sendai fans said in a survey that they wanted Livedoor instead of Rakuten to run the new franchise there, though Rakuten was thought to have more business stability. In fact, that’s why they were ultimately selected. A new team will incur losses early on, and Rakuten had the edge in in pretax profit as well as total assets and sales. The new team became known as the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, or the Rakuten Eagles for short.

Finally, the last glaring problem with Japanese baseball ownership was rectified when the league approved the purchase of the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks by Softbank Corp., an Internet service provider headed by President Masayoshi Son, an ethnic Korean. Unlike the troubled Kintetsu Buffaloes, who could not draw a million fans, the Hawks drew three million and were recent winners of the Japan Series. “My task is to make a team loved by a huge number of fans into a more decent one,” Son said at a press conference in Fukuoka.

Thus, four months after the crisis began, the hidebound element of Japanese baseball was gone in disgrace, the Kintetsu Buffaloes had merged with another team, bailing out the troubled ownership, another financially troubled owner had found a purchaser with deep pockets, and a new team was created with a young, ambitious owner….

Team ownership was relinquished by old-fashioned, old-line businesses with no ideas how to get Japanese baseball out of its downward spiral and placed in the hands of bright, young, energetic entrepreneurs from the Internet industry brimming with new ideas for the sport.

“Where’s the power?” was the question John Gunther always asked in his travelogue of mid-twentieth-century America, Inside U.S.A. In the late 1940s, the answer was often the local party machine. Power now was here, in this restaurant [Bistango, next to a Japanese bank], dispersed among many more people and much less accountable, for the issue was simply profit, disconnected from political promises or even geography. Orange County’s global corporations were merely home bases–which could be removed in an instant in response, for example, to tax increases.

“What kind of business is being transacted?” I asked. “Biomedical, pharmaceutical, genetic engineering, chips for fax machines, and all kinds of software-multimedia,” [Orange County Business Journal editor Rick] Reiff told me. “Then there are firms, big firms, that specialize in teaching English to Vietnamese, Chinese, and other Asians and Latinos. Global trade and workforces are everything for us. Orange County is roughly one percent of the U.S. population, but it has three percent of Fortune 500 companies. Every time there is a conflation of the publishing and multimedia industries, power shifts slightly to California from New York, because the future will favor multimedia over mere books.”

Later, back at Reiff’s office, I leafed through more than a hundred editions of the Business Journal and found stories about this group of Iranians or that group of Taiwanese or Pakistanis or Mexicans from Sonora buying this or that technology company. Ethnic Indians and Chinese predominated. Seeing Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Mexican faces in an Orange County computer factory owned by a Pakistani and two Chinese some years ago, Polish journalist Ryzsard Kapuscinski noted that the culture of the new workforce here “Hispanic-Catholic family values and Asian-Confucian group loyalty,” with hiring done through family networks….

“Will this place fight for its country? Are these people loyal to anything except themselves?” I asked.

“Loyalty is a problem,” Reiff said. “Only about half the baseball fans in Orange County root for the California Angels [whose stadium is in Anaheim, a county municipality]. I root for the Chicago White Sox. So many people here are from somewhere else, whether from the U.S. or the world. People came here to make money. In the future, patriotism will be more purely and transparently economic. Perhaps patriotism will survive in the form of prestige, if America remains the world economic leader.”

Rather than citizens, the inhabitants of these prosperous pods are, in truth, resident expatriates, even if they were born in America, with their foreign cuisines, eclectic tastes, exposure to foreign languages, and friends throughout the world.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 99-101

For ten days I drove throughout greater Los Angeles, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to walk in a different neighborhood. The media image of the L.A. riots and the O.J. Simpson trial had prepared me for a city as divided as Washington, D.C. But in LA., where eighty-one languages are spoken, that’s not what I found.

TAKE ZAHEER VIRJI (an alias), a twenty-seven-year-old ethnic Indian immigrant from the East African nation of Tanzania. Zaheer wore a blue velvet baseball cap, a white T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes when I met him and his American wife, Heather, in a Santa Monica hotel lobby. Zaheer’s family, which imports goods from Hong Kong to Tanzania, is part of a merchant community from the Indian subcontinent that forms the middle class in Tanzania and several other African countries. Zaheer remembers police thugs of the former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere harassing his relatives and arresting his parents. He told me that race relations are “so much better” in southern California than in Africa, where Indians and Africans completely stereotype each other. “I came here to escape not just Africans but Indians, too.” He went first to England, then to Canada, where there are large Indian communities. But he didn’t feel free. “In those places, the community is what is happening. Here in the U.S., it’s you that is happening. There is less of system here, fewer laws to restrict you.”

Zaheer came to the United States six years ago and has no college degree or green card yet. In the previous six months he had earned more investing in the stock market than his wife had made at her job, a reflection not only of his skill but of an economy where the prices of stocks and other assets have risen but wages have not. With this money, along with funds from his family in Tanzania, he was looking to a buy a business: a flower shop, a gas station, whatever he can get the best deal on. He is using a broker. If he buys a gas station, he told me, he needs to know about the underground tanks and the environmental regulations. He wants to be partners with the current owner for a three-year transition period; that way he will still keep some of his money even if the business does not turn out as advertised. Ten years from now, he explained, he wants to be the owner of a small business with good employees so he can spend his time investing the profits in the stock market. “Everything is a risk. A few years ago, to make some money, I bought a hundred and fifty tons of rice in Tanzania and sold it in Zaire. That was more risky than buying a business in Los Angeles, I can tell you.”

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 82-83

That’s the Pacific League’s Seibu Lions, of course, who dispatched the Central League’s Chunichi Dragons after 7 Games in the Japan Series.

NAGOYA (AP) Takashi Ishii went six strong innings and Alex Cabrera hit a two-run homer Monday as the Seibu Lions defeated the Chunichi Dragons 7-2 in Game 7 of the Japan Series to win their first championship since 1992.

Ishii gave up just three hits over six scoreless innings at Nagoya Dome as the Pacific League champion Lions won two straight on the road after being down three games to two in the best-of-seven series.

“I just tried to build on the momentum from yesterday’s win,” said Ishii, who finished the Japan Series with a 0.00 ERA. “It’s not often that I get to pitch in these situations. I just tried to pitch as I always do.”

It was the ninth Japan Series championship for the Lions.

The Pacific League will shrink to five teams after the highly controversial merger of the Orix Blue Wave and Kintetsu Buffalo, but help is on the way. Two Japanese internet companies are bidding to start a new team based in the northeastern city of Sendai, to be named either the Sendai Livedoor Phoenix or the Tohoku [Northeast] Rakuten Golden Eagles.

TOKYO — Internet service provider Livedoor Co, which has applied to own a professional baseball team, said Tuesday its ball club will be called Sendai Livedoor Phoenix. Livedoor conducted Internet voting to decide the name for its baseball team, with Phoenix proving the most popular among a list of 10 candidates.

Rival Internet shopping mall operator Rakuten Inc, which has also applied to own a professional ball club, on Friday named its team the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. The name Eagles was second on the list of votes for Livedoor’s team. (Kyodo News)

Oh, and congratulations to the Boston Red Sox! What can we expect next year? The Cubs vs. White Sox?

Steve Kelly of the Seattle Times reports:

For the past four seasons, baseball fans in this town have been fortunate to watch Ichiro play a kind of baseball the big leagues never have seen.

They’ve watched him get more hits in a four-year span, 921, than any player ever. They’ve seen him play the game at an entirely different speed. Watched him make the best infielders in the game jittery. Seen him turn seemingly harmless ground balls into base hits.

And last night, on a cool autumn evening, as crisp as a golden delicious, a night that made you wish the postseason would return, they saw him break an 84-year-old record.

Appropriately he did it with a single. A typical Ichiro slapshot that was lined up the middle.

It was a single, like 221 others this season. The kind of room-service 3-2 pitch from sinkerballer Ryan Drese that Ichiro has feasted on since arriving from Japan in 2001.

In his first two at-bats, he had tied [at 257], then broken [at 258] George Sisler’s major-league record for hits in a season that had stood since 1920. [Ichiro ended up with 259 hits.]

It is a remarkable achievement even at a time when the base hit has been devalued like third-world currency. And it was celebrated the way it should have been last night inside Safeco.

Ichiro’s teammates, led by manager Bob Melvin, ran to first base to celebrate with him. And after all of the hugs, after he twice tipped his helmet to the crowd, and after he broke into a rare on-field smile, Ichiro ran to the box seats behind first where members of Sisler’s family were sitting….

Ichiro’s pursuit of Sisler was bigger news in Japan than it was here. It was the top story on NHK’s 10 o’clock news. The Safeco Field press box was swollen with Japanese TV and newspaper reporters.

“I talked to someone in Japan this morning, and they said it was a very big thing,” said Mariners pitcher Masao Kida.

The Fujisankei News broadcasts that I watched the past two days led off with 10-minute segments on Ichiro (and Matsui as the Yankees clinched their AL East title), and then recapped the same during their sports segments.

UPDATE: Colby Cosh has a wonderful essay on Ichiro.

The temptation to make Ichiro a symbol for his native country is overpowering sometimes; he looks so foreign out there at the plate, with his knock-kneed stance, his non-level swing, his uncanny break towards first, and his strange pre-swing rite of using his bat as a crosshair, as if calibrating himself with respect to the geometry of the playing field. But after tonight he belongs to the world, or that part of it which cares about baseball. In Japan Ichiro is regarded as an individualistic, “American” figure. Few American players can have been as stubborn in resisting interference with their batting style as Ichiro was during his first difficult years in Japanese pro ball. And he had to defy the norms again when he crossed the Pacific with seven Japanese batting titles in tow….

I wonder if Ichiro thinks that the ceremony surrounding tonight’s capture of the single-season hit record isn’t a very funny sort of Americanism. Long ago I remember reading of a Japanese visitor to the United States being shocked that the living relatives of George Washington, who might have been the American imperial family, enjoyed no special status in the republic and lived anonymously amongst their neighbours. Yet the game tonight was interrupted for a display of nothing less than unvarnished ancestor-worship, as Ichiro exchanged salutes with the daughter and other descendants of George Sisler. I do not disapprove of this one bit, but I am not sure it would have occurred to anybody in, say, the baseball of 1940. Somehow the republican sport par excellence has constantly absorbed ornaments of royalism, whose very premise is that accomplishments can be reified as heirlooms…. Ichiro came to Seattle, U.S.A. and found in American baseball a world of hierarchy, ritual, deference, dominance, splendour, custom, and oppressively omnipresent history. It was, all in all, an awfully short journey.

via Matt Welch, whose blog is a must-read every day in October–especially if the Anaheim Angels remain in contention.

Colby Cosh concludes with another interesting cultural twist.

One must nod to Vancouver’s Tyee for spotting an underappreciated angle to the Hit King Ichiro story. Amidst the welcome revival of George Sisler’s image, the man in second place on the single-season hit list, Lefty O’Doul, has mostly been forgotten. As it happens, O’Doul is a 2002 inductee into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame and played a crucial role in the historical developments of which Ichiro is the apotheosis. (He has even been called the “Father of Japanese Baseball”, though I’m not sure anyone ever said it in Japanese.

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese baseball players and club representatives reached a deal Thursday to end the first strike in the 70-year history of the sport in Japan, with owners agreeing to let newcomers into the leagues as early as next season.

The players, backed by the majority of fans, went on strike last weekend to protest a planned merger and to press owners to ease requirements for new teams. Weekday games have continued.

The Chinese Professional Baseball League began play in 1990 with four teams–each, as in Korea and Japan, owned by a major corporation, mainly for marketing potential. However, unlike Korea and Japan, or any other major professional league for that matter, none of the teams in the CPBL had a permanent home base. Instead, the four teams traveled around Taiwan, playing at five parks. As the league explained: “In the absence of clear demarcations of ‘market territories’ for the teams, plus the fact that fans do not entertain a strong sense of geographical division, scheduling and assigning game locations are done in such a way that the area factor does not distinguish host from guest. Rather, the host-or-guest designation is determined with a formula by which teams equally take turns playing the host or guest roles at a given location.” Weather was a consideration in the unique setup as well. The lack of permanent home sites enabled the league to schedule more games in the warmer south earlier in the season.

Unlike Korea, which imposed revenue sharing on its teams during the early days of professional baseball, the CPBL fostered stronger competition–or, at the very least, a perception of incentive–by decreeing that “the take of each team from the proceeds of the games [shall be decided] on the basis of win or loss percentages.” Teams would play a split, ninety-game season with the winners of each half meeting for the league championship. If a team won both halves, it would be declared “Grand Champion of the Year,” and playoffs would be held for the runner-up “Challenge Cup.”

There were two other distinguishing features in the CPBL. One was that pitching mounds varied in height from ballpark to ballpark. Another was that league rules permitted teams to carry as many players as they liked. Corporate budgets decided roster limits. Some teams carried thirty players, others only twenty-two. There was, however, a limit to the number of foreign players each team could sign. Originally, it was set at five, and no more than three could be on the field at anyone time. That first season, the four teams recruited a total of sixteen foreign players, paying them U.S.$4,000 to $5,500 per month for their services.

SOURCE: Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia, by Joseph A. Reaves (U. Nebraska Press, 2002), p. 149

The Korea Baseball Organization League has prospered, but not in proportion to the talent levels of Korean players–the best of whom often play in the Japanese professional leagues. In The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, Robert Whiting wrote about the roles foreign players from the United States and Korea played in Japanese baseball. “The American is not the only ‘outsider’ in Japanese baseball, he’s just the most visible,” Whiting observed. “Koreans also fall into the same category. But while the American is merely resented, the Korean is often looked down upon.” Whiting claimed many Koreans born and raised in Japan played baseball because the game offered a way up and through Japan’s strict social hierarchy. Even so, the escape route was only open to those Koreans who suppressed their heritage by assuming Japanese names and trying to pass for natives. Most did it so well that even their Japanese fans were duped. A favorite activity in Japanese ballparks to this day is “Korean spotting”–trying to figure what players, if any, are second-generation Koreans. Whiting quotes another knowledgeable writer who calculated there were so many Korean players in Japan “if you removed them all there wouldn’t be any more Japanese baseball.”

To underscore Whiting’s point, few realize that Masaichi Kaneda, considered the greatest pitcher in Japanese baseball history and nicknamed the “God of Pitching,” was a Japan-born Korean. Scores of other stars in Japan’s two professional leagues actually were born in Korea and emigrated to play baseball.

Much has changed in the more than two decades since Whiting broke cultural and historical ground with The Chrysanthemum and the Bat. And the Korea Baseball Organization is one of those changes. Korean stars now have a native outlet for their talents. And many are eager to pursue that outlet. But the level of play in Korean professional baseball still is universally regarded as inferior to that of Japan and, certainly, the United States. The Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan is widely considered better than the Korean professional league. So there still is an allure for talented Korean players to look elsewhere to challenge their abilities. Japan remains a ready and lucrative forum for them.

And, of course, in the 1990s, the United States finally began to be an option for truly exceptional players from Asia. The Los Angeles Dodgers created a minor sensation in 1993 when they paid $1.2 million to sign Park Chan Ho, an economics major and star pitcher at Han Yang University. Park went to the States, westernized his name to Chan Ho Park, and radically changed his pitching motion, which for years featured an excruciatingly long pause at the top of his windup. Japanese pitchers often use the same pause and compare it to ma, the dramatic pauses so essential to Kabuki dialogue. In You Gotta Have Wa, Robert Whiting quotes a fan of the famous Japanese relief pitcher Yutaka Enatsu, who claimed to know the secret of his hero’s success: “He was good because he knew how to use the ma. He waited for just the right moment–a lapse of concentration by the batter–to deliver the pitch.” But umpires and fellow professional players in the United States took one look at Park’s ma and cried foul over something they had never seen before. Park took it all in stride, quietly altered a lifelong habit, and was a pitching star in the Major Leagues within two years.

SOURCE: Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia, by Joseph A. Reaves (U. Nebraska Press, 2002), p. 128-130

Reaves does best where he is able to draw on the work of previous researchers, like Robert Whiting.