Category Archives: baseball

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.

In … 1913, the first Far Eastern Games were held in Manila. Billed as a biennial Asian Olympics, the first games featured competition in eleven events, including baseball. The Philippines won eight of eleven titles but lost the baseball competition to a team from Meiji University representing Japan. Two years later, the Philippines got revenge, winning the baseball championship at the second Far Eastern Games in Shanghai. From 1915 to 1925, the Philippines won five of six Far Eastern baseball titles, losing only the 1917 championship to a team from Waseda University….

Baseball continued to thrive in the Philippines until World War II, with Japan and the Philippines developing a particularly healthy baseball rivalry. Another article in The Sporting News of May 15, 1930, noted “the school championship of Japan attracted more spectators, average per game, than the World’s [sic] Series in the United States” that year. The article then went on to say: “The National Game goes splendidly in the Philippine Islands” as well “and is played excellently by the natives. The Japanese say they cannot be outbatted by the Filipinos, but the latter affirm they are better baseball players than their neighbors to the North.”

SOURCE: Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia, by Joseph A. Reaves (U. Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 102-103

The chapter on baseball in the Philippines is much weaker than the earlier chapters.

Many people have written about the various barnstorming tours of Japan by male baseball teams from the U.S., the most famous being the 1934 tour sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun (owner of the long-dominant Yomiuri Giants), which included Babe Ruth. Not so many people are aware of the female “squad of semiprofessionals who made a remarkable and sadly ill-fated tour of the Orient in the fall of 1925.”

That team was the Philadelphia Bobbies, composed of females aged thirteen to twenty, who went to Japan with the promise of making as much as $500 apiece for playing exhibitions. The Bobbies were one of two leading “bloomer girl” squads of the 1920s. The other was the New York Bloomer Girls…. The trip to the Orient in 1925 was collaborative effort of Mary O’Gara, the Bobbies’ manager and chaperone, and Eddie Ainsmith, a former Major Leaguer, who, just the year before, had taken twenty-four young men to Japan and boasted that each earned $830 playing exhibition baseball….

Ainsmith handled financial arrangements for the tour. Three Japanese promoters agreed to pay one-way, first-class passage for the team across the Pacific and assured Ainsmith and the Bobbies that generous gate receipts would cover costs of lodging, meals, and return fare–with a tidy profit for everyone in the traveling party. Unfortunately, that never happened. The Bobbies received a typically warm Japanese welcome. Reporters were on hand to greet them when they landed in Yokohama. So were the university teams they were scheduled to play. Tour promoters passed out flowers, had welcome banners strung, and provided rickshaws to shuttle the Bobbies from the Tokyo train station to their rooms at the newly built Western-style Marunouchi Hotel….

By early November, as the Bobbies continued to barnstorm through central Honshu with stops in Kyoto and Kobe, they began to lose regularly, and the crowds began to dwindle. E. R. Dickover, the U.S. consul at Kobe, summed up the situation in direct–if hardly diplomatic–language. “Because the girls could not play a sufficiently strong game to compete with any school team in Japan and as the Japanese would pay only to see a baseball contest and would not turn out simply because one of the teams was composed of girls, the trip was a financial failure from the start, despite all the advertising efforts of the promoters.”…

By mid-November, reality began to sink in. Two of the Japanese promoters disappeared without paying any bills. The third promoter, T. Shima, went bankrupt. Finally, on Friday the thirteenth–appropriately enough–Ainsmith and Mary O’Gara had a showdown about money. Ainsmith thought if the Bobbies moved on to Korea they could get a fresh start and turn their financial troubles around. O’Gara was afraid and wanted to go home. The two parted ways. Ainsmith convinced Leona Kearns and two other players–Edith Ruth, who played first base, and infielder-outfielder Nellie Schank–to go to Korea. With Hamilton, the three U.S. players, and four Japanese players, Ainsmith set out for Seoul. O’Gara and the nine remaining Bobbies threw themselves on the mercy of the expatriate Americans living in Kobe. But those U.S. citizens were being called upon constantly to bailout wayward travelers and were developing thick skins. The only help the Bobbies received was from an American named Henry Sanborn, who fed and housed the players at his hotel, the Pleasanton [scroll down], and tried unsuccessfully to convince an Osaka newspaper magnate to start a fund-raising campaign. The failed Japanese promoter, Shima-san, also tried unselfishly, in the face of his own financial problems, to drum up donations from wealthy Japanese to pay the Bobbies’ way back. But he, too, was unsuccessful. Finally, and almost miraculously, a wealthy British-Indian banker stepped in to save the Bobbies. N.H.N. Mody, who was living at the Pleasanton Hotel, heard about the Bobbies’ troubles and, without ever having met any of the players, wrote a check for 12,000 yen, approximately U.S.$6,000, to pay their passage back home.

O’Gara and the nine Bobbies in her company arrived home in Philadelphia on December 6, 1925, having done little to promote women’s baseball. Around that time, Ainsmith and his group returned to Kobe, where they asked the U.S. consul to accompany them to the police to try to secure the funds they had been promised by the promoters who disappeared. The police said they could do nothing. Again, Henry Sanborn provided what help he could, housing Ainsmith, his wife, and the three remaining Bobbie players in his hotel. He even hocked some brass treasures and curios to try to raise enough money to ship the Bobbies home. All he could get for them was about $300, not nearly enough for the tickets. Ainsmith then announced he had managed to have money wired from the States, but only enough to pay for his and his wife’s passage home. With his back to the wall, his patience running out, and his pockets only half full, Ainsmith told the players they would have to fend for themselves. The Ainsmiths sailed for home on December 27, 1925, leaving behind the three young women who had stood by the troubled tour leader all winter. U.S. Consul Dickover explained how such a callous abandonment was allowed to happen: “While Mr. Ainsmith was morally bound to care for the girls and should have remained with them until their repatriation, he could not be held legally responsible and so was permitted to leave.”

Indirectly, Ainsmith’s cold-heartedness led to Leona Kearns’s death. By early January 1926, her parents were frantic. Kearns was embarrassed and ashamed and had never written about her troubles. But her parents read about the return of the rest of the Bobbies in early December and began making a series of increasingly worried inquiries about their daughter. When Claude Kearns finally learned in early January that his daughter was stranded in Japan, he rushed to a local bank and borrowed $300 to pay for a second-class ticket home. On January 18, 1926, a relieved Leona Kearns boarded the Empress of Asia with her two friends, Nellie Schank and Edith Ruth, whose fares were covered with Sanborn’s help and the proceeds of a benefit dance.

The trip home was as disastrous as the tour…. [W]hen the ship finally got under way, it was battered by winter storms. For nearly four days, the crew plowed through winds as high as seventy miles per hour (112 kilometers per hour) that churned waves eighty to ninety feet high (twenty-four to twenty-seven meters). The second-class passengers rode out the tempest below deck behind steel storm doors. When the doors finally were thrown open the afternoon of January 22, Kearns felt as if she had been released from prison. She ran wild up and down the deck, delirious at finally sensing the end of her exciting but troubled journey. A ship’s officer warned her it was dangerous to run around on deck since the ship was still rolling. So Kearns went to the salon to have tea. Her friend Nellie Schank had been feeling seasick and was out on deck getting some air. Kearns finished her tea and stepped out to join Schank just as a giant wave rose out of the sea. Kearns shouted a warning to Schank, leaped over a bench, and sprinted for a bulkhead door just as the towering wave crashed. Edith Ruth, the third of the stranded Philadelphia Bobbies, saw the horror unfold from the tea parlor. She ran to the door and was relieved to find Schank grasping a rail as the receding water swept almost everything from the deck to the sea. Kearns, however, was nowhere to be seen.

The crew of the Empress of Asia cut the ship’s engine and circled the stormy sea for an hour. No trace of Leona Kearns ever was found. She was seventeen. Eddie Ainsmith, the quarrelsome catcher who already had a full career when he recruited her for the tour and left her behind in a strange land, lived another fifty-five years. He went on to become a Major League coach, an umpire, and a scout and, briefly, in 1947, managed the Rockford (Illinois) Peaches of the All-American Girls Baseball League. He died in Florida at the age of ninety in 1981.

SOURCE: Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia, by Joseph A. Reaves (U. Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 59-63

I can sympathize more than a bit with columnist Jon McGrath as he opines on Olympic coverage.

The Olympics start today, and NBC is planning 24-hour-a-day coverage on its various networks….

But with so much coverage, no one can see it all. Here’s one suggestion to narrow your viewing: weed out the events that aren’t real sports.

My first rule of thumb is a simple one: if the results of a contest are solely decided by a judge or panel of judges, it is not a sport.

It is a skill. It is an event. It is a spectacle. It is something I could never do well if you gave me my whole life to train, but it is not a sport.

In addition to the “no judge rule,” there are a few rules I have to further define a sport.

First, the term “Degree of Difficulty” can never, ever be used to help determine the outcome.

Can you imagine if baseball had such a rule? Let’s say Manny doubles in Johnny Damon with a tying run in the bottom of the ninth. The umpire could then decide that, because Manny hit a nasty slider, low and away, on an 0-2 count, that he really deserves a home run because the pitch was much more difficult to hit than a fastball down the middle. Manny trots home, game over. It’s ridiculous to even suggest.

You could argue that baseball has umpires and football has referees, etc. It is not the same. Those officials are there to enforce the rules, not decide who is best. Sure, they make mistakes that affect games, but they are not the sole arbitrators of who wins and loses.