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 Ch
iba 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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Latin America has developed its own style of baseball. While the Japanese leagues have existed for domestic consumption until recently, most players in the Caribbean region have had one major goal—to reach the majors and make money. Only Cuba, with its state-dominated league and tight controls on immigration, has kept its players at home, although defections by Cuban stars have been common.
Because of its proximity to South Florida, Cuba was the first major Latin outlet for baseball. Some say that Nemesio Guilló, a college student, brought the sport back from the United States in 1866, while others give credit to Esteban Bellán, who left the island to study at Fordham University in New York in 1869, became the first Latin major-leaguer with the Troy Haymakers, and returned to Cuba in 1874.
By 1878, there was a professional league, including Havana, Almendares, and Matanzas. Cuban sugarcane workers then carried the sport to the Dominican Republic and also the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico while American troops and oil workers taught the sport in other parts of Mexico. Venezuela's tie to baseball was established in 1895, but the sport really boomed after 1922, when oil was discovered in Lake Maracaibo, bringing the inevitable Americans. And Puerto Rico took up baseball following its independence from Spain in 1897.
Early in the twentieth century, Cuba was becoming a virtual colony of the United States, convenient for beaches and gambling and various other pleasures, only a few miles from the Florida coast. With a year-round baseball season, Cuba developed its own players and also offered a haven to black Americans who were banned from organized ball at home and therefore had considerable incentive to beat touring major-leaguers.
“I didn't come down here to let a lot of coffee-colored Cubans show me up,” John J. McGraw is said to have grumbled after visiting with the Giants. Historians have counted 65 games between major-leaguers and Cuban teams, with a direct split of 32-32-1. Jose Mendez, one of Cuba's greatest pitchers, won eight of those games.
In the early twentieth century, many Latinos hoped to play in the major leagues but never got the chance because of America's national obsession about race. Martin Dihigo, a Cuban who led the Mexican League in batting in 1938 with a .387 average and also won 18 games as a pitcher with an earned run average of 0.90, was too dark-skinned for the majors, although he would eventually be voted into the Hall of Fame.
Some players did slip under the American visual skin-tone barrier. Clark Griffith, while operating the Cincinnati Reds, hired Rafael Almeida and his translator, Armando Marsans, whose complexion was called “olive-skinned,” and later when Griffith moved to Washington he signed light-skinned Latinos at modest salaries.
One Cuban who passed the visual barrier was Miguel Gonzalez, a catcher who became the first Latino manager, filling in for 17 games with the Cardinals late in the 1938 season. Gonzalez was also the third-base coach when Enos Slaughter steamed home with the winning run in the 1946 World Series, and Gonzalez was later the scout who coined the immortal evaluation: “good field, no hit.”
The first big star from Latin America was Adolfo Luque, a pitcher born in 1890 in Cuba. After bouncing around, Luque joined Cincinnati in 1918 and bloomed under his manager, Christy Mathewson. Luque pitched the first shutout by a Latino, and in 1919 became the first Latino to play in the World Series. Although he often heard heckling about his swarthy skin, Luque had the aggressive temperament to give it right back, lasting long enough to save the 1933 World Series for the Giants.
Luque is a classic example of the six-degree connections in baseball. After World War Two, during the Pasquel brothers' expensive raids on the majors, Luque was managing the Puebla team in Mexico. One of his pitchers was Sal Maglie, a refugee from the Giants, who had previously pitched for Luque in winter ball in Cienfuegos, Cuba.
Years later, Maglie would tell how Luque lectured him to throw a curveball—“like Mardy.”
“Mardy? Who's that?” Maglie had asked.
“Mardy! Mardy! You never heard of Chreesty Mardyson?” Luque replied in his chewy Cuban accent.
After Luque's tutelage, Maglie returned to the States as a hardbitten old pro, mostly with the Giants, later with Brooklyn. In 1956, Maglie was a teammate of a lanky rookie named Don Drysdale, imparting his wisdom about when and how to pitch inside, which Drysdale adapted with great relish. Thus, there is a direct baseball lineage from Mathewson, the Hall of Famer early in the century, through Luque and Maglie, to Drysdale, an eventual Hall of Famer.
The ethnic barriers fell slightly, out of necessity, during World War Two. Some teams, particularly Washington, signed Latin players who happened to be light-skinned and were not about to be drafted for the military. Needing reasonably able-bodied players, Griffith and other owners were less likely to inspect the color of their imports from Cuba.
Two years after the arrival of Jackie Robinson and other pioneers in 1947, Cleveland brought in Orestes Arrieta Armas, who went by his stepbrothers' family name of Minoso. Nicknamed “Minnie,” he was promptly traded to the White Sox, where he became Rookie of the Year and was soon considered a Chicago civic treasure up to his retirement in 1964. Minoso made cameo appearances in the 1970s and 1980s but was stopped from playing in another decade in 1990 when Commissioner Fay Vincent refused to permit any such Veeckian-style tomfoolery.
Roberto Clemente from Carolina, Puerto Rico, became the first Latino superstar. He signed with the Dodgers for a bonus of $10,000, but under the rules of the day Clemente either had to play for the parent team in Brooklyn or be eligible for a draft by another system. The Dodgers tried to hide him at their Montreal farm team in 1954, but the rumpled veteran Pittsburgh scout Howie Haak noticed Clemente on his rare appearances and quickly recommended him to the Pirates' general manager—none other than Branch Rickey. Rickey, who had been forced out by Walter O'Malley, delightedly drafted Clemente, and turned him over to mentors, in-cluding—the reader has already guessed—George Sisler.
Sisler showed Clemente how to make tighter turns while running the bases, and how to keep his head from bobbing at the plate. Clemente broke in with the Pirates in 1955, helped them win the World Series in 1960, and won the batting championship in 1961 with a .351 average. Later he thanked the Pirates coaches, including Sisler, for their encouragement.
Proud, intelligent, handsome, and outspoken on the subject of race—plus a graceful right fielder with a superb arm and quick bat—Clemente became a superstar. In the last days of 1972, following an earthquake in Nicaragua, Clemente chartered a plane in Puerto Rico, loaded it himself with relief supplies, and prepared to fly there, but the plane crashed into the sea upon takeoff. He quickly became one of the few players ever inducted into the Hall of Fame before the mandatory five-year waiting period. To this day, many Latino players wear No. 21 in his honor.
After Minoso and Clemente arrived, it was obvious that Latin America was a gold mine for talent. The Giants found the three Alou brothers in the Dominican Republic, along with Juan Marichal. After the Dodgers discovered Fernando Valenzuela in Mexico, their 1981 attendance was an average of 9,000 higher on the days of his scheduled starts at home.
No country in the world loves baseball more than Cuba, both before and after the 1959 revolution. Fidel Castro has never discouraged the myth that he was once a hot pitching prospect, but in reality his highest level was pitching for his decidedly amateur law school team. Under Castro, the state-supported national team has dominated world amateur tournaments, but Castro has refused to allow his players to earn a salary in professional leagues outs
ide the country. Many Cuban stars found a way to leave, starting with young Tony Perez and Tony Oliva after the revolution and followed, years later, by Orlando (El Duque) Hernandez, who slipped out by sea, either on a leaky raft or a high-powered yacht, depending on who is doing the telling. In 1998, somewhere in his thirties, El Duque established himself as a fearless winner of big games for the Yankees. Nicaragua also closed its borders for a time, but Dennis Martinez managed to sign with Baltimore in 1973 and had a long and successful career in the major leagues.
Many major league teams, recognizing the talent pool in Latin America, began establishing academies, particularly in the Dominican Republic. In 2005, the Mets brought over Omar Minaya as their general manager after he had helped keep the shaky Montreal Expos competitive.
Minaya, of Dominican ancestry and raised in Queens, a few blocks from Shea Stadium, was given a large budget for restocking the Mets. He promptly signed Pedro Martinez, the ace Dominican pitcher, as well as Carlos Beltran and later Carlos Delgado, two Puerto Rican sluggers, who served as walking advertisements that the Mets were receptive to talent, wherever its origins.
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Meanwhile, Ichiro (or “Suzuki,” as he is still listed in baseball's finicky computer system) established himself as one of the great hitters in the major leagues, making 242, 208, and 212 hits in his first three seasons.
In 2004, he began to challenge the record for hits in a single season, 257, set back in 1920 by George Sisler. In America, fans were inflamed by home runs but Japan was captivated by Ichiro's chase of Sisler, who had died in 1973. When it became obvious that Ichiro might break the record, members of Sisler's family were invited to Seattle on the final weekend of the season.
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