As in life, so in baseball: the object is not earning money

http://www.worldbaseballclassic.com/

The writer suggests that while WBC is a great idea, it is at best a nuisance, interrupting MLB’s spring training schedule, at worst a danger to players and heavily invested owners, both of whom could suffer financial losses as a result of player injury incurred during the WBC tournament. This seems to be a far too narrow view of the potential of life, in which we look at the amazing unfolding of reality through the pinhole of finance. The writer’s argument from caution could be extended to nearly any activity of daily life, every one of which has the potential to cause bodily injury - walking down the street, driving a car, playing ball with the neighborhood kids, working out at the gym, carrying garbage to the kerb, climbing a ladder to change a lightbulb - the list is endless. I’m sure not even one professional ball player wishes to live in a cocoon during the off-season. I’m also sure most professional ball players relish the challenge of pitting themselves against the world’s best. Many will also prize the opportunity to represent their country in an international forum. Those players fortunate enough to be nominated to the roster ought to take the chance while they have it. The WBC happens only every four years and by the time it rolls around again (if it rolls around again), today’s eligible players may no longer be able. They might even be dead. Life is meant to be lived. Go live it.

#

On the commodification of sport

The quaestores of modern times use health, religion, and access to sports and art just like those of the Middle Ages used salvation: to exploit people by pricing what they value too high.

Jonathan R Goodman writes in Aeon:

It was in 2012 that Major League Baseball ran an ad showing generations of parents sharing the beloved American pastime with their kids. But it was already too late: in 2012, the average price for tickets to the World Series was nearly $1,000 – compared with just $2 for the same seats in 1963. Cost for two to attend even a run-of-the mill baseball game in 2016 is nearly $80, what with $6 per beer, almost $5 for a hot dog, and $16 to park the car.

Using baseball’s cultural status to exploit fans is part of a long, dark trend: the tendency to milk the masses for what ostensibly belongs to everyone. In the Middle Ages, quaestores (pardoners) granted followers of the Catholic Church indulgences, which were believed to lessen the punishments of one’s sins. At first, indulgences were given for acts of piety and prayer but, over time, were sold by members of the Church for money. This practice became so common, and the prices so extreme, that the Protestant Reformation was, in part, galvanised by Martin Luther’s outrage at this industry of the Church.

The unaffordability of salvation continues to this day.

Full article here.

#

Japanese baseball neologism

Seiya Suzuki @ The Japan Times

From today's Kyodo news feed:

TOKYO — The Hiroshima Carp hit yet another home run as “kamitteru,” a coined word that means being godlike or superhuman which was used to describe the baseball team’s feat this season, was selected as Japan’s top buzzword in 2016, the award’s organizer said Thursday.

The word highlights the Carp’s achievements, including winning their first Central League pennant in 25 years on Sept. 10 and finishing the season with a 17.5-game lead over the runner-up Yomiuri Giants.

Hiroshima manager Koichi Ogata renewed the trend of using the term in June when he described Seiya Suzuki’s performance as “kamitteru” after the outfielder hit sayonara home runs in two consecutive games against the Orix Buffaloes.

The expression, which had already been used mainly among young people for years, became even more popular after Ogata used it and the second-year manager described the entire ballclub as “kamitteru” at the end of the season.

This is the second straight year in which a top buzzword in Japan was related to baseball, with last year’s co-winner being “triple three,” used to describe a player posting at least a .300 batting average with 30 steals and 30 homers in a season, after two players achieved the feat in 2015.

#

Baseball Time

Whilst verifying a fact presented in Gmelch's Inside Pitch, I ran across this 2013 article from the Wall Street Journal, in which the writer clocked three MLB games to get an idea of how time in the average three-hour-plus game is spent.

First, the conclusion:

Huge chunks of inaction that absolutely dwarf everything else that goes on in the game.

The breakdown:

• 0:17:58  Action (or, ball in play)
• 0:33:39  Time between batters
• 0:42:41  Time between innings
• 1:14:49  Time between pitches

Might you know of a similar study with a larger data set?

#

Book Review: Gmelch, George. Inside Pitch: Life In Professional Baseball. 2001.

Gmelch, George. Inside Pitch:  Life In Professional Baseball. 1st ed. Washington [D.C.]: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Print.

This is an extensively researched, sharply observed, well written anthropological account of the lifecycle of US professional baseball players in the 1990s.   It begins with descriptions of the dreams and aspirations of boys, before examining the few well-worn avenues teenagers and young men take to become salaried players.  Succeeding chapters explore the process of acculturation to exclusively male groups devoted entirely to the full-time pursuit of sport, the psychological demands of a game in which the ball is in play only 15 minutes for every three-hour match, the role of superstition, players’ relationships with wives and groupies, and the difficult adjustment to retirement.

Inside Pitch is based on interviews with 107 players, managers, coaches, and scouts conducted by former-minor-leaguer-turned-academic Dr George Gmelch, a professor of Anthropology at the University of San Francisco, author of a book-length account of behind-the-scenes baseball workers (In the Ballpark), and editor of a collection on global expressions of the game (Baseball without Borders).  Gmelch has most recently published an account of the US minor league experience of the 1960s based on journals written while a member in the Detroit Tigers farm system (Playing with Tigers).

Film & Book Review: White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium, 2008 & 2013

White Elephant: What is There to Save? (2008). [DVD] Miami, FL: Joe Cardona, producer, director; Rolando Llanes, director; Cantilever Productions, Kids in Exile Films.

Llanes, R. (2013). White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium. 1st ed. San Francisco: Blurb.


This is an odd film.  I came to it through an interest in baseball and my own childhood experience of attending Baltimore Orioles spring training games in the 60s and 70s.

But the film is not really about baseball, nor it seems much about the stadium itself.  It is more a collection of historical vignettes loosely connected to the stadium, which opened in 1949 and was demolished in 2001. The absence of an overarching narrative is confounded by nonlinear sequencing, intermittent poetry reading, and an assumption that the viewer is familiar with the mid-20th century history of Miami, Cuba, and Central America.

The science of hitting a Major League fastball

Hitters only have 125 milliseconds to gauge the average Major League fastball – less than the blink of an eye. Which begs the question: how is it humanly possible?

Korean baseball rocked by game-fixing scandal

Korean baseball was last week stung by a police investigation into gambling and game-fixing that has resulted in 19 indictments, including seven current or former pitchers. as well as two executives of the KBO's NC Dinos, a team that appeared in this year's Korea Series.

Of the infringements cited is the case of a pitcher in 2014 taking money to deliberately walk batters.  According to police, the deception was discovered by team management but covered up so that the player could later be traded.   NC Dino management denies a cover-up, saying their own investigation produced no irrefutable evidence.  It has nevertheless suspended the two indicted officials pending court proceedings.  KBO management is likewise waiting on court outcomes before announcing penalties, which could include lifetime bans.

Korea KBO Series 2016

More fall championship baseball is available from the Korean Baseball Organization, which last week completed its annual best-of-seven series, this year between the NC Dinos and Doosan Bears.  If you have a suitable broadband connection, all games are available as VOD through afreeca.tv.  No registration or fees are currently required.  From my location streaming was choppy and sometimes stopped altogether.  An alternative for those with similar issues, or who don’t care about watching complete games, are condensed versions of about 10 minutes each from SpoTV available on Youtube and linked below.

Of this years's three Asian series, Japan’s was most suspenseful, going a full seven games.  Taiwan’s series ran six games and included a surprising come-from-behind victor, while the Korean series lacked much contention or drama.

For a text summary of the Korean series, see here.  For Youtube links, click Read More.

Tawain CPBL Series 2016

Thumbnails for the 6-games series, numbered 001-006, 22 October to 29 October

If you’re looking for more championship baseball action this fall, you might like to check out the recently completed Taiwan series, which featured an unlikely, come-from-behind winner.  For background on the series, you can see this article;  if you prefer to be spoiler free, read it after you’ve finished watching.

All series games are available on demand through the league’s TV and streaming service, CPBL.TV.   From my location, I found I had to create an account, but no purchase was necessary.  While the site is entirely in Chinese, your browser and email translate function should be sufficient to complete the registration process.

Enjoy.

#

When a ticket to stand at the world series is $1000, MLB is hardly a people's sport

The US Census Bureau reported a mean personal income of $44,510 for all workers over age 15 with income based on the Current Population Survey for 2015. That comes to $3709.00 per month, or $23.18 per hour, assuming 160 hours per month.

A ticket to stand at Game 7 of the World Series therefore costs 43 hours of labor.  A whole week's worth of work for a three hour baseball game, and you can't even sit down.

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/cubs-indians-world-series-game-7-tickets-standing-room-only-seats-hit-four-digits/

#

Book Review: Cohen, M. No girls in the clubhouse: The exclusion of women from baseball. (2009)

Cohen, M. (2009). No girls in the clubhouse: The exclusion of women from baseball. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.

Author Marilyn Cohen, an Associate Professor and Director of Women’s Studies at St Peter’s University, New Jersey, has written an accessible account of the problems faced by American women seeking to play what has been perceived as a male sport.  While the content does not require specialized academic knowledge and the writing is clear and unaffected, a stronger editor might have eliminated what appear to be frequent redundancies.  Absent notes, indices, front matter, and illustrations, content amounts to less than 200 pages.

Though the chapters and discussions proceed chronologically, this is not an account seeking to document the role of women in American baseball.  That work, Marilyn Cohen observes, has been ably completed by a host of previous researchers, allowing her to focus more on theory and analysis.  Her methodology is that of most theorists - reading lots of books and articles.  Her principal sources are journalistic accounts and legal documents relating to cases of sex discrimination.  She says she also conducted interviews, through with whom is not clear.

Her analysis is “informed by social science perspectives, principally critical feminist theory, anthropology, and sociology.”   She sees sport as vital to the understanding of the process of the encoding of biological differences with symbolic meaning.  "No single social institution, with the exception of the military, has influenced the cultural construction of masculinity more strongly or has justified in biological terms more directly the inferiority of the female body resulting in the acceptance of gender-based discrimination.”  (I’d say religion has been far more damaging for a far longer time than modern sport, but that’s another book.)

Second foreigner to win Japan's Sawamura Award

American Kris Johnson of the Hiroshima Carp has become only the second non-Japanese to win the nation's annual award for the year's best starting pitcher.  The only other foreigner to be presented the Sawamura Award was American Gene Bacque in 1964.  Last year's winner, Kenta Maeda, pitched for the LA Dodgers in the 2016 season.  The Texas Rangers' Yu Darvish took the award in 2007.

Apparently the award committee was not unanimous in its decision, a result perhaps of standards that are now past their prime.  See the Kyodo news report here for more.

Photo (Kyodo News):  Kris Johnson with baseballs spelling out Sawamura.

#

The problem with Chief Wahoo

It seems a clever First Nations lawyer was biding his time, waiting for the media attention of a World Series appearance to take legal action against the MLB's Cleveland franchise for their use of what many consider a culturally offensive mascot, the grinning, red-skinned, feather-wearing Chief Wahoo.

Liz Churchville has fairly summed up the situation at The Scrum Sports.  (An additional article from First Nations' press can be found here.)  The only thing to add is that a sensible solution might be to make First Nations people a part of the solution, to invite them to help choose and create a new name and logo they feel extols their culture and traditions, to give them a chance to make the team theirs.  

#

Review: Sport and Society: 7-week Course from Duke University at Coursera

I have recently completed Sports and Society at Coursera, one of the internet’s largest platforms for MOOCs (massive open online courses).  Written by a professor of anthropology at America’s Duke University, the 7-week introduction to the sociology of sport has been running for four years and is offered free of charge, with the option of buying a certificate of completion at US$50.00. This was not my first foray into online learning - I have completed an MA and CertHE costing several thousands of dollars and years of study - but this was my first opportunity to participate in a free MOOC.

As an educator myself, I understand the demands of creating and running a course.  The writer/professor in question obviously gets a good bit of professional milage out of this course, even if there is no direct financial remuneration.  That is to say, there is an incentive for creators to produce engaging material and to follow through in managing delivery of the course.  On the other hand, creators are likely to have other obligations and cannot justify spending large amounts of time on what is essentially community service. You can see this push and pull at work in this course, which is well designed and written, if only for a general audience, but has been left to run itself.

A letter to Pacific League TV

Dear Sir or Madam,

I have been a subscriber to PA League TV for the 2016 season and am writing to let you know how pleased I have been with your service.  I hope to renew my subscription for the 2017 season.  Please keep up the good work.

Here are a few changes I would like to suggest.  

Allow controls at full screen.  The present software removes all video controls when the full-screen option is engaged.  This can be frustrating whenever there is need to pause, fast-forward, rewind, or adjust volume.  

Add 10 second forward/reverse buttons.  These would be a huge help in navigating through a game.  

Increase video resolution.  Comparing your service with other sport streaming services, the video resolution is quite low. 

Add condensed games.  MLB VOD service offers games in four formats:  Live Stream, VOD Full Game, VOD Condensed and VOD Highlight.  The highlight film is similar to what you already offer at PA TV.  The condensed film runs 10-15 minutes, depending on the level of action in any particular game.  All of the relevant plays are shown, though not every pitch, nor every out.  There is no commentary on the audio track.  (Search [condensed game] at youtube for examples.)

Add a Facebook share button to video clips.  At present, only a Twitter button is available.  FB is by far a wider network, one which the Pacific League can use to promote its brand through attractive and interesting video clips.  

Hide scores in Archive.  I have sometimes been unable to watch games for a few days and when I go to the archive to find them, I have to make a deliberate effort to cover or avoid looking at scores.  

Thank you for your attention to this letter and thank you again for a wonderful service.  My last wish is that the NPB offer a streaming service for both leagues.

Yours sincerely, 

A letter to NPB

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am an overseas fan of yakyuu who would like to have access to all NPB games, regular and post-season.  At present, I can purchase streaming/VOD rights to games only of the Pacific League.  This means I can watch only half of NPB teams, only half of interleague games, and nothing at all of the Central League Climax Series or the Japan Series.

If you have a look across the internet, you will find the following baseball leagues offer streaming/VOD packages:

• MLB (USA)
• MLB Minor (USA)
• LMP (Mexican Pacific League, winter)
• LMB (Mexican Baseball League, summer)
• CPBL (China Professional Baseball League, Taiwan)
• KBO (Korean Baseball Organization)
• ABL (Australian Baseball League)

Why does a leading country such as Japan still not offer such service to fans worldwide?  If even small leagues on three continents have managed to offer affordable, easy access to _all_ their games, why not the NPB?

For the moment, I rely on fans uploading content to file sharing sites to avail myself of Central League games and the Japan Series.  I would be happy to pay for a quality product, but at the moment there is _none_.  I hope by the 2017 season NPB will resolve what issues remain in order to better serve their customers.

Best regards,

The Marlins Man

Photo:  TAMMY LJUNGBLAD The Kansas City Star

Not your average fan.

"... he has attended over 300 Major League Baseball playoff games— including 89 in the World Series, 200 NBA playoff games and 70 in the Finals, 37 NCAA championship games, and 27 Super Bowls."

More at NJ.com.

#

Baseball announcer struggles to find the participle

Sport commentary is largely innocuous fluff, easy to ignore, or completely tune-out.  How many of us can keep a game running on the television while engaged in something else?  Last week during Game Two of the NLDS (between the Washington Nationals and Los Angeles Dodgers), I happened to be paying a bit more attention and noticed something peculiar. Something grammarians, speech pathologists, and linguistics will find amusing.

Have a listen to the sound file and see if you can spot the error in linguistic processing.

The announcer is discussing an event in which a baseball catcher has to swing his arm approximately 45 degrees to tag a runner approaching from his left.  As the description is happening in review, that is, being discussed as a past event while looking at a video replay, the announcer deploys the third conditional to describe what might have happened if the catcher had performed differently.  His problem is that his mind can’t retrieve the past participle for swing.  He appears to be attempting to deploy the conjugation pattern i-a-u, as found in swim-swam-swum, drink-drank-drunk, sing-sang-sung, ring-rang-rung.  The conjugation for swing is swing-swung-swung (though swang as the past form seems to be used just often enough to be noted in some dictionaries as one now rarely used).  The announcer’s mind catches itself in what it believes to be an error (swinged), but the correction suggested (swang) seems unequally unacceptable.  He recovers by switching verbs.  The completed statement turns out to be a mixed conditional:

If he could have swi – swa - brought that glove around without touching the dirt, I think he’s got a play.

Book Review: Yu, Junwei. Playing In Isolation: A History Of Baseball In Taiwan. 2007.

Yu, Junwei. Playing In Isolation:  A History Of Baseball In Taiwan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Playing In Isolation is an adapted version of a PhD thesis by a Taiwanese scholar, former amateur baseball player, and present professor at the National Taiwan University of Physical Education and Sport.  Much of the book deals with amateur baseball - a professional league debuting on the island only in the 1990s - and more specifically the role of government in sport.  As one of the first book-length texts on the subject in English, readers might expect a somewhat hagiographic account, but there is no cause for concern. Yu is unafraid to examine the negative effects of policy and in his introduction laments the unwanted government attention his research attracted.  For non-specialists, Yu does an adequate job providing the background necessary to follow his largely chronological account. The latter half of the book seems to offer a number of threads that aren’t woven into a larger story, a problem not uncommon for historians working on events contemporaneous to their own lives.  The writing is workmanlike, aimed at a general audience, and could have benefited from a stronger editor.

Review: Antolihao, L. (2012). "From baseball colony to basketball republic: postcolonial transition and the making of a national sport in the Philippines."

Antolihao, L. (2012). "From baseball colony to basketball republic: postcolonial transition and the making of a national sport in the Philippines."  Sport in Society, 15:10, 1396-1412.

The Philippines at the turn of the last century presents an interesting case study in the cultural diffusion of sport.  Occupied for nearly half a century following the Spanish American war, US troops, businessmen, educators and missionaries introduced both baseball and basketball.  One thrived, the other did not.

What might account for this?

Book Review: Fitts, Robert K. Remembering Japanese Baseball. 2005.

Fitts, Robert K. Remembering Japanese Baseball. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

If you don’t know much of the sport as it developed in Japan, Remembering Japanese Baseball is probably not the best place to start learning.  It consists of transcribed interviews with 25 former players in Japan’s professional baseball league, ranging in time from the pre-war era to the late 1990s.  Of the 25 interviews, only five are with Japanese.  The title is a bit misleading, like a book called Remembering American Baseball containing interviews with players from Latin America and Asia.

Since publishing this collection in 2005, Fitts has gone on to write three books on Japanese baseball history:  a biography of the first American to play in Japan, the first Japanese to play in the US, and an account of Babe Ruth’s visit to Japan.  Remembering Japanese Baseball might be considered Fitts’ first notes for those projects, the groundwork that led him to and informed future research and writing.

MLB Team Color Schemes

Red and Blue.  It seems almost every MLB team has one and many have both.  How many?  Someone's already done the work. Check out the Sports Design Blog. 

#

159 ways to hit the ball

Puck, 1913.  Artist: Crawford, Will

The following list appears in Zack Hample's Watching Baseball Smarter (2008).  The author provides no citation, and as a search for the list name returns nothing, I assume for now it is his own compilation, a wonderful testament to the human need for novelty (and penchant for cataloging).  

159 WAYS TO HIT THE BALL 

Squib, squirt, nub, chop, 

Drive, line, send, pop. 

Lift, loft, lace, lash, 

Scald, slice, serve, slash. 

Slap, swat, belt, smack,

Loop, bloop, bounce, whack. 

Fist, flare, muscle, mash, 

Deliver, doink, unload, smash. 

Book review: Klein, A. (2014). Dominican baseball: new pride, old prejudice

Klein, A. (2014). Dominican baseball: new pride, old prejudice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

I finished this book just before leaving for a longish vacation filled with diversions a bit more appealing than writing a book review.  I didn’t want to let the reading pass, though, without saying a few words about an informative text that marks the end of a quarter century of baseball research in the Dominican Republic.  Klein’s first book, Sugarball (1991), was an ethnographic account of the sport on the Caribbean island in the mid to late 80s, including extensive discussion of the developing system of buscones and the MLB’s increasing interest in the country as a source of cheap and highly skilled labor.  In the interviewing years, Klein published several papers on Dominican baseball, as well as a book length project on baseball in a Mexican border town, in addition to research into the North American body-building subculture, and sport among Native American communities.

New pride, Old prejudice is something of an update rather than a full-blown ethnography, an analysis of the economic and political developments between the MLB and Dominican baseball.  While there are many irritants in the relationship, Klein concludes that the biggest problem appears to be the inability to agree on what constitutes a problem. The MLB, for example, sees the buscones as a nuisance, one to be reined in to create a more rational (and less expensive) labor supply.  Dominicans, on the other hand, are likely to see the buscones, in the absence of a strong government, as the actors most likely and most able to protect Dominican interests and procure appropriate levels of financial compensation for Dominican ball players.  It’s not clear how these issues will be resolved, but Klein feels that the fortunes of the Dominicans and the MLB are now tied so closely to each other that the two will sink or swim together.

For a lengthier look at this book, please see Dain TePoel’s review at Sport in American History:  https://ussporthistory.com/2014/10/06/review-of-alan-kleins-dominican-baseball-new-pride-old-prejudice/

#

Japan Baseball Trip: More Tickets

Buffaloes online ticketing

Single tickets for Japan’s pro-league games are released in blocks, both to groups and across time.  Fan club members get first choice, and some weeks later, usually one to two months before game date, remaining tickets are released to the general public.

When I left off, I was waiting to purchase tickets for August games of the Eagles and Buffaloes. I was a bit worried about availability during holiday events, the Eagles during Sendai’s largest annual festival, Tanabata, and the Buffaloes on Yamanohi with last year’s champions and this year’s leading team, the Hawks.

As it turned out, there were plenty of seats available for both and the only inconvenience with the online order systems was being forced to input my name in kanji.  Foreign credit cards were not a problem.

I chose to print my own tickets.  The Buffaloes' system was somewhat easier;  the Eagles seemed especially cumbersome, requiring 1) entering a receipt number, 2) then on a succeeding page entering my email address, 3) checking my email for a link to a ticket, 4) saving the ticket as a pdf, then finally 5) printing the ticket.

All that’s left now is to get to the stadiums on the appointed dates, eight in all.

#

Book review: Gmelch, G. (2006). Baseball Without Borders: The International Pastime

Gmelch, G. (2006). Baseball Without Borders: The International Pastime. University of Nebraska Press.

The editor of this collection of 16 authors on baseball in 14 nations is a cultural anthropologist at Union College and University of San Francisco (as well as a former minor league player) and has written two books on baseball culture, Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball, and In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People. As only Japan and Cuba are represented by more than one essay, most writers take a broad historical perspective, so you can think of this collection as a global history of baseball. Writing is uneven but largely readable for a general audience.

For those wishing to skip the details, the concluding chapter provides a useful summary of findings. The Americans were not solely responsible for the global diffusion of the game, but were abetted by the Japanese, who took baseball with them to Taiwan and Korea, as well as by expatriate Cubans, who brought the game back from the US and then spread it across the Caribbean, most notably Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Spalding’s late 19th century world tour introduced the game to other corners of the world, and apart from Sri Lanka and Egypt, the game took root in all the other countries visited. (An investigation of these two outliers might provide interesting clues as to the intersection of the game and its audience, much as Kaufman and Patterson’s study of cricket in North America.) While baseball was part of the cultural baggage of invaders and colonizers, it was often used as a vehicle for the weaker party to assert its national and cultural identity. On the ball field, Koreans and Taiwanese could safely challenge the dominance of the Japanese, likewise the Cubans against the Spanish, and the Japanese against the Americans. Apart from the US, Japan, Cuba and the Dominican, baseball has been largely a marginal sport and has not approached the global appeal of basketball. The US game has in recent years become quicker and achieved greater defensive finesse as a result of the presence of increasing numbers of Latin players.

Given that most of the essays seem to follow the same outline and end up reviewing many of the details common to baseball most everywhere, redundancy could have been avoided if the same material had been presented by one author. Still, this was an enjoyable and informative read and a suitable introduction to baseball as it has developed across the world.

#

Book Review: Fitts, R. (2008). Wally Yonamine: the man who changed Japanese baseball

Fitts, R. (2008). Wally Yonamine:  the man who changed Japanese baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Wally Yonamine was a Hawaiian of Japanese descent who played in Japan’s professional baseball league from 1951 to 1962.  For 27 years afterwards he served as a coach and general manager for several Japanese teams before becoming the only American so far inducted to Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.  He is sometimes compared to Jackie Robinson, the first player to break the racial-ethnic barrier in Japan’s post-war pro-league.   In fact a number of foreign players were part of the prewar game, but following Japan’s defeat and occupation few foreigners wanted to live or play in Japan, and the Japanese were not yet ready to live and work so closely with foreigners, most especially Americans.   Yonamine made this possible by meeting his hosts halfway - he looked Japanese and had a Japanese name.

When he arrived in Japan, food scarcity was still a reality, housing was often ramshackle, sewage was basic, and transport was slow and uncomfortable.  Perhaps the most interesting part of this biography are the chapters dealing with Yonamine’s move to Japan and the problems he and his family encountered in adjusting to life both on and off the field.  Also of interest, and perhaps worthy of book-length treatment or a film, is the Yomiuri Giants’ 1954-55 world tour of Australia, Philippines, and Latin America, a tremendous comedy of cultural errors.

Film Review: I Will Buy You (1956)

I Will Buy You. (1956). In Eclipse Series 38: Masaki Kobayashi Against the System [DVD].  USA:  Criterion Collection, 2013.

The title alone suggests this is not your typical adulatory sports film.

The protagonist is a youthful talent scout charged with acquiring the services of Japan’s hottest university baseball prospect.  Other teams and scouts are soon in the hunt and the film chronicles their escalating efforts to bribe their way into the hearts and minds of the talent’s suspicious and equally amoral agent, as well as the talent’s impoverished rural family, who literally murder one another over promises of riches.  The talent himself appears to be above the fray, but in the end is revealed equally capable of using others for self enrichment.

The story is suspenseful, written so that the viewer is never sure who might be lying or engaged in a double-cross, and the main characters have a measure of depth that keep them from being mere caricatures. While the protagonist develops a degree of self-awareness, he finds it too little, too late, trapped in the drama he and the rumor-mongering media have created.  The only element that escapes director Kobayashi’s withering criticism is the sports consuming public, whose spending on tickets, newspapers, and merchandise fuels the industry and the corruption on which it depends.

This is not a film that will make you feel happy to be a sports fan, or even a human being.  At times it feels too didactic and too cynical, but from today’s distance it may be difficult to judge.  Perhaps this film cuts close to the Japanese experience in the decade of impoverishment following Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The Dominican talent hunt of the past two decades suggests such behavior is not behind us.

#

Film Review: Kano. (2014).

Kano. (2014). [DVD] Taiwan: ARS Film Production; Umin Boya, dir.

This film is like Japanese baseball manga - all plot, no character. And that's a shame because the film could have been so much more. There is almost no investigation of the backgrounds of any of the players, no exploration of the political, economic and social disjunctures of a Japanese-speaking baseball team in occupied Taiwan. Instead, it's all about discipline, team work, loyalty, and determination. These are not unworthy themes, but they've been done before in other sports films. This one tries far too hard, with an intrusive, cloying score and heavily saturated images. For a lengthier treatment of these issues, see Tsui's review in the Hollywood Reporter.

#

Review: Kaufman, J. and Patterson, O. (2005). Cross-National Cultural Diffusion: The Global Spread of Cricket.

Kaufman, J. and Patterson, O. (2005). Cross-National Cultural Diffusion: The Global Spread of Cricket. American Sociological Review, 70(1), pp.82-110.

The article is concerned principally with cricket but baseball is discussed at length to highlight relevant issues of cultural diffusion.  For 25-30 years until about 1880, baseball and cricket enjoyed near equal popularity in North America.  Cricket quickly lost ground and is now nearly forgotten in the US and Canada, while maintaining immense popularity in many commonwealth nations.  The authors, two Harvard sociologists, argue the key factor in cricket’s NA decline was equality of economic opportunity.  Faced with a loss in economic prestige, social elites limited equality of cultural opportunity.  Where baseball was available to all in NA (and cricket was similarly available in other colonies), cricket was protected in NA as a sign of cultural primacy.  Baseball's diffusion was greatly accelerated by commercial interests that never coalesced around cricket.

Photo:  Penn State University Archives Digital Image Collection, 1879 Sports goods advertisement

#

Review: Gelber, S. (1983). Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of Baseball

Flickr:  Hastings Historical Society:  Uniontown Baseball Team ca. 1900

Gelber, S. (1983). Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of Baseball. Journal of Social History, 16(4), pp.3-22.

Gelber, an historian at University of Santa Clara, argues for a congruence theory of leisure, that hobbies are embedded in, informed by, and mirror the larger social, economic, and political realities (in contrast to compensatory theories, which see leisure as constructed to provide for deficiencies in the larger reality).  Baseball was a product of 19th century industrialization and reflected and reinforced the values of that reality.  It was a game that reflected the transitional nature of a society whose economy demanded specialized labor concentrated in factories, in which work was highly regulated, and depended on the orchestrated effort of a team of workers.

“By concentrating less on the role of nature in baseball and more on the nature of the roles of its players, a very different pattern emerges. The game's attraction lay in its congruence with everyday experience. It was popular because it was similar to, not because it was different from, day to day life. Baseball provided the male business worker with a leisure analog to his job. In the game he experienced social relationships and psychological demands similar to those he knew at work. Indeed, he was working at playing, and by doing so was minimizing dissonance between those two aspects of life. Baseball brought psychological harmony. It appeared to be different from work because it was outdoor play, but underneath it was the same.”  

#

Japan Baseball Trip: Buying tickets

Tokyo Giants Ticketing (in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean)

After determining the schedule and making hotel reservations, the next order of business was securing tickets, a process in which I am still engaged.  All Japanese teams have fan clubs that are given priority access to tickets.  Sales to the general public don’t begin until a month or two before game dates (depending on the team), though some Japanese ticketing systems (such as Pia) offer the option to make ticket reservations.  A reservation does not guarantee a ticket, only a place in line.  There are other complications.  Pia, for example, will not accept credit cards issued by a non-Japanese bank.

Planning a baseball trip to Japan

Nippon Professional Baseball

It wasn't a long cherished dream to do a baseball trip to Japan.  It wasn't much of a dream at all. But I'm now just a few weeks away from boarding a plane.  For those who might have such dreams or aspirations, I thought perhaps my experience might be helpful in planning your own trip.

I’m not highly paid, but as a teacher I get long vacations.  Every summer my wife and I visit my family in the US, or hers in Japan.  This summer we’ll be visiting the latter and for the first time in a number of summers I found myself with no research projects or conferences.

While considering what I might do with my time, I bumped into the idea of a baseball tour.  Last summer I had a great day photographing at a US game in Atlanta.  With more available time, I could do the same in Japan many times over. I haven’t visited any Japanese stadiums apart from Fukuoka Dome, at which I attended a couple of Hawks games when we lived in that city.

So, why not?  I may never have a chance like this again.

My trip as scheduled now includes eight games in four stadiums featuring seven teams, plus a day at a fifth stadium for a high school tournament, all over a period of 16 days.

Book review: Gall, J. and Engel, G. (2006). Sayonara home run!: The art of the Japanese baseball card

Gall, J. and Engel, G. (2006). Sayonara home run!: The art of the Japanese baseball card. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

This is at once a beautiful and disappointing book.

The design and layout are superb and do much to highlight its subject, a collection of early to mid-20th century Japanese baseball cards.   Given the quick methods of production and cheap materials used during this period, the cards don’t present well in large format.  Most have been photographed in sets and appear in these pages in groups of anywhere from 4 to 30.  There isn’t much to learn here by looking, apart from acquiring a sense of the visual language used in marketing Japanese popular culture. For a few minutes you can enjoy the sight of Asian men in various poses of playing baseball, outfitted in old-style uniforms labelled with familiar names such as the Giants and Braves, surrounded by exotic text, sometimes rendered in penciled lines and most often presented in garish color.

About midway through there is a wonderful two page spread of a pair of children’s school bags from the 1940s, together with a set of cards found within.  Where did they come from?  Who found them?  Where are they now?  We are left without a clue, and this points to a serious deficiency in this text.  While it contains short essays on Japanese card production that are informative and not to be found in most other sources on Japanese baseball, there is little else here that can’t be found in Wikipedia or other common sources.  In the Further Reading section, the authors recommend the books of Robert Whiting, as well as a couple of other regularly cited sources, but nothing anyone interested in Japanese baseball hasn’t seen elsewhere, nothing that suggests the authors went to any great effort in researching material for this book.  While the cards presented here appear to have come from the personal collections of the authors, you’ll discover this only by looking in the Credits section at the back of the book.  There is no discussion of how or when these cards came into their possession.  There are no interviews with Japanese card collectors, dealers, card manufacturers, no background on the companies that made cards or the people involved in their production, no pictures of cards in situ.   Sayonara Home Run! is, in fact, a photographic collection of cards with a bit of text for the reader who knows nothing about Japanese baseball.

As a visual record, this is a lovely collection. Unfortunately, binding is poor.  The cover quickly separated itself from the text block under normal reading conditions.

#

Book review: Klein, A. (1991). Sugarball: The American Game, The Dominican Dream.

Klein, A. (1991). Sugarball: The American Game, The Dominican Dream. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Alan Klein is a Professor of Sociology-Anthropology at Northeastern University who has published extensively on the intersections of sport, economy, politics and culture among Dominicans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and North Americans.  Sugarball was his first book-length project, an investigation of baseball in the Dominican Republic, which since the 1950s has been a regular and frequent supplier of high caliber baseball talent to the US professional league.  

In an Appendix Klein reviews his approach to data collection, which included extended periods of residence in Dominican baseball camps observing and interviewing managers, coaches, and players, teaching English classes to prospects, and following players home on weekends to witness their home life. He also engaged in observation at Dominican ballparks, interviewed fans, and surveyed baseball coverage in the local press.  He does not comment on his Spanish ability except to note that he was sometimes required to carry out interviews in Spanish and occasionally act as translator.  Taken together with his survey of local newspapers, this suggests a high level of fluency.

Book review: Beyond Baseball: Rounding First

Venn, D. (2016). Beyond Baseball: Rounding First. World Beyond Publishing.

Rounding First, the subtitle of this 200-page self-published book, is derived from the name of an American NPO supplying used baseball gear to children in Nicaragua. It has since branched out into other projects, including agriculture and health care. The title, Beyond Baseball, addresses the author’s understanding of his two week experience distributing equipment to teams in Nicaragua. He questions his own presence as a former ballplayer and recent college graduate, as well as the value of sporting goods to a country that has difficulty feeding itself.

The answer to the first question is this book, Venn’s contribution to spreading the word on the good work of Helping Kids Round First. He sent me a copy for review, and now here you are reading about it. Hopefully, you will be curious enough to inquire further, donate, or perhaps join one of Rounding First’s trips. If so, you might also be interested in reading Venn’s account for a more in-depth look at what goes into one of these visits, from collection and shipping of equipment, to sorting, packing, and personally delivering hundreds of kilos of baseball gear. (You’ll also have to read about Venn’s romantic relationships, but thankfully those interludes are infrequent.) Money from book sales goes to Helping Kids Round First.

Book Review: Gmelch and Weiner, J. In the ballpark: The working lives of baseball people. 1998.

Gmelch, G. and Weiner, J. (1998). In the ballpark: The working lives of baseball people. Washington [D.C.]: Smithsonian Institution Press.

This slim volume looks at people usually ignored in baseball or sport books, those behind the scenes who make the on-field drama possible, everyone from the usher to the beer vendor to the general manager.  Produced by a professional anthropologist who was also a minor league player, the book is comprised of oral histories derived from interview transcripts with twenty-one employees of professional baseball organizations in the United States.  Each 8-10 page chapter includes a description of the kind of work performed, the particular challenges of the job, how the person first became involved in the work of baseball, and in perhaps half of the accounts some discussion of salary.

Visit the FB Group

The Anthropology of Baseball at Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/458681047676053/