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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.”  

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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.

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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.