A Nagoya encounter

Ueda-san was an average-looking, middle-aged Japanese guy with a full head of hair and a Chunichi Dragons jersey on his back.  He arrived just as the game began and sat to my right at the end of the aisle.  He didn’t say a thing, just rummaged around in his bag and took out a container of yakisoba, which he proceed to devour in a few quick bites before sitting back to watch the game. Between innings I started making small talk and before you know it Ueda-san felt free to unburden himself on the stranger sitting next to him at Nagoya Dome.  I subsequently learned about his wife’s recent death to cancer, his children’s marriages, and his desire to someday visit all the baseball stadiums in Japan and walk the Shikoku pilgrimage.  At one point he realized how he had been going on and apologized for taking advantage before literally offering me the shirt off his back.  As a long-time fan of the Dragons, he had dozens of jerseys, he said, and he felt like I should have this one on the occasion of my first visit to Nagoya.  He had a smartphone, but he insisted he didn’t have email or Facebook and that we should confine our relationship to these few hours at the ballpark.  Maybe we’ll meet again someday somewhere, he said.  Maybe we will.

#

Rooting for Laundry

Rooting for Laundry from Melel Media on Vimeo.

I'm in the midst of John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden, a wonderfully informative, entertaining and evocative book. Thorn's voice and phrasing have obviously been influenced by a lifetime reading Victorian-era sources, which he quotes liberally throughout, and he brings to his topic a breadth of knowledge that extends beyond the period, the sport, or the country.

In a discussion of the commercialization of baseball, for example, he notes one of the first occasions for what had been until then locally stocked teams taking on paid players from outside the community.  In 1869 the Cincinnati Base Ball Club hired an almost entire roster of outsiders, leaving its supporters to "root for the laundry."  The quotation is from a comment made by comedian Jerry Seinfeld about the utter emptiness of the modern professional sports team, in which players and managers regularly change from season to season, in which owners move teams from city to city, and whose only enduring feature is the uniform.

Thorn goes on to note such a phenomenon was not unknown to the ancients, quoting Pliny the Younger on the chariot races of 2000 years ago:

“If indeed it were the swiftness of the horses, or the skill of the men that attracted them, there might be some pretense for it [the passion of the crowd]. But it is the dress they like; it is the dress that takes their fancy. And if, in the midst of the course and the contest, the different parties were to change colors their different partisans would change sides and instantly desert the very same men and horses whom just before they were eagerly following. . . . Such mighty charms, such wondrous power reside in the color of a paltry tunic!”

# 

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.

#