A Saitama encounter

The author, Iwaki-san, Matuskawa-san

Matsukawa-san said, Why don’t you come and sit next to me?  The people who own these seats never come, he claimed.  We took him up on his offer, Iwaki in the center, Matsukawa and I on either side.  Good thing, too, because Matsukawa had a rough way of speaking that was not easy to understand and Iwaki could help explain if required.

During the game itself (a win for the Lions against the last-place Marines) I didn’t interact much Matsukawa, but we spent a good 40 minutes in conversation on the train back to Ikebukuro.  A man of odd jobs who worked 23 years as a truck driver, he claimed to have no family, which is I suppose why he had the means for season tickets, regular transport from Gunma prefecture, and hotels in Ikebukuro during every home stand, 73 games a season.  He claims to have been a Lion’s fans from a young age, back when they belonged to Nishitetsu, the Kyushu rail company.

How did a kid in Kanto grow up being a fan of a team so far away in an age when there was only newspaper and a few channels each on television and radio?  It seems he was something of the contrarian.  Everyone he knew loved the Giants, and so he wanted to be a fan of some other team.  I’m not sure why he settled on the Lions, but it turned out to be a good choice as they ended up moving to Saitama, far closer to Gunma than Fukuoka.  He remembered the Lions playing at Heiwadai, a stadium that has since been torn down, but whose name remains attached to a park and a track-and-field venue. We spoke a bit about Fukuoka, since I used to live there and know a bit about it, and he warned that the Hawks was becoming the Pacific league version of the Giants, a team fronted by a huge corporation with the money to buy the best team, year after year, and thereby thwart the aspirations of other teams and communities. Since retiring Matsukawa has travelled to a number of stadiums up and down the peninsula, from Kyushu to Hokkaido, and hopes someday to visit the US to see some live MLB games, and maybe even to Korea and Taiwan for some pro-league Asian games.

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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.

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Film: Dream Chaser, a story of Chinese baseball

Baseball does not yet have wide appeal in China.  In a country with a population four times that of the US, it has only six teams in its nascent professional league.  If you were a young man in China with a love of baseball, the choice between university and sport might be a difficult one to make.

The subtitles in the first few minutes are cut off a bit at bottom but still readable.

Enjoy.

I'm not sure how to embed media from Chinese websites, so here's the easy solution---follow the link:  http://sports.le.com/news/963125019.html

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Interview with MLB Advanced Media

No, not a job interview.  Actually, I am planning on moving and have been doing job interviews, which is why I haven't posted much here of late, but I'm a teacher, not a market researcher or analyst.  That's who I seemed to be speaking with yesterday.  The interview was led by a young white man by the name of Scott, and was observed by five other men whom I never met, heard from, or saw.  Only their names appeared in the video-chat software as logged-in to our group (which is why I assume they were men -- they all had typically male names).  The interview was scheduled for thirty minutes and lasted twenty-five.

Why did they want to speak with me?

Book review: Thorn, J. (2014). Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game.

Thorn, J. (2014). Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. 1st ed. New York: Simon & Schuster.

This is not a suitable introductory text to the origins of baseball.  Readers without the appropriate background will very quickly find themselves wading through a veritable sea of names, dates, claims and counterclaims, much of it presented out of chronological sequence, and a fair portion made of up of extensive extracts from primary documents.

The book opens at the turn of the 20th century with a commission tasked with tracing the origins of baseball.  Thorn then moves in and out of narratives, back and forth across this point in time, to examine the commission’s collected documents and determine what was overlooked, or perhaps deliberately ignored, in reaching the now debunked claims for baseball having been invented by Abner Doubleday in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York.  It’s an interesting tale, and Thorn has obviously done his research, but this is clearly a book for those who might have a stake in the story, or how it is told.  A book, in other words, for historians and researchers.

Special Instructions to Players

Almost every chapter in Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden contains a historical oddity worth a bookmark -- or a blog post.  In this case, the league's Special Instructions to Players.  Thorn sets the scene:

In the National League, [John T.] Brush tried to introduce reforms and to punish miscreants, partly from conviction and partly because he thought it made business sense. ... League attendance figures, stagnant on a per-club basis, worried him. At a league meeting in March 1898, Brush pushed through a resolution to “suppress obscene, indecent, and vulgar language on the ball field by players.” It passed unanimously, and then a shocking secret memorandum was delivered by hand to each of the twelve clubs and perhaps each league player—its obscenity made it undeliverable by ordinary mail without risk of federal prosecution—detailing precisely the language that had been complained of in the previous year.

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!”

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