More Early Morning Baseball Adventures

It soon became clear why I was able to hook on with the Wakakusa team just by asking. We were very bad. Half the team was over forty, the right fielder looked as if he had never played a game of baseball before (because, as it turned out, he hadn't), the third baseman (one of the better players) never bothered to go to bed the night before the games, and each week we struggled to put nine players on the field. I don't recall winning any games in the year and a half I played for Wakakusa, but this was a familiar feeling for me, having been on an 0-17 team during my senior year of high school.

But playing for Wakakusa was fun and full of adventure.

Often, the fun started the night before. Saturday nights were usually spent drinking with friends, though I imposed a midnight curfew on myself to make sure I had at least four hours of sleep before the alarm rang at 4;30 am. However, during the warm months, at about 2:30 am each week, I would be awakened by the bosozoku -- the "speed tribes" -- teenage motorcycle gangsters who would cruise the streets of Tokyo, blocking traffic, gunning their engines, and generally irritating everyone within earshot. Bosozuku were the minor leagues for the yakuza gangs, and they didn't care who they pissed off. The cops were scared of them and did nothing about them, just happy to see them pass off into the next police box's district. But, the bosozoku were nothing if not punctual, and they followed the same circuit each week, which brought them to the intersection of Yamanote Road and Inokashira Road, perhaps 100 meters from my apartment, where they would stop and gun their engines for several minutes, at precisely the same time each Sunday morning. Each week, upon being awakened, I would lie in my futon fuming and fantasizing of revenge: spreading nails and broken glass across the intersection, or of stretching piano wire at neck height between the pillars of the pedestrian bridge crossing the intersection. I'd fall back to sleep to the comforting thought of bosozoku bloodily wiping out as their tires shredded or slicing their own heads off on piano wire they couldn't see in the dark.

As the first gaijin in the league, I became a local celebrity. Word about me spread throughout the league, and members of the other team would often introduce themselves before the game. They all knew my name, and it was very disconcerting. As I warmed up, I'd hear them talking about me:

He's got a good arm.

Can he hit?

Look! He does have a big ass, just like the major leaguers.

I started out as our team's catcher, forming a battery with Umezawa-san (or "Ume-san"), a sidearmer who like most Japanese pitchers threw mostly breaking stuff but could also get a surprising amount of zip on the fastball for a 47 year-old sushi chef. Even though catching had been hell on my knees since the tenth grade, when I had to give it up, I enjoyed catching more than any other position. It allowed me to see the whole field, to be involved in every play, to be in control of the game, and to talk to the batters and the umpire. On one particularly bright Sunday morning, the rising sun bore directly at the batter's box from center field. At "balls in!" the umpire and I stood behind the plate, shielding our eyes as we waited for the first batter. "Sure is bright out," I said. After a pause the umpire hesitantly responded, "Oh, is that so?," as if this was new information that he wasn't sure how to address.

Later, I replayed the exchange in my head. All I had said was, "Mabushii desu ne . . ." ("Sure is bright out"). Why had he answered, "Oh, is that so?" when it was obviously so bright out? And what was he so sheepish about? Only much later did I realize I had made an ever so small, and ever so important error. I'd replaced the "bu" in mabushii with "zu." So, I had told the umpire, out of the blue, "Mazushiii desu ne . . ." ("You know, I am very poor. [I don't have any money].") No wonder he had responded the way he did.

After a few weeks, my knees were aching beyond my capacity to endure it any longer, and I told my manager that I could not catch any more. He asked if I could pitch, and I told him I had pitched in high school. I should have known better, because saying you played high school baseball has an entirely different meaning in Japan. Rather than shabby uniforms and games no one attends, high school baseball conjures up images of the nationally televised national high school baseball championship, known informally as "Koshien," after the famous field on which it the final games are played, the hallowed home field of the Hanshin Tigers. Koshien is a single-elimination tournament played by teams from all over the country before capacity crowds. The final is often an epic extra-inning marathon in which both starting pitchers -- who have started every game of the tournament -- throw goose eggs at the other side for 16 innings. Many players, like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui, go directly from Koshien to Japan Professional Baseball. So, when one says, "I played high school baseball" in Japan, people are impressed.

My manager told me I was starting that morning. At least for that game, he was onto something. The slightly smaller Japanese baseball made it much easier for me to throw a curveball, and for six innings, I throw no-hit ball. We lost in the seventh (we played seven inning games) when I walked a batter and then, with two outs, the batter hit a routine pop fly to our right fielder, who, playing as if he'd never played the game before (because he hadn't), dropped it and then kicked it into foul territory, allowing the only run of the game to score. But my manager was beaming with the thought that he now improved the team's chances considerably. In future games, though, my pitching did not live up to the early promise. A player on another team told me I had a good fastball, but I was telegraphing when I was going to throw the curve.

That did not stop me from making two all-star game appearances during my time on the team. Wakakusa's manager managed our division's all-star team both years, and he selected me both times. I always assumed that it was because I was the league's only gaijin, but I enjoyed playing in the games nevertheless. The first year, I played right field, and made a nice play to double a runner off first base on a line drive that I had to run some distance to catch. The second year, I started the game as pitcher and, against the best players from the other division, got lit up like a string of red plastic chili lights. It was a very, very long night. But, these games were in the evening, under the lights at a good university baseball field, and a lot of my friends came to see me play.

Playing baseball was one of the best experiences I had in Japan. I got to meet real salt-of-the-earth, every day Japanese people, who were more fun and easy-going than most of the people in the button-down places I worked, where everyone had graduated from Tokyo University and took himself very seriously. I made some good friends, particularly Ume-san, whose sushi shop I used to visit even after I stopped playing for the team. And, I hit my first home run since Little League -- a dinger into the Tama River on the fly that I knew was gone the minute I made contact.

Dawn Baseball

It's hard to imagine in the depths of winter that spring is near. But the proof that I am right in spite of the snow is that, starting tomorrow, thousands of professional baseball players will be suiting up in locker rooms across Florida and Arizona for the first day of spring training. So, my mind turns to baseball.

In a couple of short weeks, it will be March. March has a very distinct smell, of new grass pushing its way through damp, thawing earth. For me, growing up in the Northeast, where we were permitted to begin practicing for high school baseball on March 8, new, damp grass is the smell of baseball, of a new season, of the end of the long, dark winter with nothing to watch on TV except basketball, and the approach of summer. More than two decades after graduating from high school, the March smell still fills me with longing to play ball.

Tokyo -- when you can find some grass -- also has the green scent of spring in early March. In 1993, the spring baseball smell overcame me, and I began asking around about adult baseball leagues. It turned out that one of the staff at the gym knew a member who played in such a league. I was introduced, and before I knew it, was a member of the ironically named team, Wakakusa -- "New Grass".

Our pre-season meeting took place in a bowling alley. It was here that I learned that our games took place at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings. Most of the men in my league were blue collar guys who worked on weekends -- sushi chefs, soba makers, factory workers, and even a professional bowler -- and Sunday mornings were the only time they could play. But it was a high-level league, with a number of former players from the industrial leagues and from the Big Six colleges, and I was happy just to have the chance to play baseball again, even at the literal crack of dawn. I was so happy that I volunteered to play where the team needed me most, as catcher, even though I had given this position up in tenth grade because, thanks to years of catching, by the age of 15 I had the knees of a forty year old. (Do the math and figure out whose knees I have now.)

At the end of the meeting, we scheduled our first and only practice, at the playing fields, near Futago-Tamagawa Station, running along the Tama River, which forms the southern boundary between Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture. On practice day, I arrived at the field a little early. I picked a bench at the nearest diamond and waited for my teammates. The sun was coming up to my left, over the bridge carrying the train line into Kanagawa, and a mist rose from the slowly warming baseball diamonds. Off to the right, tiny on the horizon, Mt. Fuji's still snow-covered peak slowly turned from pink to yellow to white as the sun climbed in the sky. Though I wore a hooded sweatshirt over my uniform top, the cold March wind blew right through my sanitary leggings and my polyester uniform pants. No one showed up for the practice. I trudged home.

At the gym the next day, I saw my new teammate, the professional bowler. He asked why I had missed practice. Only then did I realize that the playing fields ran for miles along the Tama's banks and that I had been waiting in the wrong place. Our field was actually a mile or so further upriver from the train station. We arranged that from then on, another teammate, Umezawa-san, would meet me at the station and drive me to the field.

For the next eight months, from March through November, I rose every Sunday morning at 4:30 am, grabbed some rice balls and canned coffee for the train at the 7-11, boarded the first train from Tomigaya Station at 5:05 am, and arrived at Futago-Tamagawa shortly before 6:00 am, where Umezawa-san would pick me up in the van he used to ferry fish from the Tsukiji fish market to his sushi restaurant each morning. We'd play a seven inning game from 6:30 am to 8:30 am, followed by breakfast at a nearby Denny's. (Yes, I always had the Grand Slam.) Then Umezawa-san would drop me back at Futago-Tamagawa Station, and I would board the train home, letting the little old ladies from the Kanagawa suburbs start their Sunday outings in Tokyo with the spectacle of a gaijin, smelling slightly of fish, dressed in a baseball uniform that, at 9:30 am, was already covered in sweat and diamond dirt.