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.