Where the Twain Shall Meet: Baseball in America and Japan

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).

 

When a team of Japanese collegians defeated their American counterparts to claim the 1984 Olympic gold medal for baseball, stunned American fans realized what the Japanese have felt for years: Baseball is as truly theirs as ours. Japan’s upset victory had even greater impact upon Americans than the initial victories by Taiwan, South Korea, and Okinawa in the Little League World Series some fifteen years ago. Then, at least, disgruntled u.S. fans could claim that the Asiatic teams consisted of older players hiding behind their small stature; and certainly the Asiatic Little League squads were selected from among the best players in entire nations, not just the best in extended neighborhoods.

Olympic baseball, however, is just one or two steps from top-rank professional baseball. If the American game is still intrinsically superior, at this level the edge should show, even granting that the single-game elimination format of Olympic play permits flukes and does not force the teams to call upon their depth. Americans may still produce more and better second-line starting pitchers, relief pitchers, pinch-hitters, platoon outfielders, and utility infielders, but up front, the Japanese Olympians proved themselves equal, if not superior.

Thus far, no American major league club has ever lost an exhibition series to Japanese professionals. However, the Kansas City Royals had to beat the Japanese champion Yomiuri Giants six games to two to salvage a 9-7-1 overall record on their 1981 tour. The Royals claimed they started poorly because of a three-week layoff between the end of the 162-game American League season and the beginning of their visit to Japan—but the Japanese players had been waiting around even longer since the end of their 130-game season. Like most other American baseball authorities, the Royals still describe Japanese baseball as the equivalent of American Double-A minor leagues. They point out that even Double-A teams occasionally beat the big leaguers in exhibitions. But sooner or later some cocky major leaguers are going to arrive in Japan expecting to clobber quasi-minor leaguers and really get their ears pinned back. The Olympics should be taken as a warning that Japanese baseball has not only established itself as a cultural tradition, but also matured at a top-flight level.

The past two decades of Japanese play represented a Golden Age, setting standards for the future much as the 1920s and 1930s set enduring standards for the American game. Since the 1920s, as documented in Thorn and Palmer’s The Hidden Game of Baseball, the average American major leaguer has risen to the levels of natural ability and acquired skill once possessed only by stars.

Thus today’s American stars stand out much less than did Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Walter Johnson. Likewise, though Japanese baseball no longer boasts players as dominant as home run king Sadaharu Oh was during the 1960s, this is because the average player has improved. The single-season and career records Oh and others set during the 1960s and 1970s may stand as long as the records of Ruth, Cobb, and Johnson because in Japan as in America it is no longer possible for anyone player, no matter how good, to be that much better than all the rest.

It wasn’t always so. Just a few generations back, the Great American Pastime was as foreign to Japan as the automobile and electronics industries. Japanese players were obviously smaller, slower, awkward, less understanding of the nuances of the game. But as with automobiles and electronics, Japan imported know-how, worked hard, and put forth an impressive product.

“After the war,” Japanese professional baseball com- missioner Takeso Shimoda told the New York Times, “we had to start from zero. We had to improve the technical level of Japanese players. … We had to hire American players. It succeeded. Now there’s not much difference between American and Japanese players, technically.”

He might have been speaking of cars or television sets, as an executive for Honda, Nissan, Sony, Sanyo, or Mitsubishi. Yet Shimoda wasn’t speaking of a business success so much as of a cultural transformation, of a process that more or less replaced institutionalized emperor-worship with the transient idolatry that fans individually accord to favorite star athletes. Where Japanese boys once memorized the sayings of philosopher-emperors, since the middle 1960s they have memorized the statistics on the backs of Kabaya-Leaf baseball cards, just as their American counterparts who, with rare exceptions, long since ceased memorizing passages from the Bible.

The economic incentive behind Japan’s rapid industrialization is clear enough, but why should baseball have come with it? Why should baseball have become a national preoccupation while other American sports and other facets of American culture haven’t? What particularly attracts the Japanese en masse to baseball and even bubblegum cards, but not to football or drag-racing?

Golf has been adopted among the Japanese economic elite because the nation’s few greens provide an internationally acceptable place for informal business discussion. The young, upwardly mobile Japanese likewise play handball, squash, and tennis, and run marathons but, as in America, none of these successful transplants has become a major spectator sport, televised every day and discussed wherever men gather. Boxing, hockey, and basketball have been transplanted as spectator sports, but enjoy distinctly minor status.

Baseball possesses a uniquely national character in both Japan and America in part because it came first, ahead of the other leading spectator sports. But it also fills a cultural role that the other sports can’t. Battalions of American sociologists and historians have tried to figure out just what baseball means, without reaching any consensus. However, historically it is clear that the rise of baseball was coincidental with that of industrialization in both the United States and Japan. It is further clear from the overseas birthplaces of many of the pioneer players that baseball in America caught on quite rapidly with recent immigrants, who might have been expected to stick with the sports brought with them from Europe. European-style football, rugby, cricket, and rounders all require less space to play, for one thing, and less equipment. They’re easier for spectators to understand (all but cricket). Yet they faded into virtual oblivion, while the largest immigrant centers became the founding cities of the U.S. major leagues.

Sociologist Ken Hogarty, of the University of California at Berkeley, may have pinpointed the key difference between baseball and most other sports in his unpublished doctoral thesis (1977). According to Hogarty, the primary conflict in baseball is individual versus society, whereas the primary conflict in most other sports is nation versus nation. The model for most other sports is war, Hogarty observed, with the individual subordinate to the group, while baseball he compared to the classical western. The lone cowboy-outlaw, the batter, rides into town to confront a hostile posse of nine. Usually, society triumphs and the anarchic cowboy is buried in his dugout, the symbolic Boot Hill. Sometimes, however, the cowboy-outlaw shoots his way into the bank, first base. Sometimes his gang then shoots him back out of trouble with a succession of hits that finally bring him home. Once in a while, a particularly valiant cowboy shoots his own way clear through town with a home run. The umpires, in Hogarty’s view, represent God rather than human authority. Dressed in their dark suits, they arbitrate justice.

Hogarty’s model clearly explains why baseball should have appealed to U.S. immigrants. Often as not, they came to America in rebellion against authority back home. Many had themselves been outlaws, of one sort or another. They could identify with the ambitious batsman/gunslinger who takes ’em all on. And, as they gradually gained property and responsibilities, they could identify with the home-team defense, too.

In football, basketball, hockey, soccer, tennis, even chess, the object of the game is capturing territory, plundering or violating a protected treasure—goal-nets and basketball hoops mix sexual and territorial symbolism so thoroughly as to leave no doubt how the reproductive and territorial drives are connected. Such sports date back to the very beginnings of society, to the first time tribal groups engaged in symbolic rather than literal mass combat to determine who would drink first at a watering hole. They survive because we retain our tribal instincts, expressed now as nationalism and political partisanship.

But, particularly since the Declaration of Independence asserted the rights of the individual as equal to those of the state, we no longer think of ourselves first as parts of a greater whole. We are each “me” before we are Christians or Jews, northerners or southerners, blue-collar or white-collar. The rise of baseball historically parallels the rise of individualism, concurrent with the collapse of the village-based, semi-tribal agrarian economy. Alexander Cartwright and Henry Chadwick devised baseball even as Ralph Emerson and Henry David Thoreau distinguished individualism from mere selfishness, the first philosophers to openly salute those “marching to the beat of a different drum.” Their colleague Walt Whitman saluted baseball for expressing the same independent American character that Emerson and Thoreau defined.

Unique among sports, baseball not only permits but demands that each player briefly emerge from among his teammates to stand alone. Every player must belong to the team on defense, but each must hit his own way on base. This balance of social and individual responsibility must have appealed greatly to young men who didn’t really wish to be outcasts forever, but did wish to make the most of their own abilities in whatever field of endeavor.

But that was nineteenth century America, not Japan. Japan has received no recent waves of immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity. Throughout recorded history, Japan has maintained a society that has been regimented, if not entirely socially stratified.

Indeed, historically Japan would seem much more like Europe than like America, so that one might expect the Japanese game to have followed the European course. A game called baseball developed from rounders and cricket in England even earlier than it emerged in America—again concurrent with industrialization—but became a girls’ game, which novelist Jane Austen mentioned in Northanger Abbey), written ca. 1803. It faded from popularity as Victorian mores discouraged women’s participation in competitive sports, and vanished by 1850.

Reintroduced repeatedly, baseball did finally catch on somewhat in Europe after World War II, with Little League and adult weekend clubs now scattered among all the western nations. Italy boasts one low-caliber professional league including several American ex-major leaguers, while The Netherlands recently sent pitcher Win Remmerswaal to the Boston Red Sox, the first major leaguer to spend his entire amateur career in Europe.

Europe is now well into evolving a postindustrial economy, however. Baseball is at most a successful minor sport, not a significant cultural influence as it has been in Japan for decades. If the evolution of baseball in Europe could be compared at all to baseball history in America, it must be placed at about the Civil War level, the point at which troop movements and the new transcontinental railroads first spread the game from coast to coast, north and south.

Baseball in Japan, by contrast, is today about as well established as it was in the United States in 1919, by which time it was already undeniably the Great American Pastime. American professional baseball was exactly fifty years old in 1919, the Cincinnati Red Stockings having become the first admittedly salaried team in 1869. The first Japanese professional team, the Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo, was chartered almost exactly 50 years ago, on December 26, 1934. The Hanshin Tigers of Osaka followed a year later, on December 10, 1935. The Chunichi Dragons of Magoya were assembled on January 15,1936. The Hankyu Braves of Nishinomiya came together just eight days later. Nineteen thirty-six brought formation of Japan’s first fully professional baseball league. Expansion began when the Nankai Hawks became Osaka’s second professional team on March 29, 1938. Postwar, these original five teams gradually grew into the present two leagues of six teams each, paralleling the development of our American and National Leagues.

When the Yomiuri Giants formed, baseball had been played in Japan for about twenty-five years. A team of American major leaguers first visited in 1912, beating a nine of U.S. missionaries. Babe Ruth led several subsequent visits, leading to the almost annual tradition of one U.S. team or another visiting in the fall. Each time Ruth visited, he and his teammates noted larger crowds and better players, an observation continued to this day.

Like the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the Tokyo Giants drew together top players from various locales—in the Giants’ case, their talent was drawn from college and athletic club teams. They barnstormed against these same colleges and athletic clubs, in the absence of any organized professional league, and having most of the best players they naturally won most of their games. Even after other professional teams organized and the first Japanese major league was formed, the Giants were able to maintain their advantage, winning over thirty championships. Only two other Japanese teams have won as many as ten.

Here Japanese baseball history first diverges from American, and a difference in the cultural traditions appears. Our Red Stockings soon disbanded, with their players moving to other cities, principally Boston and Washington. But the Giants remained together. Other teams similarly started from scratch. Instead of raiding one another to achieve parity, they patiently developed their own talent. The principle became established that Japanese players would generally remain with their clubs for life. To this day, trading and otherwise moving from club to club is rare in Japanese baseball,just as Japanese factory workers rarely move from firm to firm. Japanese club owners, usually large industrial consortiums, are expected to provide lifetime employment for their players in one capacity or another, while players are expected to remain unswervingly loyal to their bosses.

These expectations of loyalty have recently become a point of conflict between the Japanese teams and imported American players, a conflict of great symbolic significance that may influence the future direction of all Japanese society. On the one hand, imported American players are viewed as mercenaries, and are clearly treated as such, hired, fired, and blamed for team failures with an abandon management would never display toward native players. On the other hand, the imported players are expected to conform at least outwardly to the same rules as the natives: to respect their supposed betters and keep their mouths shut, just as if they could expect similar long-term rewards for good behavior.

Grafting on an almost feudal system of team loyalty was only part of how the Japanese adapted baseball customs to suit the traditions of their own society. Baseball took root in Japan at precisely the time when most other foreign activities became suspect, the period during the late 1930s when tariff wars with Great Britain and the United States were raising tensions that culminated in World War II. As Japanese baseball promoters realized immediately, the game would have to take on a nationalistic character to survive.

To great extent, this influenced the style of play. In the heyday of American jingoism, between the Spanish Civil War and World War I, the American game endured the “deadball” era, a phase in which managers tried to replace the freewheeling Wild West style of offense that characterized the ’90s with team play emphasizing the sacrifice bunt. The sacrifice was lauded by sportswriters while players swinging for home runs were derided as “rutting sluggers” with more muscle than either brains or character. Baseball in Japan entered a similar phase, with several significant differences. Despite the patriotic emphasis on conformity during the American deadball era, Americans still prided themselves on being rough-and-ready. Thus American pitchers continued knocking batters down with inside fastballs and American baserunners threatened fielders with their spikes at every opportunity. While sublimating offense, the American deadball era might have featured the most violently aggressive style of play ever. The Japanese, on the other hand, pride themselves on courtesy. As recently as the mid-1960s, pitchers apologized for accidently “dusting off” batters, and no Japanese player ever physically challenged another. Players even bowed to the umpires who called them out. Deadball play in Japan stressed the sacrifice without any form of self-assertion emerging until after World War II.

Thus, even as jingoistic generals urged a return to the code of the samurai and other unique cultural traditions, baseball was not only tolerated but even encouraged. Baseball and military preparations were perhaps the only two realms in which Japanese leaders urged the population to learn from the West right up to the outbreak of war. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, when most foreigners were being hustled from the country, former major league catcher-turned-spy Moe Berg was not only allowed in but was welcomed with the red carpet, was allowed to take photos from a tower overlooking Tokyo, and was further permitted to take them home again, to be used in directing American bombers. Berg recalled in his memoirs that his having played on one of Babe Ruth’s teams that toured Japan served him much better with the Japanese authorities than either his passport or his ability to speak Japanese.

Nor did the war itself curtail Japanese enthusiasm for baseball. Americans who flew on General Jimmy Doolittle’s 1942 raid against Tokyo recalled feeling guilty about dropping their bombs after passing over children at a sandlot ballgame. Japanese troops on the Pacific islands shouted “To hell with Babe Ruth!” at American invaders, but the invaders usually found shell-pocked baseball diamonds ready for play just as soon as they finished mopping up.

If baseball were only another game providing some sort of moral lesson, it probably wouldn’t have caught on so strongly, certainly not at that time. But the nature of the lesson had special appeal. Although Japanese baseball was played in a fashion tending to promote traditional values, it added the notion that there are times in life when it is not only necessary but also good and praiseworthy that each individual step forward and do something conspicuous. Though ostentation was discouraged, the spotlight was unmistakably focused upon the man at bat, upon his individual contribution to the greater whole.

Here, at least, the small fish in the big sea were not permanently anonymous. Here also, they received the opportunity to perform so well as to become big fish. The promise of social mobility endemic to America was rather new to Japan, but equally appealing—and all the more noticeable, because in Japan hardly any other field of endeavor overtly offered it. The peasant who accepted industrialization might indeed become richer, but he would still be a peasant, whereas the humble batsman who excelled might become exalted as a samurai.

Perhaps the most Significant clue to what baseball means in Japan lies within the event that prompted Commissioner Shimada to address the New York Times—an event highlighting essential differences. A few months before the Olympics, xenophobic Japanese baseball fans including Shimada raised a hue and cry against the foreign players they once enthusiastically hired and copied. Foreign players should be banned, they argued, for corrupting the character of their national sport. Their definition of that character emerges from the origin of their wrath.

Former U.S. major league infielder Don Money touched off the uproar by signing with a Japanese team for more money than any of his native teammates were making, reporting to the team out of playing condition, griping incessantly about the Japanese training discipline, and finally leaving the team without permission in mid-pennant race. Money claimed he jumped the club to receive treatment for an injury from his own doctor back home, but Japanese baseball people weren’t convinced. Many other disillusioned American players have used the same excuse as a means of escaping their Japanese contracts. Foreigners were nearly banned a decade ago, in 1973, when Joe Pepitone jumped the Yakult Atoms with a purported injury best diagnosed as acute culture shock.

Money was an irritant, both as an individual and as an economic factor, but Money in either sense wasn’t the primary issue. The primary issue for most Japanese fans was that players like Money and Pepitone violate the fundamental tenets of their society by overtly placing their own interests above those of their team. Their actions are discourteous and disloyal. They set a poor example for Japanese youth. American sports columnists reported that Money and Pepitone were simply too individualistic to suit the Japanese, an unfair oversimplification. Money and Pepitone were criticized not for being individualistic so much as for being selfish.

Nor would their conduct have been any more acceptable in the American major leagues. Pepitone, in fact, wound up in Japan after similarly jumping his contract with the Atlanta Braves. During his career, Japanese baseball actually offered him more leeway than the American leagues did, since the standard Japanese contract for foreign players lasts only two years. At that time, players in the U.S. leagues, like native Japanese players, were purportedly bound for life to the teams that owned their contracts. In actuality, American players have always moved rather freely and frequently from club to club, through trades often self-initiated.

Nonetheless, in either nation, Pepitone was expected to honor his contract by playing ball to the best of his considerable ability. In both nations, Pepitone was notorious as a playboy, often criticized for letting off-the-field pursuits interfere with realizing his on-the-field potential. American teams put up with Pepitone for a decade because he still hit better with a hangover than most players who were cold sober. In Japan, however, he hit .163, erasing any claim to special privilege.

Money’s case was somewhat different, in that U.S. baseball norms have changed since Pepitone’s time. Since 1976, about midway through Money’s career, American professional baseball has offered veteran players several means of openly choosing their own teams, through requesting or refusing trades and playing out their contract options. The most significant change from past practice is that today players can change clubs without their former clubs receiving compensation: can in effect sell themselves, instead of being sold by club owners, and pocket the proceeds. But even under this new system, contract jumpers have never been tolerated. A U.S. major leaguer who simply breaks his contract is heavily fined, as Dick Allen was for abandoning first the Phillies and then the White Sox. If less valuable than Allen, one of the game’s all-time great sluggers, a contract-jumper in the U.s. might also be suspended, or unconditionally released, ending the team’s obligation to pay him. Over the last thirty-five years, such cases have usually been resolved through retirement or a trade, rather than confrontation such as happened in Japan in the Money and Pepitone cases.

American fans would certainly boo a Money or Pepitone for jumping his club, just as they booed Allen. The issue in either nation is not “individuality” but honor. Antagonistic toward the Americanization of traditional Japanese society, the xenophobes emphasize the imported players’ mercenary status-warriors with no sense of honor, who unlike the samurai fight only for pay, and then only when they feel like it. After all, the American and Latin American players in Japan have already left other teams and countries, often under questionable circumstances.

The very first American players in Japan actually were mercenaries, more or less. Former Boston Braves’ pitcher Phil Paine became the first ex-major leaguer to play in the Japanese big leagues during 1953, while serving with the U.s. Air Force. Infielder Larry Raines made the U.S. major leagues in the mid-1950s as the best-known of many Americans who also played for Japanese clubs on leave from the U.S. military. Arriving under moral suspicion, meanwhile, was first baseman Don Newcombe, who drank himself out of a brilliant pitching career with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The first American stars to reach Japan, Newcombe and outfielder Larry Doby, played poorly for the Chunichi Dragons in 1962, becoming the focus of criticism directed at U.S. imports ever since.

Although American players have generally given honest effort and conducted themselves honorably, Japanese fans are aware that most view their two major leagues as a sort of Siberia, preferable only to the death of a return to the minors. American players go to Japan either because they’re washed up, not good enough to stick in the U.S. major leagues, or because no American team will put up with them.

Faced with the end of their careers, many Americans do take advantage of the tough Japanese training regimen to get back into shape and play good baseball. George Altman and Willie Kirkland came off the American scrap-heap to become superstars in Japan, thanking martial arts discipline for rescuing them from hard drink, fast women, and what appeared to be fast fade-outs after brilliant beginnings. U.S. minor leaguer John Sipin similarly developed his abilities through the Japanese approach, also becoming a superstar after scarcely getting a trial in the American majors. Former Kansas City infielder Tim Ireland, now with the Hiroshima Carp, speaks for many American players in observing that under the Japanese regimen, “you forfeit individual expression, but you gain in production and non-confusion.”

Great comeback efforts are applauded and compliments from Americans accepted, even when they miss the point. But comebacks attributed to sobriety and proper conditioning also hurt Japanese pride somewhat, since Americans often take the successes of “failures” to mean Japanese baseball is inferior. Never mind that American stars often likewise emerge after interleague trades—Hall of Famers Carl Hubbell and Joe Cronin, for instance. No baseball expert claims the National League of the 1930s was inferior because the late-blooming Hubbell excelled for the Giants after failing with the Tigers, or that the American League was inferior because Cronin made it big with Washington and Boston after riding the Pirates’ bench. The accusation that the Japanese game isn’t quite as good persists because nonentities like Greg “Boomer” Wells keep emerging as superstars when Japanese clubs give them the first real chance to play regularly that they’ve ever had. How, then, to account for the inability of former stars like Reggie Smith or Warren Cromartie to handle Japanese curveball pitching? American scouts find it easier to consider the Smiths and Cromarties washed up than to accept that they’ve misjudged a Sipin or a Wells, or an Altman or Kirkland, for that matter.

The Japanese, meanwhile, are sensitive about being considered a nation of imitators, whose products are essentially inferior to the originals. They’ve worked hard for two generations to erase the “Made in Japan” stigma from cars, cameras, and electronic equipment. Thus when Americans take Japan’s national pastime lightly, the “ban foreigners” approach is understandable. It’s what the U.S. and Soviet Union do, more or less, in boycotting one another’s Olympics … what half the world does in boycotting sports events involving South Africans … what every child does when offended by a playmate: “If you don’t play nice, I’ll take my toys and go home.”

Ironically, the Japanese victory over the U.S. baseball team in the Olympics makes a ban on foreign players less likely. Japanese pride has been assuaged. Now that Japanese collegians, at least, have proved themselves peers of their American counterparts, fans can more easily shrug off the “inferior” rap whenever an American unknown hits a home run. The pressure on imported players to excel conspicuously might also diminish considerably, after decades of mounting.

Having starred for the Hankyu Braves in 1964-68 and again in 1971-72, former infielder Daryl Spencer knows that pressure well, understanding thoroughly how it contributes to the present situation. Not only the fans but “the managers like to use Americans as scapegoats,” Spencer recently explained to baseball historian Mike Mandel. “If the American has a bad year and the team doesn’t do well, then the manager says, “Well, our Americans didn’t do well,” without regard to the performances of the other twenty-three on the roster.

Smith and Cromartie particularly demonstrate this tendency. The Yomiuri Giants more or less expected them to replace Sadaharu Oh, the Korean-born first baseman who hit even more home runs than Hank Aaron (868 to 755 before retiring in 1980) and Shigeo Nagashima, the third baseman whose lifetime batting average is the highest in Japanese baseball history. While the Giants dominated the Japanese game as the New York Yankees once dominated American baseball, Oh and Nagashima were the Japanese Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Through their prime, the Giants alone among Japanese teams steadfastly refused to sign Americans. Their only imported players ever had been Hawaiian-born Wally Yonamine, Andy Miyamoto, Bill Nishida, Jun Hirota, and Fumiharu Kashiwaeda, all of pure Japanese descent, who formed their nucleus during the early 1950s.

But tradition changed fast after Nagashima began declining. In 1975 the Giants jumped at a chance to sign infielder Davey Johnson, a perennial Gold Glove winner and All-Star with the Baltimore Orioles who had also hit 43 home runs as an Atlanta Brave only two years before. Past his prime, Johnson disappointed, but he did have a good year in 1976 as the Giants kept on winning despite Nagashima’s retirement. Aware what might happen, however, if the Giants lost, Johnson fled back to the U.s. after his two-year contract expired, where he enjoyed one more standout season in 1977.

The Giants next traded for John Sipin, who did effectively replace Nagashima during Oh’s last few seasons. In 1980 they added outfielder Roy White, a regular on three recent pennant-winning New York Yankee ballclubs. White starred, but after both Oh and Sipin retired, he slumped, unable to carry the Giants’ offense alone. For the first time, the Giants suffered three consecutive losing seasons. Nagashima, probably the most popular Japanese player ever, had become the team’s general manager. He couldn’t be blamed. Nor could Oh be blamed, now the Giants’ field manager. The Giants dumped White, bringing in first Smith, then Cromartie a season later with fanfare designed to hide the bitter truth that almost their whole club was over 30, they no longer had a single standout pitcher, and hadn’t developed a native star in at least a decade.

Smith had been a legitimate major league superstar in his prime with the Red Sox, Cardinals, and Dodgers, distinguished for home run power, speed on the bases, and one of the best arms in the history of baseball. However, he arrived in Japan at age 38 after a succession of injuries had left him unable to throw hard, run fast, or even swing the bat hard every day. Cromartie, in his early thirties, was a few years past career highs of 14 home runs and .304 in seven seasons with the Montreal Expos. He was a good player, but only a marginal regular. Smith and Cromartie couldn’t possibly have lived up to their billing, even if they had produced as well as Oh and Nagashima did during their last seasons; the Giants couldn’t reasonably have been expected to win. But blaming them for the Giants’ collapse helps Yomiuri management, including Oh and Nagashima, to survive the fans’ disappointment while rebuilding their team from the bottom up.

The expectation that American players should be supermen even extended to Masanori Murakami, the Japanese pitcher who played for the San Francisco Giants in 1964-65. Murakami joined San Francisco almost straight out of college, after only half a season in the U.S. minor leagues. Under normal circumstances, no one would have expected him to create a stir right away. But, recalls Spencer, “Murakami came back [to Japan] and he was the first Japanese to play in the major leagues in America and they had a big bally-hoo every time someone hit a home run off him in spring training. And the kid got really psyched out, and the other Japanese players kind of resented him. He had a miserable time of it for about three or four years. Finally he did have a halfway decent season, but he never became a star,” despite lasting eighteen years in professional baseball. Ironically, reversing the pattern of American players, Murakami returned to the San Francisco Giants for his final comeback attempt. Had he succeeded, he might have proved himself that American and Japanese baseball are simply different, rather than ”better” or “worse.” Instead, he received his unconditional release during 1983 spring training.

Yet another Spencer anecdote reveals the depth of the Japanese inferiority complex concerning American base- ball. As he told Mandel in S.F. Giants: An Oral History (self-published, 1979), “I got in a situation where I was going for the home run crown with this Japanese player. And I was ahead of him 32 to 26 in August. And my interpreter told me to forget the home run title; it had already been decided that I wouldn’t win. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about, but in our next series we went into Tokyo and we were playing in this real small ballpark, and I always hit a couple of home runs there in a three-game series. And they walked me eight straight times. The greatest pitcher in Japan at that time, a kid named Koyama, who could throw strikes blind-folded, he walked me four times on sixteen straight pitches. So they were getting the message to me that I wasn’t going to hit any more home runs. And eventually the guy caught me.”

The Japanese have never been particularly sensitive about Americans winning batting championships. Even before former American major leaguers arrived, Wally Yonamine won the 1951 Central League batting title. Larry Raines won the Pacific League batting title with the Hankyu Braves in 1954. No feelings were hurt because at that time the Japanese leagues did not even pretend to equality. Almost a decade later, playing at the same time as Spencer, former American minor leaguer Jack Bloomfield won back-to-back Pacific League batting titles for the Kintetsu Buffalos in 1962 and 1963.

Home run titles, however, have been a sore point, as has the whole business of home run hitting. In America, the self-sacrificing deadball era ended when pitcher Babe Ruth turned in his toeplate at the peak of his career and became a fence-busting outfielder instead. The deadball era in Japan ended almost the same way, when one-time pitching great Michio Nishizawa returned from World War II with an injured arm, forcing him to become an outfielder-first baseman. Unlike Ruth, Nishizawa had never before been much of a hitter. In fact, in seven previous seasons, he’d hit over .223 just once and that was as a teenaged rookie in 1937, when he got two hits in five at-bats. He’d hit only one home run in his life.

Grateful just to be playing ball again, Nishizawa played conventional deadball for a couple of years, then discovered he was big and strong enough to hit home runs in bunches. The individual self-assertion inherent in swinging for the fences made Nishizawa the target of considerable criticism from the old guard, but most fans loved him. When he retired in 1958, his career total of 212 homers and single-season high of 46 in 1950 were both Japanese baseball records.

They didn’t last long. Because Nishizawa’s teams won, and because his hitting packed the bleachers, Japanese management immediately began seeking more fence- busters. This, as much as a desire to better the overall caliber of their game, was the real impetus behind the wholesale import of American players from the early 1950s on. Even playing in much smaller ballparks than the American norm, few native Japanese had the size and strength to hit home runs before the 1960s, when the improved nutrition of the postwar era brought a generally bigger, stronger generation to maturity.

Meanwhile American players of average power, like Spencer, challenged league and team home run records, while Americans with no power reputation at all frequently became sluggers. The handful of Japanese players who did hit home runs consistently during the 1950s and early 1960s became symbols of national pride: Futoshi Nakanishi of the Nishitsu Lions and Kazuhiro Yamauchi of the Hanshin Tigers, who arrived in 1952; catcher Katsuya Nomura of the Nankai Hawks, who broke in during 1955 and played until age 46 in 1980; Shigeo Nagashima, debut season 1958; Oh, and outfielder Shinichi Eto of the Chunichi Dragons, who came up in 1959. These were the few players whose power complemented their other abilities sufficiently that even the most critical Americans recognized them as authentic major leaguers.

Whether or not Spencer accurately accuses Japanese baseball of a conspiracy to deprive him of a home run title, it is a fact that although many Americans had spectacular home run totals, few of them actually became home run champions until after Oh hit the home run in 1977 that put him ahead of Hank Aaron as the all-time, all-world professional leader. Only since Oh’s triumph have any Americans won multiple home run titles. Japanese players and fans today can better accept former American reserves like Adrian Garrett, Charlie Manuel, and Samoan-born Tony Solaita outslugging today’s native favorites, Koji Yamamoto, Masayuki Kakefu, and Yasunori Oshima, because regardless of the outcome of any single season’s home run race, Oh at least has done something no American shall rival for a long, long time.

What will happen in Japan, following the Olympic victory, might parallel developments in the Japanese industrial labor force now that Japan has established her reputation for quality and productivity. As Americans gain greater tolerance, they might also be permitted off-the-field influence equal to their influence on the diamond. Japanese players might begin asserting themselves as individuals with confidence that they do have somewhere else to go if their employers foolishly release them. Certainly American teams have been interested in obtaining Japanese players ever since Murakami held his own with San Francisco through the torrid 1965 pennant race. Only custom has bound them to Japan, while only pressure from the U.S. State Department has prevented American teams from raiding Japanese talent in bidding wars. If the State Department believes American teams can sign Japanese players without Japanese fans feeling as if their major leagues are being treated like an amateur talent pool, if the international trade authorities judge that Japanese as well as American talent can move both ways without provoking more serious economic or diplomatic retaliation, the custom of eternal loyalty to one’s team could quickly crumble.

There is an on-the-field precedent, one that Daryl Spencer initiated in early 1964. “In Japan they don’t say ‘Spencer,’ they say ‘Spen-sah,’ “he told Mandel, “and when they talk about ‘Spen-sah,’ they talk about his sliding first. … In this one game, this same pitcher with all the control, the one who walked me four straight times on sixteen pitches, well, he walked me again to get to the next guy. That put runners on first and second in the bottom of the eighth inning with one out. And I yelled down to Gordon Windhorn,” a fellow American who was the runner from second, “that if this guy hits a ground ball to just keep on running because I was going to take the second baseman out.” A conventional play in American baseball, from Little League up, this was unheard of in Japan, where rough tactics had always been shunned.

“Two pitches later he hit a ground ball to shortstop, the second baseman covered, I knocked him down, and Windhorn scored the winning run. They argued for about thirty minutes over that. Our players had never slid hard like that before. But from that game on, all our players started sliding hard. And in fact it changed the whole style of play in Japan as far as making double plays. It used to be that the player running to second base, if it looked like he was going to be out, he’d just turn and head out to right field,” away from the relay throw. “No one would ever slide. The second baseman would just stand on the base and make the nice easy throw. And almost from that day on, all the second basemen had to adjust because all our ballplayers started sliding in hard. And of course all the other teams started to do it, too.”

During the middle 1960s, firebrands like Spencer, Don Blasingame, Don Zimmer, and one-time Nankai Hawks coach Pete Reiser also introduced fighting with the hitherto sacrosanct umpires. Murakami reputedly threw the first deliberate brushback pitches in 1966—one reason, perhaps, why he was anathematized by most other Japanese players of his generation. Rough-and-ready American-style baseball still isn’t universal, but by the middle 1970s Japanese management was hiring retired American tough guys like Clete Boyer, Jim Lefebvre, and Vernon Law to teach the very tactics some of them once asserted would kill their game.

From the sanctimonious press response to Spencer and cohorts, one would gather that Japanese fans universally disapproved of rude, individualistic aggression. Gate receipts tell a different story. The more colorful the American, at least on the field, the better the fans like him. If this admiration for the man who stands out and even makes himself obnoxious spreads to off-the-field behavior, and if this in turn inspires average Japanese citizens to become more openly self-assertive as well, the whole of Japanese society could begin changing.

As, indeed, it seems to be. No longer content with collective achievements, many Japanese are now agitating for higher personal standards of living, more freedom of choice in occupational and social matters, and less rigidity in their educational system. The rights of peasant farmers were recently advanced by student militants as equal in importance to Tokyo’s need for a new airport, a development perhaps akin to the Boston Tea Party in challenging the status quo. Minority rights have never before meant much in a society stressing obligations over options. Many of the student leaders professed Communism, certainly not the ideology of capitalistic American ballplayers. Yet both Communism and anything-goes capitalism present radical departures from prevailing custom, and may simultaneously appeal to the silently frustrated Japanese baseball fan for the same reasons.

While increasingly individualistic baseball players may help inspire the forthcoming changes in Japanese society, baseball should help equally to insure that these changes are not violent. Baseball in Japan, as in the U.S. and Latin America, may glorify the individual disrupter, but at the same time provides a safety valve for pent-up emotions, and also asserts a timeless, traditional pattern to events. Though longtime players and fans agree that no two games are ever the same, each team always fields a lineup of nine, sends nine hitters to the plate in an established order, and makes three outs in an inning.

*****

There is an added dimension to this pattern, one that does not meet the average fan’s consciousness—a dimension equally significant to nineteenth century New Englanders, Latin American Catholics, and Japanese Shinto-worshippers. It is a dimension as old and universal as humanity itself. At root, baseball is a fertility rite, a ritual symbolizing human reproduction from conception to birth. The infinite number of variations possible within the structured combat of two teams suggests the infinite variety of romantic and genetic possibilities between male and female.

But baseball’s sexual dimension goes far beyond the genetic abstract. Pitchers stand on the mound, the sacred pedestal, as ovulating females, whose egg becomes vulnerable to the phallus-swinging batsmen. Their objective is to avoid unwilling impregnation; they are protected from rape by their clans, behind them, whose own phalluses menace other women in their turn. Yet each pitcher is also carrying the child of her clan, the hope of victory, which must be nourished through nine increasingly difficult innings corresponding to the period of gestation. Today, though not in baseball’s first half-century, midwife relief pitchers may help her. Relief pitchers, interestingly enough, were at one time former starters past their prime: postmenopausal females. Pitchers are even treated as women off the mound, surrounded by eunuch or old-maid coaches in the bullpen-harem. Pitchers’ arms are treated with the same sort of superstition as women’s genitals.

Most telling, perhaps, is that young men generally become interested in baseball as they approach puberty, and are most intensely devoted to it in puberty, just before establishing their first liaisons with real rather than symbolic women. On the sandlot, whether in the U.S., Japan, or Latin America, young men usually experiment with the differing pitching and hitting roles, arguably a sublimated substitute for sexual experimentation.

As a fertility rite, baseball maintains a connection between past and present wherever it establishes itself, the green outfield recalling an agrarian society, the stooping motions of infielders resembling those of berry-pickers and fishermen, the running and throwing of outfielders continuing skills originally developed by hunters and herdsmen, while the squatting catcher could be weaving a basket or milking a cow. Baseball may have initially failed in Europe because many centuries of Christianity had finally erased any instinctive feel for fertility rituals connected to the land and role-playing, rather than to statues of the Virgin. But baseball caught on like wildfire in Latin America, where Christianity has both absorbed and been absorbed by native fertility-worship. American Christianity through the age of Manifest Destiny took as its first commandment, “Go forth and multiply!”, while the Transcendentalists, Mormons, and others variously explored how that might be achieved. Adopting the baseball fertility rite may have relieved the nation of having to choose definitively among the rival religious possibilities.

And in Japan, where forms of fertility worship have always been practiced, undisguised, baseball simply fit in, as a modern variant filling the same psychological needs when some of the older forms began to seem quaint, not quite what a growing industrial power should be doing.

Ultimately, baseball heroes are gods and goddesses of the harvest, of the future, a self-regenerating pantheon whose ever-shifting structure parallels our own lives. We watch stars emerge, shine, then fade and die within the space of a decade or two—but they don’t really die, since as coaches and managers they perpetuate their lineage, while new players take their places. Baseball helps America remain American by demonstrating daily where we come from, why we’re here, where we’re each going, in a manner understood subliminally if not overtly. Likewise, baseball helps Japan remain Japanese. As a sport and subject of international commerce, baseball may help the world become a smaller place, providing new channels of communication. At some point, baseball rivalry might help replace war. When better understood, baseball’s universal patterns may help replace nationalism with new recognition of ourselves as individual members of a common species.

All of this may come about not because baseball is an international melting pot, but rather because baseball provides a model of balance between individuality and teamwork. The history of baseball in Japan and America alike demonstrates that the individual must not and cannot be forever repressed, yet the formula for victory requires that the individual must also cooperate with others. No matter how the Japanese have tried to diverge from the American pattern—tried to make their game enforce their own traditional values more than ours—similar patterns have emerged, not because baseball is a quintessentially American sport but because it is a quintessentially human sport.

Had baseball begun in Japan, the American game would likely still follow the prevailing pattern-breaking from quasi-feudal beginnings where the players were samurais or knights eternally loyal to overlords, to cooperation of peers for mutual benefit. This is the stage just now arriving in both lands. Whether the Japanese know it or not, they too are baseball teachers: Americans have learned from them how to run effective college baseball programs, how to use martial arts exercises to improve performance, even how to make better equipment.

Mutual acceptance of one another as peers may still be a few years off, despite the Japanese Olympic victory. But it’s coming. Once it happens, acceptance of Asiatic people as equals may gradually follow, as gradual acceptance of blacks has slowly followed the admission of black players into the U.S. major leagues. From there, perhaps, we may progress to accepting Latin American baseball as something more than a source of raw material for the U.S. majors—to considering Latin American people as equals. Who knows, we might even wind up with world peace, to which the ongoing performance of the Hiroshima Carp could contribute as much as the lingering memory of the Hiroshima bombing.