Bobby Valentine interviewed in the New York Times

I had the opportunity to interview Bobby Valentine, manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines, on one occasion several years ago. I found him to be an astute student of baseball, both Japanese- and American-style, and an eager promoter of the Japanese game.


Now the New York Times has featured Mr. Valentine in the "Questions for" feature in the Sunday Magazine.

The most interesting answer for me is that he confirms my suspicion for why Japanese professional baseball limits games to four hours or twelve innings: "Japan is a public-transportation society, and the trains stop running at midnight." I always suspected that this was the case — or else there could be twenty-inning marathons that leave fans stranded at the ballpark, or alternatively, are played before crowds smaller than the number of players on the field.

Ashamed

I am back in Chicago for a bit, and have managed to make it out to Wrigley Field twice to see Fukudome Kosuke, the first Japanese addition to the Chicago Cubs roster. Readers will recall that I was quite pleased about this, and so far I haven't been disappointed. With a .317 batting average and .431 on-base percentage (and one of the highest pitches-per-at-bat averages in the National Leage), how could I?

What I am disappointed, nay, ashamed about is the behavior of some Chicago Cubs fans in regard to Mr. Fukudome.

Cubs fans have a reputation for being drunken layabouts (cf. Lee Elia), more interested in the Wrigley Field atmospherics than the game on the field. Marty Brennaman, Cincinnati Reds broadcaster, made this point earlier this week after an incident in a game between the Cubs and Reds, and at times I have a hard time disagreeing (despite being a Cubs fan myself).

But in addition to being obnoxious on occasion, are Cubs fans also racist?

The arrival of Mr. Fukudome in Chicago has been largely but not entirely incident-free, but the Chicago Sun-Times reports that some horribly offensive Cubs-related merchandise is selling heavily around Wrigley Field. I saw the t-shirt in this picture on a fan sitting a few seats away from me on Friday afternoon.



(Photo: Richard A. Chapman/Chicago Sun Times)

Mr. Fukudome was restrained in his comments on this merchandise.

"I don't know what the creator of the shirt meant this to be, but they should make it right," Fukudome said through his interpreter after being shown one of the shirts Thursday. "Maybe the creator created it because he thought it was funny, or maybe he made it to condescend the race. I don't know."

I will be less restrained.

This kind of thing is embarrassing in the twenty-first century: I am embarrassed as a Cubs fan, a Chicagoan, an American, and as someone whose life is spent, well, observing Japan.

I don't want to generalize about Cubs fans or Chicagoans — Mr. Fukudome's reception in Chicago has been quite friendly, and fans besieged the Cubs organizations with complaints about these items, prompting the team to stop their sale — but the fact that people find this sort of thing funny or cute is a blot on the US. I don't think it's a product of outright racism, just ignorance. But that ignorance is wide and deep, and is not without consequences for US foreign policy. The stunning ignorance about other countries — allies and "enemies" alike — means that ugly stereotypes like this have survived for far too long. (And then there's the question of the older generation of Americans, some of whom revert to embarrassing stereotypes of Japan perhaps in large part because their images of Japan were shaped by a horrendous race war.) Knowledge about Japan among Americans of all education levels is shockingly poor, allowing offensive (or dated) stereotypes to persist.

Perhaps I shouldn't take this so seriously, but it's that kind of attitude that allows this behavior to persist. A person wearing a shirt like this should be stigmatized.

It's small incidents like this that speak volumes about America's place in the world in the twenty-first century.

The healing power of Dice-K?

Perhaps the baseball gods are smiling on the US-Japan relationship, with wunderkind Matsuzaka Daisuke's first start for the Red Sox a masterful performance.

What better way for the allies to change the subject away from all that nastiness about comfort women and North Korean nuclear weapons? State Department spokesman and Red Sox fan Sean McCormack evidently, according to Jiji, interrupted a press conference to thank the Seibu Lions for Matsuzaka. (Although Japanese Finance Minister Omi Koji criticized NHK for excessive coverage of Matsuzaka's debut -- hey Omi! get on message.)

Yes, baseball, what a nice way to paper over the serious problems facing the alliance in advance of Abe's visit. I wonder if Bush and Abe will be playing a game of catch at Camp David, just as Bush did with Koizumi on the latter's first visit to the US as prime minister.

Can you see this man playing a game of "catch ball" with President Bush?

All fungoes, all the time

Believe it or not, the year-round extravaganza that is Japanese baseball is gearing up for another season.

It seems like only yesterday -- mere weeks after my arrival here -- that the Trey Hillman-managed Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters bested the Chunichi Dragons in the Japan Series.

What prompted this post? One of the sports channels offered by my cable provider has been showing Hanshin Tigers spring training round the clock all week. And by spring training I don't mean exhibition games -- actual training. Over the past several days I've seen catchers doing pop-up drills, pitchers going through their daily workouts, and hitters taking simultaneous live batting practice with a row of batting cages lined up at home plate. These aren't highlights or anything: just raw footage with commentary.

While I know that the Hanshin Tigers are a special case, as Tigers fans are perhaps the most fanatic in the world, this strikes me as a bit much.

Then again, I hope that I'll catch infield drills one day. Japanese teams run infield drills with greater intensity than I'm used to back in the US.

Matsuzaka is signed

So at the last minute, the Red Sox reached a deal with Seibu Lions pitcher Matsuzaka Daisuke (or rather, Scott Boras, his agent).

Total price tag, including the posting fee? $103.11 million.

There's no question that Matsuzaka is a phenomenal pitcher, but then you read an article such as this from the IHT, which includes the following insight from Marty Kuehnert, general manager of the Rakuten Golden Eagles:

"It's like a time bomb. When is it going to go off?" said Marty Kuehnert, an American-born resident of Japan and the first foreign general manager of a Japanese pro team, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. "Any Japanese pitcher, these guys included, has thrown too much. The Japanese mentality is that it will make them stronger. But if I was trying to sign these guys, I'd take a good look at them."

Foreign players in Japan often joke that Japanese are "all thrown out at age 30" because of rigorous training from the age of 12, Kuehnert said by phone from Sendai, Japan.

"They throw easily two to three times more pitches in their career than Americans," he said.

"They play 360 days out of the year. It's taken to an extreme that you don't see in America. So the level is very high, but they break down sooner."

So after all this, the Red Sox are taking a tremendous risk on a pitcher who could potentially have a shelf life well under the six years for which he has been signed.

It may well reap tremendous dividends for the Red Sox, but I wonder how patient the Fenway faithful will be if "Dice-K" starts slowly.

What were the Red Sox thinking?

Switching gears, the big news in sports this week is that the Boston Red Sox had the highest bid in the auction for the right to talk -- that's right, talk -- to Seibu Lions pitcher Matsuzaka Daisuke. They reportedly paid $51.1 million.

Mull that over for a minute.

$51.1 million. To talk.

...

Sorry Red Sox fans, but I'm with ESPN's Sean McAdam on this one: "...In submitting the winning post for Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Red Sox also forfeited the right to whine about [the Yankees'] economic might ever again."

I've never understood the whole "Yankees-as-evil-empire" trope as mouthed by Red Sox fans. After all, in 2004, the year that the "Idiots" succeeded in their assault on the, er, Death Star, the Red Sox payroll was second in Major League Baseball, around $50 million behind the Yankees. I'm afraid that hardly counts as virtuous. Now had the Red Sox beaten the Yankees with the Brewers' MLB-lowest payroll ($27.5 million), that would have been something to get excited about.

Arguably, the Red Sox only upped their payroll because the Yankees did first (time to break out the game theory). And that reasoning is certainly understandable. But at the same time, given that the Red Sox management decided to copy the Yankees, the Red Sox (and their fans) have indeed forfeited the right to complain about how the Yankees are outspending everyone. As McAdam writes:

No more suggestions, please, that the Yankees are some financial superpower capable of trampling the rest of baseball with their reckless and boundless spending. No more talk about the Red Sox being the plucky underdogs that somehow must make do with less.

The Sox's insistence that the Yanks were economic bullies always seemed a bit hollow, anyway. Sure, the Yankees have baseball's deepest pockets, as might be expected in a sport in which local revenues are critical to a team's financial footing.

Here, though, is what the Red Sox never acknowledged: Although the Yankees could indeed outspend them, the Red Sox, in turn, could outspend the other 28 teams in baseball.

Do the Gettys complain about the Rockefellers?

It was the Red Sox's misfortune that the one club with more resources just happened to be their longtime rival, with whom they're locked in an annual battle for divisional supremacy.

That's not some cruel inequity; that's merely geographic bad luck.

I secretly hope that the Red Sox will be unable to seal the deal with Matsuzaka, but then signing Matsuzaka might provide a greater opportunity for schadenfreude. To spend upwards of $100 million on a pitcher who has never pitched in the US, to spend that much on any pitcher -- given that pitching involves motions that the human body wasn't designed to perform -- seems absurd. Consider, moreover, that Japanese teams have historically run down their pitchers' arms early in their careers, meaning it's possible that the Red Sox could only get a couple good years out of Matsuzaka before he's finished.

In any case, if the Red Sox manage to sign Matsuzaka, they will be an elbow ligament tear away from wasting an awful lot of money. As a Cubs fan, I have seen two very promising young pitchers' careers go up in smoke in recent years. Don't think it can't happen to Matsuzaka.