The Meaning of Ichiro (16 page)

While awaiting that highly unlikely event, they had seen fit to insert a standard option clause in the agreement which allowed
San Francisco to purchase the contract of any of the Japanese players who made the parent team for the princely sum of $10,000.
The Hawks’ general manager at the time, Makoto Tachibana, had agreeably okayed the clause, feeling certain that none of the
players he had dispatched would ever advance out of the bowels of the North American farm system, in view of the stiff competition
that existed for spots in the almighty major leagues, as well as the obvious fact that none of the three players chosen for
grooming abroad had, as yet, demonstrated they had enough ability even to make the Hawks’ main roster—which was why they were
being sent to America in the first place.

Two of the players sent to America were dispatched to Twins Falls, Idaho, the lowest rung in the San Francisco system, where
they would not do very much to distinguish themselves. Young Murakami, for his part, was assigned to the Fresno team in the
Class A California League. There, much to everyone’s surprise, he suddenly blossomed. With a darting fastball, a sharp breaking
curve and uncommon control, he compiled a strong 11-7 record with an honor-roll ERA of 1.78, prompting his crusty manager
Bill “Bugs” Werle to croak, “Kid, you’re too good for this league.”

In September, the parent team beckoned. Signing the requisite MLB contract that a Giants executive thrust in his face, Murakami
made his big league debut, pitching an inning of scoreless relief against the Mets at Shea Stadium, before a thunderous crowd
of 50,000 fans. He thus became the first son of Nippon to play in a major league game, an accomplishment noted with great
pride by the Japanese ambassador to Washington, D.C., to his friends on the cherry blossom circuit there. Murakami went on
to pitch ten more scoreless innings before someone finally managed to score a run off him. He was an overnight hit in windswept
San Francisco, especially with its large Japanese-American population. Bay Area fans took to Murakami’s friendly, gregarious
manner and Pepsodent smile, and found especially endearing his habit of doffing his cap and bowing from the waist on the mound
when a teammate made an especially good play in the field to help him out of a jam.

Back in old Nippon, Murakami had suddenly vaulted to the top of the news, thanks to wire service reports and film clips flown
across the Pacific by JAL in that pre-satellite era. His fellow countrymen were elated. No Japanese had gotten this much favorable
attention in the continental United States since Kyu Sakamoto’s improbable (and misnamed) hit single “Sukiyaki,” a tune, incidentally,
Murakami liked to hum on his way from the bullpen to the pitcher’s mound. (The Japanese title,
“Ue wo Muite Aruko,”
literally means “Walk with Your Head Held High.”)

“Mashi,” as his San Francisco teammates had dubbed him, loved pitching against the big, free-swinging Americans. “In Japan,
batters only swing at strikes,” he told Los Angeles sportswriter Jim Murray. “Here, they try to hit everything out and they
don’t care if you throw a strike or not. It’s easier to pitch against them.”

Murakami appeared in a total of nine games that season, finishing with an eyebrow-raising ERA of 1.80 in 15 innings pitched.
The Giants, delighted with their find, offered him a contract for the 1965 season and Murakami cheerfully signed. “There’s
nothing I’d like better than to keep playing here,” he was quoted as saying. San Francisco owner Horace Stoneham had $10,000
wired to Nankai for Murakami’s services, as per their option clause, and assumed they had a done deal. Then Murakami hopped
on a jet clipper for Osaka to spend his winter with his family in rustic Yamanashi.

San Francisco was so happy about the experience that they tried to sign the long, lanky, lefthanded pitching sensation Masaichi
Kaneda, perhaps the best pitcher in the history of the NPB, a two-time 30-game winner who was coming off a season in which
he had compiled a record of 27-12 with an ERA of 2.79 in 310 innings and 231 strikeouts. He had recently been freed from a
14-year contractual obligation to the Kokutetsu Swallows and was initially willing to go, but then changed his mind over concerns
about the language barrier, as well as the fact that by leaving, he would have to give up his career quest for 400 wins and
4,000 strikeouts. Instead, he went on to join the Tokyo Giants and retired in 1969 with a lifetime record of 400-298, 4,490
strikeouts and an ERA of 2.34.

Meanwhile, the next chapter of the Murakami saga was beginning to unfold. After meeting several times with Nankai officials,
who informed him he might never be allowed to play in Japan again if he returned to San Francisco, and talking with family
members who demanded he stay, Murakami suddenly changed his mind about returning to the U.S. and decided to remain in Japan,
then signed his
second
contract for the 1965 season. On January 31, the day before spring training started in Japan, he appeared at a press conference
and grimfacedly explained his reasoning. He was an only son. His family wanted him at home where his future would be less
uncertain. And he was Japanese. He belonged in Japan with the Hawks.

This astonishing turn of events was not welcome in San Francisco. The Giants’ incredulous owner Stoneham complained to the
U.S. commissioner of baseball, the aging patrician Ford Frick, the man who had become famous three years earlier by refusing
to recognize Roger Maris’s single-season mark of 61 home runs as having surpassed Babe Ruth’s total of 60. (Maris had played
in a newly expanded season schedule of 162 games, as opposed to 154 for Ruth.) The Murakami problem also caught the attention
of other MLB owners who viewed the conduct of the Hawks and Murakami as a clear violation of
Major League
Baseball’s reserve clause—a time-honored rule that essentially bound a player to the team that had originally signed him
via a series of one-year contracts. Murakami had signed a contract with the Giants and he was obligated to honor it. So were
the Hawks. If Murakami flouted the rules, then wouldn’t other U.S. major league players feel free to leave their teams whenever
they wanted? Frick wrote a letter to Japanese baseball commissioner Yushi Uchimura demanding in the strongest terms that he
urge the Hawks to send Murakami back to San Francisco.

Uchimura urged, but the Hawks refused. Shigeru N
yama, who had replaced Makoto Tachibana as the general manager of the Hawks, on loan from Nankai Railways, the Osaka-based
transportation monolith that owned the team, indignantly retorted that there had never been any intention on his part of selling
Murakami’s contract to the Giants for a lousy ten thousand American dollars. They pointed out that they themselves had only
recently paid Murakami a 10-million-yen signing bonus, equivalent to nearly $30,000, upon his graduation from high school.
What Nankai had done, in effect, explained the Hawks official, was rent Murakami to San Francisco for a year. They interpreted
the $10,000 check from San Francisco as a bonus payment for Murakami’s services—a payment for which they had signed a receipt
in the belief that it was a thank-you gift for all the fine pitching Murakami had done for the Giants in September. And yes,
they knew what a reserve clause was. The NPB had one as well, one which they planned to use to keep Murakami for themselves.
Frick was unpersuaded. He insisted that the Giants had a valid contract with Murakami and reiterated his demand for the player
to return. A standoff ensued.

The dispute, in essence, arose out of very different attitudes Americans and Japanese had in regard to contracts. The Japanese
believed more in the
spirit
of a contract than the letter, that the purpose of a contract was to ensure that both sides benefitted. Since situations
changed, the parties to a deal should not be locked in by mere words or the interpretation thereof. For Japanese, a contract
did not define a relationship, it signaled the beginning of one. Therefore, a contract’s contents could always be changed
to suit evolving circumstances. What was most important was mutual understanding and the cultivation of
ningen kankei,
or human relationships.

The Hawks had never anticipated upon signing the agreement with San Francisco that one of their players might be good enough
to make it in the majors. Since they had never expected the situation to arise, they paid no attention to the option clause
in the contract. They reasoned that the clause was merely a standard part of American contracts, but also assumed that the
Bay Area team understood
their
feelings and the
ningen kankei
involved in this trans-Pacific relationship. In all honesty, how could the Giants expect them to give up a promising pitcher
so easily? Viewed in that light, wasn’t San Francisco in the wrong?

San Francisco, of course, had not understood. A contract was a contract. An option clause was an option clause, and $10,000
for a pitcher who had spent most of the season in Class A baseball was fair compensation. San Francisco officials fully expected
the option clause would apply if the tables had been reversed and the Hawks had decided to keep a player the Giants had sent
to Japan for training. The unlikelihood of that idea notwithstanding, neither Stoneham in San Francisco nor New York–based
Commissioner Frick, who was now the point man in the dispute, was about to change his mind. Murakami belonged to San Francisco
and that was that.

The next couple of weeks were not a high spot in the history of U.S.-Japan baseball relations, as the Hawks turned to other,
more devious ploys to buttress their case. First they claimed the club signature on Murakami’s release—which accompanied the
$10,000 check—was a forgery. When Frick would not swallow this, they tried to get their erstwhile pitcher back via a “homesick
clause,” buried in the initial agreement, which provided that a Japanese player unable to adapt to the American way of life
be immediately released and allowed to return home. Frick didn’t buy that either in light of Murakami’s earlier professed
eagerness to stay with San Francisco.

Finally, Nankai abandoned all attempts at legal niceties and out and out refused, unilaterally, as it were, to deliver Murakami.
No more explanations provided.

On Feb 17, 1965, Frick thereupon suspended baseball relations between the two countries. He also instructed the Pittsburgh
Pirates, scheduled to visit Japan that fall on a goodwill tour, to cancel their trip until the matter was resolved. Had MLB
had an ambassador posted to Tokyo he would no doubt have been withdrawn as well.

On hearing this, the president of the Nankai Hawks, Osamu Tsubota, also on loan from the railroad, decided to throw in his
two yen worth. “Let the Pirates stay home,” he sniffed. “Japanese baseball will not suffer. Frick’s actions are proof that
he is holding Japanese baseball cheap and it is certainly regrettable.”

Things hadn’t been this bad since the demonstrations against renewing the Security Treaty in 1960, which caused U.S. president
Dwight Eisenhower to cancel his visit to Japan. In fact, things were so bleak that they had actually galvanized the commissioner
of Japanese baseball, Yushi Uchimura, into doing some work. Uchimura, a retired college professor of some note, who had also
been a left-handed fastball pitcher when he attended Todai (the Harvard of Japan), was primarily a figurehead responsible
to the owners—or rather, to Matsutaro Shoriki, since the Giants wielded all the power in the NPB—and his duties largely consisted
of sitting behind a desk and issuing proclamations. Now, however, he was put on the spot.

His first decisive act was to check into the hospital for an operation, where he stayed for a month mulling his problem. There,
he came to the conclusion the Hawks had been careless in their dealings with the American team. He, in fact, had not even
seen the San Francisco–Nankai player exchange agreement his office had approved, and when he finally read a copy of it, which
was only in English, he found the document difficult to understand, even for a Ph.D. like himself. He guessed then that the
Hawks had signed a contract they did not fully understand, naively assuming that no problems would arise, because, after all,
what was a little misunderstanding among friends.

Still, he decided it was unreasonable to expect the Hawks to part with their young prospect under such conditions. Moreover,
he faced intense pressure from other owners who feared that an agreement in San Francisco’s favor might somehow encourage
other young players to find ways to flee Japan. They demanded an example be made.

On March 17, he finally came up with a counterproposal—a compromise to Frick whereby Murakami would return to San Francisco
for the 1965 season, but come home to stay for good in 1966. He allowed that the Hawks had made a serious error in misinterpreting
their agreement with the Giants, but asked that the American side understand that the Nankai club had, indeed, never had any
intention of surrendering Murakami permanently to San Francisco.

Frick declined the offer, averring that Murakami’s return to Japan in 1966 would still constitute a violation of the reserve
clause. He insisted that Murakami come back to the States before any further settlement could be made. Without question, he
declared, the first step in breaking this impasse had to be the absolute recognition of the validity of Murakami’s contract
with the Giants.