The Meaning of Ichiro (20 page)

Usually, an unorthodox motion like Nomo’s, at such a young age, is the kiss of death in form-conscious Japan. Nomo, like his
contemporary Ichiro, had been fortunate enough to play under a junior high school coach who left him alone. But the manager
of the Kindai High School baseball club, one of the Kansai area’s most famous big-time baseball schools and an organization
that Nomo desperately wanted to join, pronounced him unfit.

“Young man,” he sniffed, “with that tornado windup, you’ll never make it.”

Stunned at the cavalier rejection, Nomo turned to a small local school in the Osaka area, Seijo Industrial High School, that
was not particularly distinguished for anything, let alone baseball. There were only 13 students on the entire squad (as opposed
to more than 150 at behemoth Kindai), and the Seijo coach did not care how Nomo threw as long as he could get the ball over
the plate. Nomo, growing into a bronzed 6′2′′, 200-pounder with meat cleaver hands, pitched exceedingly well for his school.
In 1985, in a qualifying round for the national summer high school baseball tournament, he even pitched a perfect game. Still,
his pitching was not enough to take the team all the way to the Koshien tournament, and scouts who had watched him play in
the regionals delivered the same verdict: “Speed: Good; Control: Bad.”

Failing to attract any interest from the big university scouts, Nomo entered
Shin-Nitetsu Sakai,
one of the 300 companies that then sponsored baseball teams in Japan’s semi-professional industrial leagues, which served
as Japan’s de facto, if defective, farm system. It was flawed because it was essentially an amateur operation, sanctioned
by the
amateur
baseball association in Japan, and was closed to the participation of professional coaches, a restriction that stayed in
place until the beginning of the 21st century. Moreover, its preferred system was tournament play, which tempted managers
to overuse their ace pitchers, causing arm trouble.

Still, for Nomo, it proved to be a wise and providential move, because at Shin-Nitetsu, he was allowed to continue pitching
with his corkscrew motion, and it was also there that he learned to throw his fearsome forkball, a pitch that dropped so much
it looked like it was falling off a
kotatsu
—developing his grip by wedging a tennis ball into the webbing between his index and middle fingers and taping it in place
at night when he went to sleep. The new addition to the Nomo arsenal elevated him to a whole new plateau as a pitcher.

Nomo’s statistics in the rust belt league and his performance in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, where he led Japan to a silver medal,
resulted in his being drafted by eight different clubs in the 1989 NPB draft lottery, a modern record. Nomo, however, was
not the biggest story in the draft. That honor went, not surprisingly, to theYomiuri Giants and their top draft pick, a nationally
popular high school infielder named Daisuke Motoki who had starred in the summer Koshien tourney and who had vowed he would
never play for any professional team except the mighty
Kyojin.

As a result of the draft, the Kintetsu Buffaloes ultimately won the right to negotiate with Nomo and offered him a then-record
bonus of 100,000,000 yen (about a million dollars at the time) to sign with them. Nomo said yes, but only on condition that
the Buffaloes promise
not
to change his form. It was the kind of demand that rookie pitchers in Japan were seldom presumptuous enough to make, but
fortunately, the Buffaloes manager at the time was the easy-going Akira Ogi, the man who would later do so much for the career
of another renegade of sorts, Ichiro Suzuki (see
Chapter 1
). He unhesitatingly gave his okay and Nomo responded by giving
full expression to his skills in a rookie season that
puro-yaky
fans still talk about.

With a forkball that was all but unhittable and a fastball that was often invisible, he led the league in wins, ERA and strikeouts
(18-8, 2.91 and 287 K’s in 235 innings, including 17 in one game), capturing the Rookie of the Year Award, the MVP and the
Sawamura Award given annually to the best pitcher in the game. And he was just getting started. For the next three seasons,
he led the Pacific League in shutouts, victories and strikeouts before being overtaken in 1994 on the leaderboard by another
budding fastballer named Hideki Irabu, and his salary had inched up to $1.5 million a year. In all that time, he had only
pitched in one nationally televised game, while Daisuke Motoki, the star of that 1989 draft and now a light-hitting utility
infielder for the Tokyo Giants, was, of course, visible to the whole country every night.

Nomo was a shy, taciturn young man preternaturally gifted at hiding his thoughts and emotions, either on or off the mound.
Reporters, whom Nomo was especially skilled at ignoring, joked that he had only one expression: inscrutable. Yet, he had an
unnerving streak of independence that some journalists claimed came from years of being a latchkey child. As a boy, Nomo had
been known in the schoolyard for protecting weaker kids from school bullies.

Almost without realizing it, he became a poster boy for a new generation of rebellious youth. Nomo became the first Japanese
player to wear Nike shoes in a midsummer All-Star series. Until then, all the players under a league-determined structure
were party to a deal to wear Mizuno shoes and only Mizuno shoes in the mid-season classic. But, without asking permission,
Nomo defied this policy and blithely sold his services under an individual contract, opening an unpleasant breach between
him and Kintetsu officials who were getting a cut of the Mizuno deal and who were supposed to have say over
all
their player endorsements. It was a breach that would only grow wider in 1994 with the arrival of a new manager, Keish
Suzuki.

Suzuki was no ordinary figure. Unlike his more relaxed predecessor, Suzuki came in as a living god, a Hall of Fame pitcher
whose career statistics occupied considerable space in the NPB record books. A barrel-chested, square-jawed left-hander who
boasted a potent fastball and a world-class forkball of his own, he dominated the Pacific League in a 20-year career that
lasted from 1966 to 1985, during which his record was 317-238, placing him fourth all-time on the list of wins. Only Masaichi
Kaneda (404), Tetsuya Yoneda (350) and Masaaki Koyama (320) were ahead of him. He led all of Japan in lifetime games pitched
without
having surrendered a walk, 340, which was about 340 more than Hideo Nomo had ever achieved. He also had lifetime totals of
71 shutouts, 3,061 strikeouts and 703 games pitched. He was so intimidating that after facing him in postseason exhibition
play in 1968, St. Louis Cardinals catcher Ted Simmons declared that Suzuki was the “greatest pitcher he had ever seen anywhere.”

Suzuki’s philosophy could basically be summed up in four words, “Throw until you die.” He had frequently pitched on two days’
rest throughout his career and on more than one occasion had pitched in relief the day after throwing nine innings. During
games he didn’t pitch, he usually went to the bullpen to throw, ever honing his considerable artistry. Suzuki’s regimen obviously
had worked for Suzuki, but it was not one that Nomo, as hard a worker as he might have been, was prepared to follow. He had
his own system. He had become a devotee of the philosophy of major league strikeout king Nolan Ryan (whose book on pitching
and conditioning had been translated and published in Japan), which emphasized the more rational American system of abundant
rest combined with a program of weight training.

Nomo did not mind throwing a lot of pitches in a game. He’d thrown over 140 pitches an arm-aching 61 times during his pro
career (Ryan usually stopped at around 120). But he followed the Ryan canon of three to four days’ rest after a start, believed
necessary in order for the tiny muscle tears caused by nine innings of hard pitching to heal and for the tissue to regenerate.
Under Ogi, Nomo had had his desired four days between starts, during which he only threw twice in practice, in light, leisurely
sessions of 40 pitches each.

Such modern training ideas and methods disgusted Suzuki. He himself thought that 100 pitches every day in practice was about
right and he pushed Nomo to do more. In one game in early July at Seibu Stadium, for example, Nomo had been having great difficulty
with his control, but Suzuki left him in for the full nine innings. Struggling throughout, Nomo walked an incredible 16 batters,
throwing a jaw-dropping total of 191 pitches, enough for a doubleheader, eventually winning 8-3. In another game, he threw
180. By refusing to put in a reliever on such occasions, Suzuki was making a statement—he was trying to build what he believed
was the mental toughness Nomo lacked, as well as put Nomo in his place.

Said Nomo’s teammate, American Lee Stevens, who witnessed it all, “It was clear what Suzuki was trying to do. But Hideo kept
his cool. Nomo wasn’t about to give the manager the satisfaction of showing that it bothered him.”

By the midway point of that season, however, Nomo’s shoulder was ailing badly (an inevitable result, some said, of all those
high pitch counts). Suzuki dispatched him to the farm team to get back in shape, which to Suzuki’s way of thinking meant more
pitching. “The best way to cure a sore arm,” he would say, “is to go out and throw. Pitch through the pain.” But this Nomo
refused to do, choosing instead a program of calculated rest. Suzuki, who badly needed pitching for the pennant race, blasted
Nomo to reporters as being “lazy.” To placate his manager, Nomo pitched in a few farm team games, but that only worsened things.
His arm became so painful that he could only drive his car with his left hand. By the end of the season, he would require
surgery.

Nomo’s secret desire to play in the major leagues had been strengthened by several more pitching appearances in postseason
U.S.-Japan baseball matches. He kept baseball cards of his favorite American players taped to his locker door in Fujiidera
and talked to his
gaijin
teammates Ralph Bryant, Jim Traber and Kyle Abbot about life in MLB. He had quietly hoped for an opportunity to present itself,
but his troubles with Suzuki were making him think more and more that time was running out. If he wanted an opportunity to
go to the U.S. before he completed the requisite 10 years to qualify for free agency—with his arm still attached to his body,
that is—then he would have to create it himself. Thus, it was about this juncture that Nomo began to meet with a man named
Don Nomura.

Half-Japanese, half-Caucasian, a six-footer in his mid-30s, he had recently made the shift to becoming a player agent. Sensing
restlessness among the NPB troops, he had set his sights on the Japan market. Quietly asking around about potential candidates
to defy the system, he had come across Nomo, who himself had quietly been asking around about finding someone who could get
him out from under Suzuki’s thumb. The two men began conferring secretly, concocting possible scenarios for a move to the
States.

Nomura had a translated copy of the Japanese Uniform Players Contract and had employed the services of a Santa Monica–based
baseball agent named Am Tellem to look it over for loopholes that could be exploited. Tellem inspected the document and found
something that had to do with the “voluntary retirement” clause.

The Japanese Uniform Players Contract, as we have seen, had been copied from a 1930s minor league contract in the U.S. It
was quite similar to a U.S. major league contract. It had the same reserve clause, but there was one fundamental difference
in the rules. Whereas under the terms of a U.S. pact, a voluntarily retired player who wished to return to active status could
play only with his former team (unless he had become eligible for free agency under the terms of the basic agreement with
the Major League Baseball Players Association), a voluntarily retired player under a Japanese contract was obligated to return
to his former team only
as long as he stayed in Japan.
Going to the
U.S.
to play was an entirely different matter, it seemed, as would become devilishly apparent. It was thus Tellem’s considered
opinion that a player who went on the voluntarily retired list in NPB would thus essentially be free to play in the U.S.