The Meaning of Ichiro (23 page)

Sportswriters in Southern California much preferred the gregarious Shigetoshi Hasegawa, a former Orix BlueWave pitcher who
was a reliever for the Anaheim Angels. Hasegawa, it is said, actually liked talking to reporters as well as studying and speaking
English.

Among
Japanese
beat reporters, who were also given the cold shoulder more often than not, Nomo earned the contemptuous epithet of
“gaijin”
—a reference no doubt to notoriously uncooperative American players like Clyde Wright and Willie Davis, who had played in
Japan and were famous for their abruptness to journalists. (Wright once even urinated in a reporter’s hat to express his views
on a critical article the newspaper man had written about him.)

Among the Japanese media representatives was the aforementioned Murakami, who had made a second career for himself as a commentator
on NHK telecasts of Nomo games. Murakami seemed a particularly suitable choice given what the two pitchers had in common.
But Murakami had also made the mistake of seeming to scold Nomo in published interviews. Said Murakami, “He’s going to be
far, far away from making the major leagues as long as he depends on his agent and his interpreter all the time.”

On a windy afternoon in August, 1995, before a Giants-Dodgers game, the San Francisco Giants honored Masanori Murakami a second
time, 30 years after his last “Day.” Nomo was asked to pose with Mashi for the benefit of the assembled media, which included
both American and Japanese reporters and photographers. But, much to everyone’s surprise and Murakami’s embarrassment, Nomo
refused. Murakami’s seniority, something normally valued in Japan, counted for little, as it turned out, against Nomo’s resentment
over his predecessor’s ill-advised remark.

Nomo told the
Los Angeles Times
of his distaste especially for the Japanese media. “They write about too many private things,” said the intensely private
man, who only on the rarest of occasions allowed photographs of his wife and children to be published. “They’re like that
paper I see at the checkout counter. You know, the one they call the
National Enquirer.”

That day, in front of Murakami, Nomo threw a one-hitter against the Giants, adding insult to injury.

The portrait of Nomo as a cold-hearted, self-centered egotist provided by some members of the press, however, did not square
with the private one provided by his teammates, coaches and friends who described him as an honest, hard-working guy who was
always trying to improve his craft, who never, ever wanted to come out of a game and who would often spend his free time,
on his own, visiting orphanages and children’s hospitals. To see him at one of these venues, shedding his normal reserve,
signing autographs and warmly hugging his young admirers—some of them terminally ill—was, his closest friends said, to see
the real Hideo Nomo. It was just healthy reporters he was reluctant to meet.

Summing it all up, Nomo’s remarkable odyssey, his multitudinous wanderings, his incredible comeback from the brink of oblivion—all
accomplished with a cultural burden heavier than a big
kanji
dictionary riding on his back—was testament he was someone special.

Said his pitching coach with the Dodgers, Jim Colborn, “You never know how well a Japanese player is going to do in the American
game until he actually tries—the same is true with Americans going over there. You can have all the talent in the world, but
if you don’t have the character, you’re not going to succeed. In Nomo’s case, his is off the charts.”

In 2004, Nomo slumped to the worst season of his career, 4-11, with an ERA of 8.75, spending long stretches on the DL with
rotator cuff problems and disappearing from the division-winning Dodgers’ postseason plans.

I agree with what you say is wrong about the Japanese baseball system. I just don’t like the way you’re going about trying
to fix it.

K
ATSUYA
N
OMURA, ALL-TIME GREAT PLAYER AND MANAGER, TO HIS STEPSON, THE TRAILBLAZING AGENT
D
ON
N
OMURA

“Why did it take so long?” That is a question that has frequently been asked in regard to the 30 years—from Murakami to Nomo—that
MLB waited before signing another ballplayer from Japan. Certainly, the onset of free agency in 1975 had changed the status
quo between the two games—suddenly a higher level of U.S. player was available to the Japanese side, a benefit that American
owners did not enjoy vis à vis their counterparts across the sea. In retrospect, MLB could have used the extra talent Japan
had to offer and in the 1970s they had the capacity to wage and win a bidding war with NPB, where salaries were comparatively
low. So why the lack of predatory activity? Why not scrap or revise that 1967 Working Agreement instead of continuing to adhere
to it?

Some published reports speculate that there was a “de facto” ban in place, that as with the Murakami case, there had been
pressure from the U.S. government on major league teams to keep their hands off NPB stars—such pressure instigated at the
behest of the Japanese leaders worried that the Americans would hijack their sacred game. As the argument went, the U.S. needed
Japan’s cooperation in matters relating to defense. Pressuring MLB with a threat to take a second look at the antitrust exemption
in the U.S. Congress would be an easy enough favor to grant in return, and would certainly be enough to keep major league
owners in line.

However, there is no concrete evidence that such pressure ever existed. And no one in a position to know, in or outside the
respective baseball commissioners’ offices, has suggested otherwise. Robin Berrington, a career diplomat in the State Department,
had this to say: “I was in the cultural office of the American Embassy in Tokyo during much of that period—and was later,
in effect, the cultural attaché. U.S. government–related sports activities were always carried out through the embassy cultural
office. Although there were several two- to three-year stretches of time when I was in D.C., I was still involved in Japanese
affairs and know of no efforts by the U.S. government to pressure the U.S. major leagues to not sign Japanese players. If
there was anything like this going on, I suspect the embassy would have known about it.” Marvin Miller, an active participant
in and close monitor of the baseball scene for the last 40 years of the 20th century, said, “I never heard even a rumor that
there was political pressure on the big leagues to keep their hands off the Japanese.” Added Miwako Atarashi, curator of the
Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Tokyo, and as knowledgeable as anyone about contemporary Japanese baseball history, “That’s
news to me.” Scoffed one insider, “It’s an intriguing theory, but the fact is there is more evidence of aliens landing at
Roswell than there is of this so-called ‘de facto ban’ on Japanese in MLB.”

Aside from the novel concept that the MLB owners actually wanted to honor the agreement they had signed, there are other theories
that present themselves, one of them being that the majors just were not that interested in Japan, regardless of the rave
reports they were getting from Americans returning from the Far East. Said Don Nomura, “There was lots of discrimination in
the States in the ‘60s and ‘70s and it probably still exists to some extent. The U.S. never had a vision of importing players
from Japan—or from the Latin countries, for that matter. Major League Baseball had no presence in Japan. There was very little
scouting there. Not like today, where they’re picking up talent from all over the world.” Added Bobby Valentine, who managed
in Japan in 1995, “Despite what some people said about the high quality of Japanese baseball, there was just this idea prevalent
in the States that the Japanese were not really good enough for MLB. It was insulting. But even the Japanese themselves bought
into it.”

Another theory has it that it just wasn’t worth the hassle, even for those who understood the value of the Japanese player.
The indomitable Bill Veeck, one of the true forces of nature in MLB, tried ardently to buy or trade for Yomiuri slugger Shigeo
Nagashima when he was running the Chicago White Sox in 1968, seven years after Walter O’Malley made his unsuccessful offer.
But, again, Yomiuri owner Shoriki and Nagashima, in the midst of winning nine straight Japan Championships, had their own
agenda, having to do with national honor, and Veeck, exhausted, eventually gave up. So did the St. Louis Cardinals, who tried
to sign Yutaka Enatsu, the San Francisco Giants, who wanted Lotte infielder Michiyo Arito, and the California Angels, who
lusted after Hiroshima Carp left-handed ace Shinichi Ono. Either the athlete himself was reluctant to take such a radical
step because of the language and cultural barriers involved, or if he was willing, his team, holding a firm grip on his services
via the reserve clause, refused to part with him.

According to Buzzie Bavasi and MLB official Jim Small, as the Japanese economy exploded in the ‘80s, MLB owners indeed grew
leery of a salary war with NPB, whose teams had been offering huge sums to free-agent American players like Warren Cromartie.
Their generosity reached a peak of sorts in the Bubble-era season of 1987, when the Yakult Swallows had outbid U.S. teams
for the services of aging Atlanta Braves star Bob Horner, paying $2 million and offering him a then-record $15 million package
to come back for three more years. Horner, who discovered he did not enjoy living in a land like Japan, turned the offer down.
But then, as big league salaries began to rise into the stratosphere, far outstripping what most NPB teams were prepared to
pay for foreign talent, fear of a raid by Japan became unrealistic.

What ultimately changed the equation was the attitude of
some
of the Japanese players. The voluntary retirement loophole had always been there. It was just that no one was aware of its
existence, because no one was trying to defect to MLB. Said Sadaharu Oh, regarded by many as the greatest player ever to play
the game in Japan, a man who hit a record 868 home runs from 1959 to 1980, “In my era, if I had tried to go to the States
to play, the public would have overwhelmingly turned against me. Feelings about such things were much more intense then.”

However, a generation later, as we have seen, youth in Japan had become somewhat less insular. Twelve million people now traveled
abroad every year—up from a fraction of that number in Oh’s playing days. Japan’s foreign population (legal and otherwise)
approached 1.5 million, triple what it was in the early ‘80s. On top of all that there was a new free-agent system in place
and the ties of fealty that bound players to their teams had been loosened a notch—with the notable exception, of course,
of the Tokyo Giants.

Thus, as one American baseball official put it, “It wasn’t so much that the caliber of the players had greatly improved, but
rather that the outlook of the players was different.”

The new environment made it possible for someone like Don Nomura to come along and elbow his way through the door. Not that
it was easy.

What Nomura did took a great deal of hard work and fortitude.

During the Nomo brouhaha, Nomura was bombarded with insulting phone calls and postcards, with messages like “You’re crazy,”
or “You’re greedy” and “You’re a cheat to the players.” He also received death threats from Japanese gangsters. The truculent
Giants warlord Tsuneo Watanabe, foe of greed and chaos that he was, also zeroed in, saying, “If we recognize agents, they
will be the ruin of Japanese professional baseball… . We can never allow agents, especially Don Nomura. He’s a bad man.”

An intelligent, well-mannered, if tightly wound individual, who neither smoked nor drank and exercised religiously, Nomura
had a penchant for hard-edged candor that would win him the enmity of many officials on both sides of the Pacific. It was
a penchant he first displayed during a meeting with Kintetsu Buffaloes president and general manager Yasuo Maeda, who in a
desperate break with protocol had asked for a meeting with Nomura in the hope Nomura could somehow make Nomo see the light
about remaining with the team.

In a meeting at the Miyako Hotel in Osaka, an island of deluxe, if artificial, comfort in the sea of endless concrete that
was Japan’s second city, Maeda complained he could not afford a multiyear deal because the club was losing so much money.
Kintetsu had finished in third place, far out of contention, he complained. Attendance was sluggish, barely over a million.
The team was in the red. In fact, the entire Kintetsu railway and department store complex was in the red. His hands were
tied.

“If you don’t have enough money then why do you have a ball club?” Nomura asked. “Maybe Kintetsu should sell the team to somebody
who knows how to run one.”

Maeda had never heard such insolence.

“Sell the club?!” Maeda retorted. “That’s none of your business.”

“That’s right,” replied Nomura. “It’s none of our business that you’re losing money. But then maybe you’re not doing your
sales properly. Maybe your marketing is no good. Don’t take your inability to make money out on the players. They give 100
percent. They are very competitive out there on the field. It’s not up to them to bring in customers. That’s your job. If
you can’t do it, that is a problem.”

Needless to say, the meeting did not last very long.

Japanese themselves often say that it takes
gaiatsu
(outside pressure) to change the status quo in Japan, given the atmosphere of rigid conformity with which certain established
patterns are adhered to; in this instance Nomura-san was
gaiatsu
incarnate. If he had been a less willful individual, Japanese players might still be waiting for the golden gates of the
temple of MLB to open to them. But being half-American and half-Japanese, and simmering with resentment at the way he’d been
treated in Japan, he had all the qualifications to challenge the system head on. His story says a lot about the gulf that
still separates the two countries.