The Meaning of Ichiro (42 page)

Valentine flatly denied that he had ever employed such a strategy, anywhere, anytime—not even when he was in the minor leagues.
“There were a couple of times,” he said, “when there was a steal on a 2-2 count, after a fastball had been thrown (which meant
in Japan that a breaking pitch was coming). Sure, we got caught a couple of times, but that’s the game. I can’t imagine (the
coaches) were that confused about what was going on. It really seems like they decided to lie to make the (managerial) change
look good.”

The similarities to the Akira Kurosawa movie
Rashomon,
in which four people involved in a rape-murder gave varying accounts, was striking.

Indeed, at this stage, it may be impossible to get an accurate read on all the factors that caused the dismissal of a manager
who had brought the franchise from bathos to respectability in a single season. Valentine himself was a controversial figure.
In the States, like Billy Martin, he could come in and turn a team around, then have it fall apart on him later. Although
he was regarded as a very intelligent, knowledgeable baseball man, he was not universally liked by his players. His critics
called him arrogant and a camera hog—a man preoccupied with self-aggrandizement. In 1999, an article in the
Sporting News
had even referred to him as the “most hated man in baseball.”

While personality conflicts no doubt played a part in the melodrama, Valentine’s (understandable) inability to grasp the subtext
of his hiring was probably what sealed his fate—a fate shared by innumerable foreign hirees dating back to the Meiji Restoration.
What his bosses might have made explicit from the beginning was this: “We want you to pass along certain things to make us
better, but only within limits which we will define—that’s what ‘you’re in complete charge but please listen to our coaches’
means; you’re only here temporarily and as soon as you succeed in giving us what we want, we’ll replace you with a Japanese;
we’re not interested in you as a person, nor do we want you to inject American philosophy or culture into our game or our
lives; and while we won’t tell you any of this explicitly or explain the rules of engagement (that’s not our way), you’ll
be expected to observe them anyway.”

It is ironic in this context that Valentine was one of the few American imports into the game that made sincere efforts to
bridge the language gap and learn to communicate with the people he worked with and for. He was determined to understand Japan
as no other had before and to get the right blend of the two approaches. It turned out to be a more volatile mixture than
anyone had anticipated.

By the same token, the Lotte front office’s citing of “philosophical differences” may not have been that far off the mark,
at least from their point of view. Critical in this philosophy was the mingled notion of authority and change. In Japan, continuity
is seen as paramount: things have to change a little at a time, taking into consideration what has gone before and allowing
the principals to make slow, steady adjustments to new ways. Neither baby nor bathwater is thrown out, but incorporated into
the new scheme of things.

Hir
ka and company could not surrender real authority to Valentine and risk having him impose radical changes on the way things
were done—on or off the field. By implication, that would have meant the old ways—
their
ways—were radically wrong, and this would have been unacceptable.

No doubt Hir
ka’s announced intention of hiring Valentine as a way of melding U.S. and Japanese styles was sincere. To this day, Valentine
thinks the problem was with the coaches who “misinformed” the GM about what was going on. He voices nothing but the highest
respect for Hir
ka and insists that if he could have eliminated Eto and Obana and had direct daily communication with him, things would have
been very different. We’ll never know (although given the fact that both coaches were doing Hir
ka’s bidding from the start, that is unlikely).

None of this, however, can take away from what the lowly Marines accomplished under Valentine’s stewardship. Whether or not
Hir
ka merited Valentine’s esteem and whether or not he and his crew were smart baseball people, Lotte and the Japanese game in
general had never lacked for long practices, knee-jerk sacrifice bunts, full counts and plodding conservatism that emphasized
wa
and consensus. The only variable in the 1995 mix was Bobby-ball, and it produced a turnaround that was astonishing. The idea
that the players were maturing and the team was just coming around anyway, that they won in spite of him and all the behind-the-scenes
conflict, that his bumbling strategy failures cost them 15 wins and the championship, might not look so absurd if the team
had done anything the following season. In 1996, Valentine and his “mistakes” were gone, Hir
ka and company were in full charge (one report said that Hir
ka was giving instructions by cell phone to Ejiri in the dugout during games), the team
wa
that Valentine had supposedly disrupted was unthreatened—and they stank up the swamp! And, truth be told, no cool sea breeze
has come along for years after to disperse the miasma.

Valentine’s letter to Shigemitsu, telling him that canning his coaches would improve the team, may have been a gross breach
of etiquette in Japanese terms, but the owner was nevertheless persuaded to act on the advice—only a year later.

* * *

For those who want the gory details, that odoriferous 1996 Lotte squad finished up at 60-67-3, fifth place and about a thousand
kilometers behind pennant-winning Orix. The team’s overall batting average plummeted—Hori, Hatsushiba and Komiyama, among
others, had bad years—while the team’s collective ERA ballooned. Tom House, who had remained with the team, explained the
difference. “Valentine had us monitor pitch totals in practice and the games. The same with batting practice and ground balls.
Hir
ka/Ejiri went back to the traditional Japanese work ethic. The more you pitch, hit, practice, the better you perform. Hence,
tired players with physical and mental deficiencies.”

Hideki Irabu became embroiled in a very public tiff with Hir
ka over his expanding pitch count and practice time. “Hir
ka is really outside the pale,” he actually said to reporters. In a highly unusual move, for the NPB that is, the Lotte players
en masse filed a complaint to the ownership about Hir
ka. Said Komiyama, “I really felt we could have won if Bobby had stayed as manager of the team.”