By Robert Whiting (2020)
PART I
The MLB season has been postponed, thanks to the coronavirus, and may not start until midsummer, if at all. With New Yorkers, among other big city residents, ordered to stay home for 90 days beginning March 21, an order which includes the New York Yankees players and those of the New York Mets, the situation for playing major league baseball this year does not look good. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
Some of you may remember the mass postponement of MLB games in 1995, when the season was shortened from 162 games to 144 following a 7½-month players’ strike that also wiped out the 1994 World Series. As a result, the following year Opening Day was pushed back from April 2 to April 26, after the continuing strike was finally solved, and player salaries were reduced by 11.1 percent because the games were lost due to the strike.
Life without baseball can be depressing. The MLB season has a certain calming effect. Knowing there are games on TV and that those games will be followed box scores the next morning to study, gives one a certain sense of continuity. Some people can’t handle life without baseball. Their palms get sweaty. They can’t sleep at night. They turn to watching tapes of old games.
Guilty as charged.
Of course Japanese pro baseball has had similar problems. Play was halted during the Pacific War years. But that was it. Until this year, that is, when “open-sen” games were played to empty stands to limit exposure to the virus and the opening of the NPB regular season had to be moved back. But that may be about to change.
Despite the infectiousness of the virus, Japan has not been affected the way Italy, Spain. China, the USA and some other countries have. Not even close. The same government that was issued a rare rebuke by U.S. health authorities for letting the Diamond Princess outbreak get out of hand is now getting it right on coronavirus and could teach the US a thing or two.
“Many infection clusters have been identified at a comparatively early stage,” said a panel said in a report in early March. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cited those findings when he said Saturday that Japan didn’t yet need to declare a state of emergency.
Moreover, Japan may have some built-in advantages, such as a culture where handshakes and hugs are less common than in other Group of Seven countries. It also has rates of hand-washing above those in Europe and people take off their shoes before entering their homes, unlike much of the rest of the world.
Cases of seasonal flu have been declining for seven/eight straight weeks, just as the coronavirus was spreading around the globe, indicating Japanese may have taken to heart the need to adopt some basic steps to stem infectious diseases. Tokyo Metropolitan Infectious Disease Surveillance Center data shows that influenza cases this year are well below normal levels, with nationwide cases hitting a low according to data going back to 2004.
So , in light of this, maybe NPB will start earlier than the MLB in the US—even if it is before empty stands– they could find a market for their games in baseball starved USA.
It has happened once before. In 1994 when the deprived MLB fans of nearly half a season, the playoffs and the world series. Japan stepped into the void.
The 1994 Japan Series between the Seibu Lions and the Yomiuri Giants was televised, on a week’s tape delay, in major markets around the U.S. in early November 1994, but few viewers would have been able to place the faces beyond those of Jim Pagliarulo and Henry Cotto, former MLB players who played for Seiu and Yomiuri respectively.
Japanese icons from Hideo Nomo and Ichiro Suzuki to Yu Darvish and Shohei Ohtani – plus scores of their countrymen in between – had yet to jump to the majors. 1994 was the first time a critical mass of Americans paid notice to baseball there.
They were rewarded with a showdown between clubs with dueling claims to superiority: fabled Yomiuri, winners of a record 17 Japan Series but only two in the preceding 20 years, and ascendant Seibu, Japanese champions in six of eight seasons leading into 1994. As Lions manager Masaaki Mori told Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated at the time, “This is the series everyone has been waiting for.”
After the final out tapes of the games were transported to Chicago by Japan Times baseball columnist Wayne Graczyk. There American regional TV network SportsChannel had recruited White Sox broadcasters Hawk Harrelson and Tom Paciorek out of their strike-induced sabbatical to call the series. The plan to telecast their commentary in prime time over the next week encountered only one fleeting snag: The announcers hadn’t expected such noise from the Japanese crowds.
“The drums they beat there were just driving both of us crazy,”
Harrelson said in a telephone interview with Nick Faris, of The Score, who wrote a recent article about the event,. “We kept looking at each other, rolling our eyes back in our heads. They started in the first inning and didn’t stop until the game was over.”
Overall, Harrelson enjoyed the experience; he later heard that SportsChannel executives were ecstatic with the ratings. And though the Japan Series didn’t totally soothe American sourness over the cancellation of the World Series , it was, most fans agreed, better than nothing. .And many observers came to see that the level of baseball in Japan was quite high and that Japan’s top stars seemed to be as good as those in America.
And it set the stage for an even more dramatic event. The departure of one of Japan baseball’s brightest stars to the US.
Hideo Nomo.
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PART II (1,356 words)
IN 1994, the MLB strike resulting in the Japan Series between the Seibu Lions and the Yomiuri Giants being broadcast in the US. It was the first time a Japan Series had even been telecast in the United States. The event was well-received by American fans even though the constant chanting from the oendan was annoying to many including the American announcers. And many observers came to see that the level of baseball in Japan was quite high and that Japan’s top stars seemed to be as good as those in America.
This realization led to a major repercussion.
In 1994, the Kintetsu Buffaloes finished several games behind Seibu in NPB’s Pacific League, well short of contending for a spot in the Japan Series. But two months after the Japan Series aired on SportsChannel, the club’s best pitcher seized the spotlight with a revelation that changed baseball forever: He wanted to play in America. And the LA Dodgers offered him a lot of money to do so—much, much more than he had ever received in Japan.
Hideo Nomo was not the first Japanese player to grace an MLB roster; that distinction of course belongs to Masanori Murakami, a southpaw whose Pacific League team loaned him to the San Francisco Giants for two seasons in the 1960s. But when Nomo signed a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers in February 1995, as the strike continued, he became the first player to make the leap of his own volition.
It wasn’t just the 1994 Japan Series broadcast that influenced Nomo’s move. A confluence of factors had come into play. American fans, of course, The internet, satellite TV, and jet travel were increasingly connecting the countries. Nomo had dreamt of playing in the majors since childhood, and by retiring from the Japanese game, he could free himself from the reserve clause that barred most players from entering free agency.
He had also come to despise the harsh regime of Buffaloes manager Keiishi Suzuki whose motto seemed to be “the only way to cure a sore arm is to throw more.”
The implications of Nomo’s maneuver reached far beyond his electrifying debut season with the Dodgers, at the end of which he was voted National League Rookie of the Year.He paved the way for a procession of Japanese players – several dozen in all, including five with multiple MLB All-Star selections to their names – to follow him to the majors in every season since.
“I’m really happy for what Hideo has done,” Don Nomura, the agent who guided Nomo to MLB, said in a recent interview with The Score,, . “If he failed, I think everybody would have been scared to make any moves. But he certainly gave hope for the next generation to challenge and compete at a higher level.
“Because of his success,” Nomura said, “it gave them confidence.”
In Japan, the contemporaneous reaction to Nomo’s departure was not so rosy. Public opinion amassed against him; baseball fans, team officials, and members of the media viewed his decision as traitorous, hoping he would fail and feel commensurate shame. Even Nomo’s father, Shizuo, didn’t speak to him for a while.
Nomo wasn’t deterred by the backlash, nor overwhelmed by the nearly 100 Japanese journalists who swept into San Francisco on May 2, 1995 to chronicle his first MLB start. (The disturbance moved manager Tommy Lasorda to boot all photographers from the Dodgers’ clubhouse.)
With the strike finally resolved, Nomo one-hit Barry Bonds’ Giants over five scoreless innings, a performance that was telecast live across Japan starting at 4:33 a.m. local time.
There were few games that season in which Nomo faltered. In his fourth start, he struck out 14 against the Pittsburgh Pirates. In his seventh start, he two-hit the New York Mets, prompting losing pitcher Bret Saberhagen to acknowledge Nomo “was becoming a folk hero here.” In his 12th start, he struck out 13 and blanked the Colorado Rockies – as fans in eight Japanese cities watched on giant outdoor TV screens that had been specially installed for the occasion
Indeed, Japan’s perception of Nomo changed completely as he started to dominate major-league hitting.
That was a huge boost to the Japanese national ego.” That July, when Nomo was tapped to start for the National League in the All-Star Game, Shizuo Nomo told Kyodo News that his son had “done a great job” since leaving for the States. No less an authority than Shigeo Nagashima hailed the selection as “terrific.”
“The Americans will see Japanese baseball through Nomo,” the then Yomiuri manager said at the time, “and I want him to do his level best.”
In October 1995, shortly after the Dodgers were eliminated in the NL Division Series, The Japan Times lauded Nomo’s marquee year, writing in an editorial widely disseminated in North America, that he’d singlehandedly refuted the notion that Japanese athletes couldn’t measure up to the rest of the world. When Nomo flew home for the offseason, more than 500 fans flocked to Narita Airport near Tokyo to cheer his return. A reporter at the gathering asked him if he had a message for young baseball players across the country.
“Challenge yourself,” Nomo replied. “Otherwise, you can’t accomplish anything.”
The week after Nomo’s flight landed, the NPB Central League champion Yakult Swallows beat the Orix BlueWave in five games to win the 1995 Japan Series. Yakult first baseman Tom O’Malley, a former major leaguer, was named series MVP. His solo homer in the decisive game, a 3-1 Swallows win, offset a blast from Orix’s leadoff hitter – 22-year-old budding megastar Ichiro Suzuki. This time, the Japan Series was not telecast in America, as the strike had ended and the American World Series had returned to center stage —a game unwatched in the USA
Ichiro, of course, bid farewell to baseball this past March, 2001, w
The breadth of Ichiro’s legacy is greater than his 4,367 professional hits, just as Nomo’sRookie of the Year award doesn’t fully express his effect on the sport. If Japanese players are known generally for their work ethic and discipline, it’s thanks in no small part to Ichiro’s famous, unyielding adherence to training and to routine.
Indeed, Hideki Matsui seemed to epitomize Japanese selflessness when, in 2006, he took the possibly unprecedented step of apologizing to his Yankees teammates for breaking his wrist on an attempted diving catch.
That said, the most significant way in which these players influenced baseball was through sheer force of skill; they pitched, hit, and fielded at an exceptionally high level. Together they laid a path for Ohtani to break ground as a DH who also pitches. Ohtani may well be the most talented athlete in all of baseball world wide.
In a way, the scope of Japan’s contributions to baseball in North America can be traced to 1994, and Nomo’s departure that Hideki Matsui credits for giving him the confidence, at age 20, to then excel on an even bigger stage.
In the following years, he matched Dan Gladden’s feat in the opposite order. Gladden has played in a world series with the Minnesota Twins and then played in a Japan Series with the Yomiuri Giants. Matsui played for the 1994 Japan Series champion and then, with the 2009 Yankees, World Series winner.
What effect will the postponement or cancellation of MLB games due to the corona virus have on the relationship between NPB and MLB. Will telecasts of NPB games become the thing to watch in the US?
Change–Cross cultural cooperation– doesn’t always come in expected ways. Sometimes it comes in fits and starts.
And when a corona virus changes the way we live our lives.
Tokyo Junkie 