By Robert Whiting (2014)
Playing baseball in a foreign country is not an easy thing to do. There are a lot of adjustments that must be made. In the case of foreigners playing in Japan, the adjustment is to longer spring camps, harder training, and a wider strike zone during games. For pitchers, it is a softer mound and a slightly bigger ball. For batters it is getting used to facing a plethora of breaking pitches.
Then, of course, there is off the field—learning to eat Japanese food and use chopsticks, traveling by train, carrying your own bag, etc.
For Japanese going to MLB in America, the adjustments are in reverse. They must cope with a much shorter spring camp (three days of workouts before exhibition games begin) and less intense training. Batters must adjust to a plethora of high inside fastballs, infielders must adjust to spikes-high slides, and pitchers must adapt to a smaller ball, a narrower strike zone, a harder mound, and pitching once every five days instead of once a week.
Off the field, of course, the biggest adjustment is the intense travel, sometimes coast to coast, in flights as long as six hours. Unlike Japan, where the team boards a train, and sometimes a plane, the next morning, MLB teams depart at midnight after a night game, arriving in the next city in the early morning.
Then, of course, there are the issues with food. Japanese restaurants proliferate in LA, NYC and Seattle—players can eat at Nobu’s every night if they wish. But elsewhere, there are fewer choices.
If your interpreter is not with you, you are on your own. If you can’t read the English menu, you may wind up ordering the same thing all the time—steak or cheeseburger, out of fear—and wind up gaining weight during the season.
Back in your hotel room, the only channel you can understand is the international NHK channel, out of 500. Being alone on the road with no one to talk to can be the hardest thing.
Of course, there will be times when people from the local Japan-America society will stop by to introduce themselves and take the Japanese player out on the town. And whenever there is a Japanese player on the opposing team, the two will often share a post-game meal.
But it is important that the Japanese player like his interpreter, because he will be spending an awful lot of time with him—more time than even his wife.
In a way, Japanese players in MLB are lucky, because they do have an interpreter with them nearly all their waking hours, not just at the ballpark but also outside the stadium, to help them perform the little mundane tasks of daily life, like shopping at a drugstore or supermarket, picking up dry cleaning, or paying a visit to a doctor.
Latino players are not so lucky. Unlike Japanese players, most Latino players are not accorded interpreters to help them during their waking hours (the thinking being that with 25 million Latinos in the US, newly arrived players from Central and South America will be able to find their own help). This can cause problems. According to a recent ESPN article, for example, Euclides Rojas, a pitcher from Cuba and now bullpen coach of the Pittsburgh Pirates, once accidentally bought dog food for his son. He saw the face of a smiling child on the can. Coming fresh from Cuba, he didn’t know there was such a thing as food just for dogs; he thought it was food for kids.
Hall of Famer Tony Perez ordered apple pie a la mode his first month in America, even for breakfast, because he didn’t recognize anything else on the menu and did not want to sound stupid or disrespectful asking too many questions of his dining companions, who could have interpreted for him if he had asked.
Future Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero, from the Dominican Republic, had his mother come live with him as a major leaguer because he was so scared of everything new and different in the United States.
LA Dodgers rookie star Yasiel Puig eats steak and eggs and double portions of hash browns and two milkshakes every day, because food was rationed back home in the crushing poverty of Cuba and he could not get that food as a child. So now he is making up for lost time.
So, as he makes the adjustment to a completely different type of game, how will Masahiro Tanaka, who won his first start in Toronto after a shaky first inning, fare this season?
Darrell Rasner, a former Yankee pitcher who also pitched for Rakuten in Japan, gave his opinion to the New York Daily News recently: “Tanaka will have to alter his mindset about pitch counts—the Yankees will take him out after 100 pitches, something most Japanese pitchers don’t like. They find it demeaning.” Also, Tanaka will have to adjust to the MLB ball, which is “harder to manipulate.”
But pitching on an MLB-style mound might actually help Tanaka, Rasner says. Pitching from Japanese mounds, which are softer, causes holes to develop after repeated landings, because the dirt is so soft, almost like sand—something that adversely affects some pitchers. Rasner, for his part, didn’t like the softer mounds because they made him worry about slipping and pulling a groin.
For some people it is a blessing, for others a curse. Hard mounds in America caused C.J. Nitkowski a lot of pain in his hips and knees, because of the hard landings. But after two years in Japan, Nitkowski said his hips and knees were free of pain.
In MLB, says Rasner, the harder mounds may be a blessing for Tanaka. “Because the mounds are harder,” Rasner says, “Tanaka will be able to drive more off the MLB mound and I think his pitches will be even more effective.”
Interestingly, Tanaka spent the winter practicing with an MLB ball, so, as demonstrated in his spring training and early season efforts, getting used to the different American ball is not going to be a problem.
I personally think Tanaka will be fine in the end. But his biggest problem may be his $155 million contract. The question surrounding Tanaka will be, for quite some time, “Is he worth the money?”
For the answer to be yes, at least this year, he will have to win 20 games, lead the league in ERA, and help the Yankees into the playoffs.
That’s a tall order for any MLB pitcher to fill.
NOTE: Tanaka finished 2014 at 13-5 with a 2.77 ERA, the first of six consecutive solid years as effectively the Yankees’ ace. The Yankees made the post-season five times with Tanaka in their rotation.
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