Lifelong baseball fan Jeff Yang looks at recent events that have renewed his passion for the game-like the drafting of 16-year-old schoolgirl knuckleball specialist Eri Yoshida as Japan's first female to play in men's professional baseball, and the Seattle Mariners' hiring of Don Wakamatsu as the major leagues' first Asian American manager.
Baseball fans are disillusioned, and here's why: Pumped up with money and medication, the sport has gotten ever bigger and badder -- and more boring. The one thing that has always distinguished baseball is the feeling of history in the making: Each season, records fall, milestones are passed, boundaries are broken. That's all been eclipsed by the asterisk of cash and steroids; it's hard to feel excited at new benchmarks when the bench is dipped in 24-karat gold and the marks are injection scars.
Two recent events, however, are enough to refresh one's faith-because they're reminders that the game exists beyond the sport; that its history reaches past the margins of the MLB, or even, for that matter, America…and that there's still plenty of room ahead for real and remarkable change.
On November 16, the Kobe 9 Cruise of Japan's new Kansai Independent League drafted an unlikely prospect: 5'0", 114-pound Eri Yoshida would have been a jaw-dropping choice even if she weren't a 16-year-old schoolgirl, and the nation's first-ever female to play in a men's professional league.
Two days later, on this side of the Pacific, the Seattle Mariners announced they'd chosen a new helmsman: Don Wakamatsu, the first Asian American ever hired as a major-league manager. His pick was as solid as Yoshida's was surprising; a journeyman catcher and veteran coach, Wakamatsu is considered a brilliant student of the game. The real question, perhaps, is why it took so long for him to get his chance: A contender to manage the A's and the Texas Rangers, he lost out narrowly both times.
"Everything happens for a reason," says Wakamatsu. "It's funny, because I was born in the Northwest, and I took the long way back: A full circuit of the American League West, coaching for the Angels, the Rangers, Oakland, and now, here I am in Seattle. Deep down, it feels like this was meant to be."
Though the two are otherwise as different as participants in the same game can be, Yoshida and Wakamatsu do have a few things in common. The first is, of course, ethnicity: Though Wakamatsu's ties to Japan are four generations back, he's stayed close to those roots-even beginning his baseball career playing in Japanese-American community leagues, making him part of the grand and seldom-explored legacy of Nisei baseball.
Building Bridges
That history, like that of the Negro Leagues, is one of exclusion and discrimination; of great athletes who performed feats that few people remember or recognize. (The rich past of U.S.-Japanese baseball relations, and the role of American-born Japanese in developing them, is being explored this weekend at UC Berkeley's U.S.-Japan Baseball Symposium-free to the public; click here for details).
"Conventional wisdom has it that pro baseball started in Japan because of the Major League's 1934 tour, led by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig," says Nisei baseball historian Kerry Yo Nakagawa. "But Nisei ballclubs toured Japan starting in 1910 -- and experts now accept that the key event was actually the 1927 Nisei goodwill tour, featuring the Negro League's Philadelphia Royal Giants and the era's elite Nisei team, the Fresno Athletic Club."
After going undefeated against Japan's top universities, the two teams faced off in a "championship" before a packed crowd at Tokyo's Meiji Jingu Stadium. The game was tied 2-2 until the 7th, when Giants superstar Biz Mackey stepped to the plate. "Mackey hit a towering drive," says Nakagawa. "My uncle, Johnny Nakagawa, was playing center, and I have a picture of him leaping over the wall to try to catch it." He didn't, and the Giants ultimately beat the Nisei 9-2 -- "but up until that inning, it was neck and neck," Nakagawa laughs.
It's important to note that by anyone's standards, the Negro League's finest were elite. "[Negro League legend] Buck O'Neil used to say, 'People ask me, 'Don't you wish you could have played with the best in the world?' I tell 'em, I did -- they just didn't play in the Majors," says Nakagawa.
Breaking Barriers
That, of course, brings up the second similarity between Yoshida and Wakamatsu: Both are pioneers, breaching historic boundaries. And while some have called Yoshida's selection a stunt, she herself has embraced the opportunity with an appealing blend of humility and chutzpah: "I've just been picked and haven't achieved anything," said Yoshida at her unveiling. "But someday, I'd like to play in America, in the major leagues!"
If the idea of a five-foot-nothing, 114-pound girl making the majors sounds comical, consider this: Fresno's Kenichi Zenimura was a slap-hitting catcher who captained his crew against Negro League all-stars when the latter were the best in the game. Lauded by the likes of Babe Ruth, Zenimura was five-foot-nothing…105 pounds.
Size does matter, of course: Bigger translates directly into faster, farther, harder. And women who've gone head to head with men -- like Jean Cione, former pitcher for the Rockford Peaches of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League back in the Forties and Fifties -- admit that their annual "serious exhibition" against an all-male squad gave even the toughest competitors on the team pause.
"We never looked forward to that game," says Cione. "We had finesse; we could run and hit; but we couldn't run as fast, hit as far, throw as hard. I remember we played back as far as we could when the guys were up at bat-because when a man hit the ball squarely, it acted completely differently from when a woman hit it...it would hook, it would fade, it would veer right at you. It was like playing a completely different game."
But that was then, and this is now. "Athletes today are completely different," she notes. "I was at a Women's Sports Foundation event, and met top college fast-pitch softball players, and some of them were a foot taller than I was -- and I'm five-foot-eight. And the game's different too. Used to be you were a pitcher and you went in knowing you'd throw nine innings and bat four times. Now, starters go six innings and get pulled for a middle reliever."
The changing nature of the game, transformed as it has been by designated hitters and one-out relief specialists, have opened a new door for a pioneering woman with the right skills to slip through.
Blowing 'Em Away
Skills like mastery of baseball's great equalizer -- a unique pitch that serves as baseball's great equalizer, leveling the table between people of different sizes, ages-even genders. Thrown at glacial speed with a minimum of spin, the knuckler's lack of rotation makes it dip and slip and slide with every stray weft of breeze. Sluggers who can hit three-digit heaters a country mile find themselves corkscrewing into the ground against a knuckleballer's junk.
Eri Yoshida has worked on her floater since she was eight. It's good enough to have whiffed every batter she faced in the Kansai League's tryouts. "No one has ever hit it," she said at her presser, showing her now-famous dimples.
But a knuckleball's butterfly dance to home plate is an unpredictable journey for everyone involved -- not just pitcher and hitter, but catcher as well. Former backstop Bob Uecker famously called the knuckler the "easiest pitch in baseball to catch; you just wait until it stops rolling and pick it up." Other baseball sages have compared being at the receiving end of a knuckleball to "catching a fly with chopsticks" -- a feat that, if accomplished, means an individual can overcome any obstacle, and do the impossible.
In his one season in the bigs, Don Wakamatsu was personal catcher for Charlie Hough -- the knuckleball king. Which bodes well for his ability to reinvent a Mariner team that last year flirted with being historically bad-and also makes him a fair judge of whether Eri Yoshida might ever get to live out her big-league dreams. Bottom line: "This is a game where they pay pitchers to get outs," he says. "It isn't about race or gender: If she can be effective, she can make it. And I'll tell you, if she has a knuckler that's as good as they say, she will be effective. It's a weird, physical feat that not everyone can do-we have one of the best out here in Seattle, R.A. Dickey -- but if you've got it and are effective with it, no question, you have a shot at breaking through, no matter who you are."
All of which gives Jean Cione, now 80 years old, something to ponder. "You know, I started at first base, then they converted me to pitcher because I was a southpaw. And I had a pretty darned good two-fingered knuckleball back in the day! If only I'd focused on developing it, who knows? Maybe I'd still be playing now."
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