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Japan Series: ‘You have to see it to believe it’
SAPPORO, Japan | A Japanese version of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” played over the speakers at Sapporo Dome, players hit in side-by-side batting cages and one of the 150 or so reporters stuffed into the dugout asked Hokaido Nippon Ham Fighters manager Trey Hillman what he said to his wife Saturday morning.
“You want to know what I said to my wife?” Hillman replied.
At least two dozen reporters nodded. Then they bowed. Camera flashes popped. Hillman shook his head. It all still makes him laugh sometimes.
“A talk with my wife,” he said, “is not a press conference.”
Welcome to Japan Series 2007.
•••
Why am I here? It’s a good question, one that at least 20 Japanese reporters have already asked me (this before asking me, “What have you eaten so far?” and “Where is Kansas City?” and, oddly, “How old are you?”).
I’m here, mostly, because new Royals manager Trey Hillman is here. He is trying to become the first foreign-born manager ever to win back-to-back Japan Series, the Japanese equivalent of the World Series. This trip seems like a good way to find out about the man charged with changing the Royals’ fortunes.
But there’s something more. I’m here to see this world. The last few years, we all have watched some terrific Japanese players come into our American game — Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui and Daisuke Matsuzaka, to name just three — and yet most of us know so little about their game. It’s virtually hidden.
Japanese baseball isn’t easily available on American television. You have to be a computer hacker to find out anything about it on the Internet. To see it up close, you have to deal with a 14-hour flight, extreme jet lag and a language barrier.
And yet, that’s what Hillman kept saying. “You have to see it to believe it.”
Saturday night, Hillman’s Fighters played the Chunichi Dragons in game one of the best-of-seven Japan Series. More than 42,000 people packed into the Sapporo Dome for one of the greatest pitching duels in Japan Series history. The fans sang and chanted and drank heavily and did the “YMCA” and smacked noisemakers together. And the ending of the game was like something out of a movie. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
“Quite a scene, isn’t it?” asked Dave Owen, a good old Texan (and briefly a Royals player in 1988) who came over to Japan to coach for his friend Hillman. “People back home should know about this.”
•••
Let’s start with a little history. Baseball in Japan goes back more than 100 years, to an American professor and baseball fan named Horace Wilson. He taught English at Tokyo University in the early 1870s and introduced the game to students. It caught on.
But that’s how American baseball came to Japan. Japanese baseball is a whole other thing. Japanese baseball, as explained in Robert Whiting’s excellent book, You Gotta Have Wa, mainly goes back to one man, a writer and manager named Suisha Tobita, who would become known as “Japan’s God of Baseball.”
Tobita coached and wrote baseball columns for most of the 20th century, right up to his death in 1965, and he is still revered for his baseball philosophy, which is pretty well summed up by his pithy quote: “Practice until you die.”
Actually, some Tobita quotes, placed against famous American baseball quotes, might help explain the clashing cultures of baseball.
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” said American icon Yogi Berra.
“Players who lose and don’t cry don’t care enough,” said Tobita.
“It’s a beautiful day for baseball. Let’s play two,” said Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks.
“If the players do not try so hard as to vomit blood in practice, then they cannot hope to win games,” wrote Tobita.
“You gotta be a man to play professional baseball, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too,” said the great Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella.
“One must suffer to be good,” wrote Tobita.
Tobita’s philosophy — that baseball is a discipline, not unlike the martial arts, and it demands intensive training and great pain — is still apparent in Japanese baseball these days. Players may no longer, in Tobita’s unnecessarily descriptive phrase, “vomit blood.”
But when Hillman took over as manager of the Fighters five years ago, he did try to bring along just a bit of America’s more laid-back approach to the game. He shortened the workouts, and he kept pitchers on pitch counts (they were allowed to throw only 120 pitches in a game) and he tried to get his players to loosen up.
Hillman saw that his style was hurting the players. Literally. He saw pain in their eyes.
“You learn pretty quickly that the Japanese players need to be on the field practicing,” he says. “They need that practice time for their souls. You may only want them to run a drill 10 times, but they need to run the drill 150 times.”
The difference is apparent anytime you watch a Japanese team practice. While most American major-league teams have their coaches and a few invited guests throw light batting practice, Hillman’s Fighters have six batting-practice pitchers whose jobs are to throw as hard as they can to batters every day.
Hillman’s “head coach” is a man named Kazuyuki Shirai, who every day pounds hundreds of scalding ground balls at Fighters infielders. He swings the bat so hard you can hear his grunt echo throughout the Sapporo Dome. He shouts whenever one gets by an infielder, and the infielder then bows in apology.
The players often come up to Hillman and demand more practice time.
“For a Japanese player, it is not enough to win,” says Ken Iwamoto, who serves as Hillman’s interpreter and has worked with both Japanese and major-league clubs. “You must win with dignity and honor.”
•••
Saturday’s first series game matched up two of the best pitchers in Japanese baseball. The Dragons starter was a veteran pitcher, Kenshin Kawakami. He has won more than 100 games in Japan, he has pitched a no-hitter, and the scouting report on him is that once he figures out your weakness, you don’t stand a chance.
The Fighters’ starter, meanwhile, was a tall, slim, hard-throwing 21-year-old named Yu Darvish. He struck out more batters than any other pitcher in Japan this season, and this is because he throws a fastball that sneaks up to 153 kilometers per hour (that’s 95 mph) and mixes in a curveball that one coach calls, “flat unhittable.” That will create some strikeouts. The reason Hillman started him in game one of the Japan Series was “because the bigger the game, the more he likes it.”
Right away, it becomes clear that the scouting reports are accurate. Darvish strikes out two in the first inning, and he looks sharp. Then Kawakami comes out and struggles with his control. He walks two batters. The crowd starts jumping up and down. Kawakami then throws a fat mistake pitch to the Fighters’ big power hitter Fernando Seguignol. And Seguignol does not miss. He powers the ball over the left-field fence, a three-run home run.
The crowd then sings a song in Seguignol’s honor. To be fair, though, the crowd sings a different song for every player no matter what they do. It’s incredible. Each player has a certain song, a certain color, a certain chant. The fans also bring props — they like to wave something that is special to that player (Seguignol told reporters that he loves bananas, for instance, so the fans wave inflatable bananas when he hits). When the Fighters are hitting, the fans never stop singing and calling their players names and making noise.
But, here’s an interesting thing: When the Dragons are up, the Fighters fans don’t boo. They don’t hiss. They don’t do anything. They just sit back and let the Dragons fans (there are about three sections worth at the game) cheer and sing for their own players. It is as if they are saying, “Well, we had our fun; now it’s your turn.”
Anyway, after Kawakami gave up the long home run, he retired 21 consecutive Fighters. It was just like the report said: He had figured them out, and he was untouchable. But Darvish was good, too. He allowed a scratch run in the sixth inning, but he was still in control and he had a 3-1 lead going into the ninth.
Then it all got away from him. He looked tired. He looked hurt. His control was gone. He started pitching a bit wildly. Darvish walked a man, which meant that the tying run was at the plate. And then Hillman did something unusual. He went to the mound.
“I’ve only done that two times all year,” Hillman would say. Usually in Japan, the pitching coach goes to the mound. But this was too important. Hillman walked out with his interpreter, and he asked Darvish a question: “How does your arm feel?” Before the interpreter could even translate, Darvish shouted, “Fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.”
Hillman looked hard in Darvish’s eyes. This is where a manager has to rely on something more involved than baseball strategy. This is when he has to look into a player’s face and decide whether he has enough left to win the game. Hillman looked at Darvish for a couple of beats.
“OK then,” Hillman said. “Let’s get this over with already.”
Hillman ran back into the dugout. And the crowd sang a song. And Darvish found one more burst of energy. He reared back, fired his 95-mph fastball and his unhittable curve, and he struck out the final batter. It was Darvish’s 13th strikeout — tying a Japan Series record for a game. Hillman’s team led the series 1-0. Everybody in the stadium, including the Dragons fans, stood and applauded.
“What do you think of the fans here?” a team official asked Hillman in a question-and-answer session for the crowd.
“There’s no place like it,” Hillman said.