SURPRISE, Ariz. | Everyone was watching Trey Hillman closely on Tuesday, the first day of full-team Royals workouts, his first real day as Royals manager. The question: Would the Royals be turning Japanese? People really seemed to think so.</p><p>Hillman, as you know, is a Texas guy who had his greatest baseball success managing the Nippon Ham Fighters in Sapporo, Japan. It makes him unique. Hillman had been spinning his wheels a bit as a minor-league manager and then a director of player development here in America. He was happy but unfulfilled; he felt like he had a chance to do something great. That&#8217;s when he was hired to be a manager in Japan.</p><p>And he did something great. Hillman guided the Fighters to their first championship in about a half-century. Last year, he took them back to the Japan Series despite the inconvenient fact that they could not hit at all. Hillman readily admits that, at first, he&#8217;d had some trouble adjusting to the Japanese style of baseball, but by the end, he had embraced Yakyu, so much so that he became an icon, so much so that he has a restaurant in Sapporo named for him, so much so that Royals general manager Dayton Moore flew across the world to hire him.</p><p>So, sure, it only makes sense to wonder how Hillman will bring East and West together as manager of the Kansas City Royals. Will he ask players to bow? Will he put them through the famously rigid training methods of Japanese baseball? Sushi?</p><p>Well, it&#8217;s only been one day, but it seems pretty clear already that the answer is: None of the above. The Royals&#8217; camp on Tuesday looked, more or less, like every other spring training camp. There were a few subtle differences, of course, which we&#8217;ll get to in a moment. But the most striking part of the first day of Camp Trey is how familiar it all looked. Players hit, fielded, pitched. That&#8217;s all. They stayed on the field about the same length of time as years past. They did many of the same drills. If you didn&#8217;t know any better, this camp would have looked like Buddy Bell&#8217;s, Joe Torre&#8217;s or Bobby Cox&#8217;s.</p><p>Hillman is not trying to revolutionize American baseball. &#8220;I&#8217;m not that smart,&#8221; he says.</p><p>Well, he is pretty smart. Hillman instinctively understands how to make people feel comfortable. It&#8217;s his unique gift. In Japan, he constantly tinkered with his training methods and his personal style in order to get the most out of his players. There, it often meant working the players <em>harder</em> than he felt was necessary and demanding <em>more</em> of them than he had originally intended. There is something about the psyche of Japanese players that makes hard work sacred. Hillman adjusted to that.</p><p>So it only made sense that Hillman would want to make his players <em>here</em> feel comfortable, too. And, hey, Hillman is American. Tuesday&#8217;s workout was very much an American workout. It began with Hillman&#8217;s motivational speech, one that Dayton Moore called, &#8220;The best I&#8217;ve ever been around.&#8221; Then, there was some stretching. A few calisthenics. Then the players went to the field for some fielding drills, for some throwing, for some live batting practice and so on.</p><p>There were some quirks, of course &#8212; every spring training camp has them. Hillman has had his pitchers throwing live batting practice to hitters since the day they arrived &#8212; that&#8217;s a little bit different. Most teams wait until everyone has warmed up for a few days before having the pitchers actually throw to batters. Tuesday, pitchers were throwing to batters for the second or third time already &#8212; they were throwing at perhaps 70 percent of game speed, which is pretty far along. Hillman is definitely trying to quicken the pace of this camp and get his players&#8217; competitive juices flowing.