Japan had a love-hate relationship with Royals’ Nomo

T oday could be the end of Nomomania, this wild and inspirational and maddening 13-year ride that’s done nothing short of change the global view of baseball forever.

Luke Hochevar will make his second big-league start today for the Royals, which means someone’s got to go, and Hideo Nomo, 39 years old and scuffling, is as likely a candidate as anyone. So this could be it for Nomo, who might not ever give a direct telling of his impossible career because of the burns he’s suffered along the way.

His native Japan once treated him like a national hero, then a traitor, then a hero again. By then it was too late for him to care, and when he appeared finished as a major-league pitcher three years ago, he had been replaced on the front pages back home by a new crop of stars he helped make rich.

Nomo once symbolized the new, rebellious generation of Japanese youth, the first to sign his own shoe deal, the first to exploit a loophole that brought him to the fame and wealth of Major League Baseball.

The Japanese hated him for that. He didn’t understand, but he also didn’t care much. So when Japan suddenly turned and tried to embrace him, he didn’t care much for that, either. Nomomania has never been his thing.

“I’m glad to be back,” he says through an interpreter, some 20 Japanese reporters hanging on every rare syllable they get. “I want to throw well.”

That hasn’t happened. He has surrendered nine runs and three homers in 4 1/3 innings, which is why he could be the casualty today. That’s OK. He’s a middle-aged man, almost three years and an elbow surgery removed from his last big-league game before this season. He was never supposed to make it back this far, so now that he has, maybe he’ll do it again.

Or maybe he’ll retire. Nobody seems certain, which is fitting, since the fact we’re even discussing Nomo in the major leagues is one of the all-time shockers.

One American League general manager called Nomo “done” when he signed with the Royals, and that was before he showed up to camp noticeably overweight, the only player gassed after basic warm-up exercises. Some of his teammates assumed he was there merely to help fellow Japanese pitcher Yasuhiko Yabuta adjust.

The tornado windup — which he developed to get his father’s attention — is gone, along with the magic. The 95 mph fastball is down to the mid-80s. Traffic in Tokyo used to literally stop when he pitched, so motorists could watch the giant video boards that showed his starts.

Yes, they cheered him wildly, but only after they cursed him passionately. The hate grew so common that Nomo merely shrugged when told of another death threat.

Then there was the incredibly rapid decline. A 16-game winner with a 3.09 ERA one year, 4-11 with an 8.25 the next year. The Devil Rays cut him, then the Yankees, and finally the White Sox before he stopped getting chances. He landed in the Venezuelan winter league, fat and nearly 40, and opponents hit .310 off him.

But a funny thing happened on his way to baseball oblivion. Halfway through what some figured was a courtesy spring training tryout, big-league batters started missing his pitches. The forkball that once turned baseball on its side came back to life.

“Guys,” Royals manager Trey Hillman told his coaches during one game, “are you seeing the same thing I’m seeing?”

Thankfully, the outline of Nomo and his remarkable career can be told with the help of those who’ve lived around it.

•••

Hideo Nomo has always been an outsider. People sometimes miss this, but it’s crucial when thinking about Nomo’s remarkable life. There is a saying in Japan: The nail that sticks up gets hammered.

Nomo has always been that nail. He has always felt like he gets hammered.

“I know how Britney Spears feels,” says Don Nomura, Nomo’s longtime friend and agent.

Nomo was a latchkey child who saw baseball as the way to become someone, only baseball never loved him back. Japanese high schools recruit baseball players the way American universities go after football talent, and none of the big ones took a second look.

That tornado windup, the one thing Nomo found to give him the velocity he needed, turned off the Japanese baseball establishment. They thought he’d get hurt. Nomo’s style didn’t fit. Too much individualism, too much unknown. He was the nail sticking up.

Nomo ended up in an industrial league, where he learned the forkball. He quickly had success and made his way into Japan’s major leagues, where he led in wins and strikeouts four straight years. Then he started sticking up a bit too much for Japan’s tastes.

Workout routines there are legendary, with 100 max-effort pitches sometimes considered a warm-up. Nomo complained of a dead arm once. His manager thought the only way to beat a dead arm was to throw more.

Nomo refused, and immediately was sent down to the minor leagues. Once again, the outsider. The nail sticking up. The one getting hammered.

American baseball had always fascinated Nomo. He wanted to pitch against the best hitters in the world. He read Nolan Ryan’s Pitcher’s Bible, which reinforced his belief in resting his arm and strengthened his skepticism of the Japanese way of doing things.

Quietly, he started to search for a way out. Japanese baseball contracts were a virtual copy of major-league contracts with one notable exception. Japanese teams held rights to a player only until he retired. After that, the player was free to join any team — worldwide — that would have him.

This was the loophole that Nomo would run through, his way out of Japan. It was an unprecedented move, a fast one pulled on the Japanese baseball structure, which responded by painting him as a traitor and eventually creating the posting system that exists today.

Ever since Nomo’s success, no Japanese player has taken advantage of the loophole that brought him to America. It took guts to do it. Took someone who thought for himself. An outsider.

A nail sticking up, though this time he would finally benefit.

“(Other Japanese players) don’t have the balls” of Nomo, a baseball executive said in Robert Whiting’s book The Meaning of Ichiro.

The Japanese didn’t see it that way. Many felt abandoned, like their favorite son moved out too early. They cursed his name. They called him a traitor, and worse. He required extra security.

This all changed immediately, on May 2, 1995, when Nomo pitched five innings for the Dodgers, struck out seven, gave up no runs and just one hit to the Giants. Right away, everything changed. The cries of sellout morphed into cheers for a fellow countryman.

“All of a sudden,” Whiting says, “it was, ‘Wow, wait a minute, he’s one of us, that’s great.’ ”

Nomo never felt the love in the first place, so when the people back home turned and started cheering him, it felt fake, superficial.

Wasn’t this the same baseball world that ignored him for so long? Weren’t these the same people who wanted nothing to do with him? Who threatened to kill him?

Nomura is asked if this is why Nomo makes it such a point to shut out those he doesn’t trust. He laughs.

“Yes,” he says. “And it still is.”

•••

Japanese baseball is divided in two eras: pre-Nomo and post-Nomo.

He was the first player to transition to the big leagues since 1964, and the first one ever to have substantial success: Rookie of the Year in 1995, when he led the National League with 236 strikeouts.

Back home, business stopped when he pitched. The stock market moved based on his success.

“Shoot,” says Hillman, who managed the last five years in Japan, “back there, he’s probably the Beatles, Fonzie and Elvis all rolled into one. He’s mystical for them.”

Even the reporters who covered Nomo’s early days with the Dodgers called him “the cash cow.” Japanese newspapers paid hundreds, sometimes thousands, for the smallest updates on Nomo. Dodger Stadium attendance rose 21 percent his rookie year.

He won 12 or more games seven times, and threw two no-hitters — including what is still the only one in Coors Field history.

Nomo’s success turned the eyes of big-league executives toward Japan, and it’s been a steady feeding system since.

Japan’s best pitcher (Boston’s Daisuke Matsuzaka), infielder (Houston’s Kaz Matsui), hitter (Seattle’s Ichiro Suzuki), outfielder (the Cubs’ Kosuke Fukudome), catcher (Seattle’s Kenji Johjima) and slugger (the Yankees’ Hideki Matsui) are all in the big leagues now, as well as 10 other Japanese.

Tommy Lasorda once joked that Nomo only knew one word in English: millions. As in dollars.

The Red Sox paid $103 million for Dice-K. The Cubs gave Fukudome a $48 million contract. Major League Baseball does millions and millions worth of business in Asia every year now. Lots of people are getting rich on MLB’s reach into Asia, and Nomo was the beginning of that.

Nomo has learned to live with his outsider status, but his friends say he is fiercely loyal to his inner circle. He still meets with former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley before every spring training; hasn’t missed one year yet.

He’s given his money to tsunami victims, his time to children’s hospitals, and even bought a few semi-pro teams in Japan — so that the next generation of Japanese ballplayers may have the opportunities Nomo feels he missed.

“He is someone we all look up to,” Hideki Matsui says. “He is very important to us in Japan, someone we all respect. I’ll never question his ability or passion for the game.”

Over the years, Nomo has been replaced in the Japanese baseball conscience by Dice-K, Matsui, Ichiro and other more media-friendly stars.

The emergence of other Japanese stars coincided with Nomo’s decline. He won 16 games with a 3.09 ERA for the Dodgers in 2003 and then fell off remarkably fast: 4-11 with an 8.25 ERA in 2004, 5-8 and 7.24 for the Devil Rays in 2005, and that was it. Three teams cut him within the next year.

Elbow surgery in 2006 put Nomomania in a lengthy rehab that was stalled by physical setbacks. Nobody gave him much of a chance when he struggled in the Venezuelan winter league last year. Nomo’s stature had fallen so far that some big-league executives laughed at Nomura last winter when he asked about a tryout.

The Royals were the only team to offer a shot, and only then because of Yabuta’s presence and general manager Dayton Moore’s belief that, “anytime a major-league pitcher with that much success still has a desire to pitch, you have to listen to him.”

Mike Plugh, an American graduate student studying media theory in Japan, says the Japanese love rooting for someone who refuses to give up in pursuit of a dream “because nobody does that.” That means Nomo is again on the front pages there, although he now shares attention with the stars who followed him here.

“I am honored to talk with him,” Yabuta says. “He has such stature, I feel like it would be disrespectful for me to express (surprise at Nomo’s comeback).”

•••

The father of the movement from Japan to the major leagues doesn’t look the part, not with those extra 20 pounds or so. There are plenty of other pitchers who perform heavy, so this is not a deal-breaker as much as it is one more way Nomo is an outsider to his home country.

He has pitched three times for the Royals, none of them effectively. Gave up back-to-back solo home runs in his debut. Retired just three of eight batters he faced against the Angels last week. Allowed a two-run double, one-run single, and three-run homer in four batters faced on Friday.

They say his split-fingered fastball is just as nasty as it was a decade ago. The difference is consistency and variety. Hanging splits that just never get down are crushed now, just like the 86 mph fastballs that stay up — that’s about 10 mph slower than Nomo in his prime.

“That split hasn’t changed; it’s just as good as it ever was,” says Kazuyuki Shirai, a longtime pro in Japan and now a Royals scout. “But he used to have a 95 mph fastball to go with it, and with that, the split becomes more dangerous.”

So far, Nomo is the exception to what is otherwise baseball’s best bullpen. The Royals ranked 10th in baseball with a 3.77 bullpen ERA entering Saturday’s games. Take away Nomo, and the ERA becomes 2.13 — nearly a full run better than any other team in the game.

It would make sense if he were the one gone now that the Royals have promoted Hochevar. And it would make sense if Nomo refused to give up when told of the news. He loves this game and all that it’s given him, loves it enough that after $34 million in baseball salary and much more in endorsements, he very well might continue to play it, in the minor leagues or anywhere else.

When the Royals signed him, one line of thought was that the tryout was a way to bring him into the organization, and once pitching didn’t work out, the Royals could quickly offer Nomo a job as a scout, coach or executive.

But Nomura says that possibility was never discussed, that playing is the only thing on Nomo’s mind. A friend of Nomo’s once asked him about managing someday. This was a few years ago, so his mind may have changed. But his answer is still worth remembering.

“No,” he replied, “I want to play baseball forever. When I can’t play baseball in the major leagues, then I’ll play baseball in the minor leagues. Or I’ll play in Mexico. Or Korea. Or Taiwan. Or anywhere else they’ll have me.”

The friend asked about Japan.

Nomo frowned.

“Anywhere,” he said, “but Japan.”

To reach Sam Mellinger, national baseball reporter for The Star, call 816-234-4365 or send e-mail to smellinger@kcstar.com