The International Pastime -- America's Game Is Getting Pretty World Serious
Washington Post By Thomas Boswell Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 28, 2003; Page H01
This week, baseball wanted to open its season with a game in Tokyo between the Seattle Mariners, owned by Nintendo founder Hiroshi Yamauchi, and the Oakland A's. The war in Iraq prevented such travel plans. But the point remained the same. It felt natural, not forced, for baseball to begin its season on another continent.
Every pro sport wants to conquer the world. For many years football, basketball and baseball have boasted about their ambitions to develop a true international identity. Who thought that baseball, so backward at times and blockheaded at others, would establish itself as such an exemplary international sport? You've come a long way from Cooperstown, baby.
The day may come, distant to be sure, when the World Series will be contested among the champions of North America, South America, the Caribbean and Asia. That's not the whole world, by a long shot, but it's a pretty good start. The NFL, for one, would be jealous. Football may have started a league in Europe, but its players, aside from soccer-style kickers, are almost all Americans.
Baseball has gone far past that point. The sport is not only loved on three continents, but the game's major league clubhouses have long had players from as far away as Australia.
For some reason, which is hard to understand, few in baseball ever seem to brag about one of the sport's great strengths. In a country that is proud of its melting-pot roots and ideals, baseball's demographics come much closer to mirroring the country as a whole than any other major sport.
The sport as a whole, and almost every team, has a roughly equal mix of white, black and Latino players. Once, the cohesion of these three groups was considered rare enough to be worthy of mention. The great '75-76 Cincinnati Reds, led by Pete Rose, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez, set the example. Now, it's the rule.
For more than 50 years, the game has benefited from, and to a degree been redefined by, the huge contributions of African American athletes, especially those, such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson, who epitomized the five-tool star athlete. Now, everyday players start from the assumption that they should, ideally, have speed as well as power, agility as well as strength.
However, it is only in the last 15 years that the sport has practically been saved by an incredible influx of talented players of Hispanic descent. Just when excessive expansion might have diluted the quality of play disastrously, the number of players from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Venezuela and, in recent years, Cuba have reinvigorated the whole sport.
Look back to the league leaders in the "Baseball Encyclopedia" as recently as 1987 and notice how relatively few Latino players were top-echelon starters. Fernando Valenzuela, Pedro Guerrero, Andres Galarraga, George Bell and Teddy Higuera show up in the top five in major categories. But that's the entire list.
These days, you could put together an all-Hispanic team that could be competitive against a team assembled from all the other countries in the world combined. Give me a battery of Pedro Martinez and Ivan Rodriguez, with Eddie Guardado, Armando Benitez and sublime Mariano Rivera to finish the job. An outfield of Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez and Vladimir Guerrero would terrify any pitcher. Give me an infield of Carlos Delgado, Edgardo Alfonzo, Miguel Tejada and Albert Pujols. My designated hitter is Juan Gonzalez. Now pick your team. Good luck. You'll need it.
Just when it seemed baseball couldn't get any luckier in the fresh-blood category, the game suddenly discovered that a stereotype no longer held true. For generations, Japanese baseball was considered the equivalent of Class AAA ball. Ex-major leaguers, especially power hitters, frequently were stars there. To produce enough home runs, fences were shorter there and balls were wound tighter. Curveballs dominated, great fastballs were few.
Now, times have changed. In this new century, the major leagues seem to receive a new gift from Japan almost every year. When Hideo Nomo arrived in 1995, he was considered a bit of a fluke -- a notion that, in retrospect, seems ignorant. Nomo is still going strong (16-6 last year), but, recently, he has been joined in America by a new distinctive Japanese star almost every season. The great reliever Kazuhiro Sasaki arrived in 2000, then most valuable player Ichiro Suzuki left the game breathless in '01.
This season, baseball will get a glimpse of something it has never seen -- a Japanese slugger. Sadaharu Oh never crossed the Pacific, though he played well against American stars in exhibition games. Last winter, the New York Yankees signed 6-foot-2, 210-pound Hideki (Godzilla) Matsui, 28, who hit 50 home runs and won his third most valuable player award last season in his 10th season of greatness with the legendary Yomiuri Giants.
How will his skills translate? Hispanic players, perhaps because of the long tradition of superb Cuban players, were always presumed to be gifted at any baseball position. But Japanese hitters have been stigmatized as lacking power. In a sense, even Ichiro's batting title, done in Ty Cobb style, reinforced the image.
In the last two years, non-descript former major leaguers Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Cabrera each matched the Japanese single-season home run record of 55 (set by Oh). So, Matsui, who will be followed everywhere by a legion of Japanese media, has plenty to prove. So far, Matsui has hit around .300 in spring training, but looks more like a 25-homer man with excellent bat control than a threat to Barry Bonds.
Who's coming next? Perhaps the shortstop Kazuo Matsui, naturally called "Little Matsui," who hit .332 with 36 homers and 33 steals last season for the Seibu Lions; he'll be a free agent after this year. Unfortunately, the Japanese performer we might want to see most, 27-year-old right-hander Koji Uehara, can't escape his contract for several years. Last fall, in an exhibition, he struck out Barry Bonds three times in one game, something nobody in the States has done since '00.
What players from Mexico to Venezuela, Cuba to Japan, the Dominican Republic to Canada, have brought to the big leagues is more that excellent performance. They have widened our vision of the game. Other cultures bring slightly different insights and styles to baseball.
Watch the Expos' Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez pause in the middle of his windup, knee under chin like a flamingo posing on one leg, and you will see a trait of many top Cuban pitchers: perfect balance at the moment they coil above the rubber. Entire Cuban national team pitching staffs can be seen in the bullpen, all standing on one leg, all with one knee near their chins, as they practice hopping on one leg without losing their balance.
To see Ichiro hit is to be taken back almost a century to the hit-'em-where-they-ain't techniques of Wee Willie Keeler and John McGraw's Giants. Who practically runs out of the batter's box in mid-swing as they chop down on the pitch? Once, many players did.
Our international stars also take us into a future we didn't imagine. For example, led by magical shortstop Omar Vizquel, more middle infielders are realizing that you can catch and throw the ball barehanded in one motion while turning the double play. Who needs a glove? What was once called hot-dogging is now seen as an appropriate risk-reward approach to a vital play.
Baseball is a sport that evolves by inches and by inspiration. It's a game of details, but of sudden insights into new methods, too. As more nations and cultures fall in love with the sport, then bring their subtle alterations of the pastime back to us, baseball grows richer as it grows broader.
In the 19th century, America invented baseball. In the 20th, we dominated the game and polished it to a high gloss. Now, in this century, American baseball and the rest of the world appear ready to shake hands across great distances, each glad for the other's version of the sport and better for it, too.