
Note: This essay partly recounts a trip through Japan my ten-year old son and I took with the JapanBall tour in 2016. The experience left an indelible impression in my life, and my son’s. On the tour, we met fellow baseball fans who became new friends, and enjoyed JapanBall’s invaluable – and yet totally unobtrusive – guidance through Japan, its sights, and its baseball culture. The care given to Japanball’s approach is obvious. Game tickets and transportation? Covered! A rigid sightseeing itinerary that may or may not appeal to everyone’s tastes? Not needed. JapanBall was a dream! And now, I invite you to enjoy The Home Run Dream!
September 14 – Tokyo, Japan
“That’s impossible!”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s crazy!” I tell my son. We are standing in the bathroom – the tiny bathroom – of our hotel room in central Tokyo. With a mouth half-full of toothpaste, I continue. “Think about it, even if he went to 250 games a year, that’s 100 years!”
We go to a lot of baseball games. This season, we have been to more than 50 live baseball games. No particular team or league season, call it April to September, at all levels. Major League. Minors. College. When I tell people we watch a lot of baseball, and they ask how much, and I say we have been to 50 games this year, their eyebrows invariably arch. “50?”
And here, on our second day in Japan, for a tour of Japanese ballparks with more than 30 other American baseball fans, my son and I are debating whether it is possible the man we just met downstairs could possibly have seen 25,000 live baseball games, as he told us he had.
25,000.
If my son, who is ten, kept up the pace we set this year – the eyebrow-arching-inducing 50 games – and he lives to be 90 years old, he will tally a grand total of 4,000 games. Assuming he can keep up the pace when he starts to work summers in high school, and during college, and when he is young and broke, and when he is newly-married, and when he has really young kids who don’t handle ballparks for hours on end well.
It assumes he can keep up the pace on long, cold April nights in lousy ballparks, watching two crummy teams who seem to barely care they are playing and certainly don’t care if anyone is watching. It’s easy to spend a night at the ballpark in July. But he’ll only have 2,480 July nights.
It assumes he’ll do extreme things like take his own son on a trip to Asia, a thirteen hour flight of more than 6,500 miles, to a place exotic and different from our small southern town, to a place teeming with more than 13 million people and resident of more than 2,500 years of history. And it assumes when they get off of their flight, and trudge to their hotel, and take a quick nap, and start to adjust to the jet lag, the first thing they will do is head off to a ballpark – indistinct in many ways from any of the hundreds at home in the US – and watch a baseball game. And then, get up the next day, and do it again.
He’ll have to do crazy things to get those 4,000 games in.
25,000?
I started to explain “hyperbole” to my son as we lay in our adjacent beds, their size proportional to the bathroom. We needed to get to sleep. We had a game to go to tomorrow.
I have but one recurring dream. In it, I hit a big league home run. Not just any home run, but a towering home run. The word a lot of baseball books use for this kind of home run is “clout,” but I have never liked that word, so I always think of it as me “smacking” a home run. But in the dream, I don’t just smack any towering home run, it is a clutch home run, which is to say it comes at an especially important moment in the game. The setting is never quite clear in my dream, but I know it is an important home run. It might be a game winner. And it is not just any game winning, towering home run, but one the announcers marvel at because I should not have been able to hit the pitch. Not at all, much less for a towering, clutch home run. And because of this, I spend a lot of time in the dream talking into cameras, explaining exactly how I hit the home run.
“I saw it was a two-seamer,” I say. A two-seam fastball. I am a right-handed hitter, and to a righty the two-seamer will have late movement, looking like a pitch over the plate and then handcuffing the batter and inducing weak contact, in on the handle of the bat. Well, sort of. That is the premise in my dream anyway. In order for my analysis to be correct, the pitcher must be a right-handed thrower, for the two-seamer’s movement, when thrown well, will have “arm side run,” meaning it will move toward the pitcher’s arm side. And, generally, down. Some pitchers throw the two-seamer as a variant of their sinker. Or vice versa. But, none of this matters much. Not in my dream. The pitcher is not extant there. There is a pitcher, certainly, but never has he been in the dream. I don’t know if he is a righty, but I think he must be because of the analysis I give to the cameras.
“I knew it would run in on me. He’s got great two seam action.”
Certainly, the disembodied pitcher is a closer. The closer is a team’s final pitcher of the game, the one meant to seal victory by pitching the final inning, when his team is in the lead. When they do this successfully, these closers achieve a statistic called a “save.” When they do not succeed, when the opposing team overtakes the closer’s team during his time on the mound, he has “blown” the save, and may even earn the statistical loss. The pitcher who threw the ball I smacked for a towering, clutch home run earned one of the most ignominious blown saves of all time.
“But I thought if I could focus on getting my hands through the zone, and my bat head out front, I could hit it well,” I add, humbly (it’s easy to be humble when one is as awesome as I clearly am in this dream). You see, it is not his fault. The two-seamer is a good one. A great one, even. As I have said, I had no business hitting it over the wall. Clouting it. There, I said it!
“His arm action disguised the pitch excellently.”
It always does, for he is a great pitcher, a legendary closer – and the pitch looked just like his four-seamer, or the common fastball, which is straighter than the two-seamer but which arrives at 96 or 97 miles per hour. On that arm action alone, he should have had me fooled, swinging early. And then there is the movement. The pitch starts over the inner half of the plate, meant to make me think that while it might not be a great pitch to hit, it will be a strike and I had better get my barrel around fast. But then the pitch makes its arm-side run. Moving to the pitcher’s right, and in on me, a righty batter. My swing has begun, my barrel is moving through the zone toward that place on the inner half where I should be expecting the ball to be, but it won’t be there, and my bat – if it hits the ball at all – will make contact with the narrow part, down near my hands where it will cause the ball to dribble weakly down the third base line. And I will jog down to first base half-heartedly, in the way big leaguers do when they know they are out, shaking my head ruefully, maybe even audibly cursing, because this was a big game, a big at-bat, and I was tricked.
Only I’m not tricked.
September 17 – Tokyo
The trains were packed after the games. After two of the games, especially. Before arriving in Japan, I listened to Haruki Murakami’s book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. It amazed me how almost all of the gas attack victims he interviewed not only knew which train car the