Archive for August, 2008

To Flinch or Not to Flinch

Published by Bob Sanchez on August 30, 2008 in Baseball. 0 Comments

The baseball always travels rapidly from the players’ point of view. Even a young kid knows that the ball is moving fast and that it really hurts if the wrong parts of him get in its way during flight.

It’s natural to fear the thing, and he has to work through that fear and realize that getting hit by a pitch or knocking down a vicious short-hop in the infield only hurts for a little while and is usually worth the pain.

You play and watch the game, dealing with this fear as you climb the ladder through the levels of baseball. You can’t play afraid, pitchers will make a meal out of you at the plate and will not want you in the field behind them.

Yet, nobody is absolutely 100% fear-free. That would just be stupid. You have to maintain recognition of what that small object can do to your face and throat at high speeds, and I think the best way to do that is to play 90% to 95% fear-free. No reason to block a screaming line drive with your Adam’s apple or wear a 91 MPH fastball on your temple.

This is how I played and I was, for all intents and purposes, not afraid of the ball. Then I stepped behind an L-screen for the first time. As its name suggests, it’s a screen in the shape of an L, the missing part of the square being the space where your arm releases the ball. You “chuck and duck” behind one of these when you throw batting practice pitches to hitters from close distances.

Most L-screens feature netting on the inside and outside of the poles, making it impossible for a batted ball to travel through it and still have enough juice on it to cause any damage to you.

However, you are as close as you ever should be to batted balls, and are usually not wearing a glove. I think it’s perfectly natural to flinch or cringe the first few times a ball comes screaming back at you from such a close distance.

This will earn you neverending ribbing from your teammates, though, as no self-respecting man flinches behind a protective net. This extends to sitting close to the action behind the plate at a high-level baseball game, or watching a bullpen session with a chain-link fence and a catcher between you and a wild flamethrowing stud.

The ball is not going to go through the fence. So, NO FLINCHING!

It’s something you have to think through and decide to get over, just like every young kid has to do in order to play the game properly and well. Pretty soon, you’re studying the seams on that 105 MPH knuckleball the hitter just catapulted at your L-screen, and your face says that you’ve just bitten into a slice of watermelon on the front porch on a lazy summer evening. NO FLINCHING! Next pitch!

When the team I work for flew me back to the States for Spring Training, I was excited about the great opportunity, but also about the chance to get out of the cold weather of Japan for a few weeks. Warm weather greeted me as I walked into camp, but so did an awful flu that swept through every club in Phoenix.

I could hardly stand up and see straight, and I was supposed to be shaking hands, observing players, and talking baseball. A couple scouts and I were watching BP, leaning on the batting cage as is custom (although I needed the cage for support).

I saw a shadow whiz over my head and instinctively hit the dirt, and so did the scout next to me who was also delirious with the flu. We poked our heads up only to hear booming laughter from the rest of the scouts - we had narrowly avoided the wrath of a passing butterfly.

I really had thought it was an errant ball and made no apologies for letting instincts take over. As I was replaying the horror in my head, the batter fouled one straight back toward my face and…I flinched.

More laughter. The scout that had dodged the butterfly with me said with his Australian accent, “Man, ya cahn’t flinch!”

Little did I know what was happening around that time at another spring training camp.

Sitting four rows behind home plate at Maryvale Baseball Park, [San Diego Padres GM Kevin] Towers was struck in the upper lip after a foul ball busted through the protective netting.

Stunned and bloodied by the blow, Towers fell off his seat and required treatment from Padres medical staff on the scene, then departed the stadium to get further examination at the team’s complex.

The GM was lucid and was cleared to return to his temporary home. Trainer Todd Hutcheson said Towers sustained a chipped tooth but should be fine.

The foul ball registered at 95 mph on a scout’s radar gun.

Yowza. I think that incident is enough to change the flinching rule. While it’s instinctive for me not to flinch now, especially ten rows back at a baseball game, I will make no further efforts to preserve the macho image. Nor will I snicker at fans who cower at a softly tapped ball that I’d reach out and catch with my hand.

A group of American scouts was doing just that toward a group of Japanese fans who, to be fair, looked fresh off the tour bus as though they had won a sweepstakes allowing them to sit behind home plate for the night.

One scout spoke up with Kevin Towers’ story, and that was the first I’d heard of it. I can’t see any reasonable person hearing about that and ever giving anyone hell for flinching again. I’ll certainly do what I can to spread the word.

Stretching the Limits of Time

Published by Bob Sanchez on August 29, 2008 in Baseball. 0 Comments

School starts on Monday, and I’ve been in the teacher’s office all week preparing for the upcoming semester. Who am I kidding, I’ve been spending most of the time fixing up baseball reports and doing crossword puzzles, I don’t need a whole stinkin’ week to make copies and revise last year’s lesson plans.

For the past two summers, I’ve been free of the Monday-Friday grind, free to wander around Japan, watching baseball players and looking for the best, the cheapest, the most left-handed, whatever.

The end of August comes and I have to come to grips with my “normal” life - English teacher and frequent weekend traveler. Gone will be leisurely rides down to the stadium for BP, no more will I be able to take scouts, radio guys, and journalists out for information - I mean, dinner. Time for tight schedules and running to make the last train, whoopee!

I’m sneaking out of school early tomorrow to get to Nagoya on time to see a baseball game with the big boss. He comes once a year and it’s a huge chance for me to pick his brain and attempt to see what he sees.

I did this last year after my first week on the job at school, same city, same big boss. Nagoya is like Japan’s Chicago: the “second city” with the third-highest population, right in the middle of the country, and the consensus is that there are many better places to live and work. It’s about 350 miles and four and a half hours by train away from Kochi.

I had Saturday and Sunday off, and got lucky with a pair of day games, which meant I could see Sunday’s game, have dinner with the boss, and make it back to Kochi on the last set of trains.

In theory. The Nagoya-Kochi swing requires a transfer in Okayama, the main island’s gateway city to the island of Shikoku. The bullet train doesn’t reach Shikoku, so it’s local express trains from Okayama. The last train to Kochi departs shortly after 9:30 p.m..

The bullet train stopped dead on the tracks 10 minutes out of Nagoya, citing torrential rain as the reason. We passengers would not see a drop of this alleged downpour until two hours later, but the conductor was nice enough to keep us in that same spot so we wouldn’t miss a bit of the action.

We finally got to Okayama at about the time I was expecting to arrive home in Kochi, another two and a half hours south. The last train to Kochi had not waited for us, and now I was wondering how the heck I was going to make it to work on time and what I was going to tell the teachers.

I checked on my cell phone and saw that the very first train out of Okayama would get me to Kochi at 8:15 the next morning. Class started at 8:45. I was disheveled, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt with a beard that would be three days old by the time I got to school. Not good for your second week on a shirt-and-tie gig!

The conductor told me to go to the “Train Hotel on Track 9″ and wait for the next morning’s first train out at 5:30. “What the heck is a Train Hotel?” I asked him, and he just pointed toward Track 9.

I expected a waiting room waiting with fold-out beds, personal TVs, and bidets or some other kind of Japanese modern convenience. However, upon arriving at Track 9, I saw that the conductor had merely opened up a local traincar and allowed everyone to get in a stake their claims on all the double seats while I was dreaming about my personal fanny freshener.

I elbowed my way into a cramped, single seat and pouted the next 5 hours away. To the railway company’s credit, they brought everyone a McDonald’s hamburger and a bottle of tea, and they took care of the excuse slips then and there, preventing a big ugly line from forming at 5 a.m. (It’s a crime to be late to work in this country, and about the only thing that can bail you out is a late slip from a transportation company).

A few stops away from Kochi the next morning, I started seeing students from my school get on the train and panicked. I didn’t know if I was going to make it on time, let alone have to explain why I looked (and probably smelled) the way I did, and the last thing I wanted was students talking about seeing Mr. Mac on the train in a garish Hawaiian shirt.

I raced to the taxi area at Kochi Station and barked out my address to the driver, who took the back way and avoided all the traffic lights. I ran up to my apartment, dumped the suitcase, showered and shaved, and threw on a shirt and tie.

At that time, I lived about 500 feet away from school, so I bolted out the door and made it to the office with five minutes to spare for the first of five classes that day. No excuse slip or explanation necessary, smooooooth!!!

I wasn’t happy about the way it had happened, but because of that thunderstorm I realized that I could stay out for Sunday night games in the big cities if I planned to stay the night in Okayama and packed a shirt and tie for Mondays.

So began the ritual of booking a capsule hotel in Okayama on Sunday nights, where I’d spend about four and a half hours trying to sleep in my human kennel that, to my frustration, is probably exactly five feet and 11 and a half inches long. Take the early train, cab it to school, stash the suitcase, straighten the tie, BOOM morning meeting. Fresh Mac (thumbs up, big dopey smile)! Oh yeah, just lazed around the apartment all weekend, no big deal.

I think my favorite part is stashing the suitcase, because I always think, “STASH the SUITCASE!” while I’m doing it. It adds to the whole double-agent atmosphere that is only half-imagined.

The school would definitely say no to this arrangement, which is one big reason why I don’t tell anyone there about my moonlighting. For me, the only risk is the train schedule. I know that I have the energy to make it work, all I need is for the train to be on time. I’ve done it about a dozen times now with a dozen dandy Mondays to show for it. It’s what I need to do to do my best for the baseball job.

Hopefully this becomes a baker’s dozen, going down without a hitch on the anniversary of the day I almost had to teach in a Japanese school with a Hawaiian shirt and a five o’clock shadow.

“Don’t Shoot the Scorer” or “Steve Bartman’s Fishbowl”

Published by Bob Sanchez on August 25, 2008 in Baseball. 0 Comments

I’m currently on what is hopefully a long climb up to some peak in the world of baseball. I don’t know exactly what I want to do in the game, but I want to be in and I want to be international, so the ship is pointing in the right direction now.

One of the many stops along the way was an official scorekeeping gig with the then-Fullerton Flyers of the Golden Baseball League in 2006. I got the job after shaking the GM’s hand and saying that I was itching to be back in baseball.

OK, I did have to show him some of the scorebooks I kept while calling Gaucho games on the radio. Really tough screening process, eh?

For those that may not know, the importance of the Official Scorekeeper ends right there with that inflated title. The scorer watches the game and writes down everything that happens, from base hits to ejections to thunderstorm, sprinkler, or Dizzy Bat Spin delays. The scorer makes sure that everyone knows the proper score and count at all times, and gives the OK for the announcer to say, “Your scoreboard totals are correct!” at the end of the game.

Perhaps the only real job-like thing about being the OFFICIAL SCOREKEEPER is deciding if a given event should be ruled a hit or an error. There are rules for that and the scorer’s opinion is required on these plays more often than not. Many events demand a ruling that is going to upset one side or the other, usually due to stats and their implications.

I brought along a time-tested Santa Barbara tradition (the bell) and, with my father’s help, tried a few press box innovations. The paddles with gigantic Hs and Es plastered on them worked great. The clip and cable system designed to pass notes over the partition wall to the broadcasters didn’t work so well.

We had a lot of fun that summer and I learned about one more facet of the game. I went straight by the book at first, but then realized that I couldn’t expect Golden League players to make Major League plays and would have to adjust the lens through which I watched the games.

And I was also told by my boss to be a homer, something I have long struggled with. Home players get hits, home pitchers get helped out. Hey, that goes on in MLB, why shouldn’t it happen in the Golden League?

Plus, these players were fighting for attention from scouts from organized baseball; three more hits and Player Abel is a .300 hitter, one bad inning off the books and Pitcher Baker is lights-out at 2.53.

The boss reserved the right to overturn a call, and I let him have it. It made it even easier for me to be objective, knowing that it wouldn’t be me caving into the home crowd.

One night, however, tested my temper and my mettle, and I can’t believe that I don’t have anything written about it in English. I can’t find a box score or article about it on the Internet, so all I have is this entry I wrote on my webpage on the Japanese answer to myspace.

WARNING: Translation of a translation with two years of perspective thrown in:

I didn’t know there could be such a game. Last Thursday, the Flyers played the Long Beach Armada, and I was in the press box with my scorebook and paddles as usual.

The crowd of 2,197 was the largest since Opening Day, and Thursday $1 Beer Night had more than a little to do with that.

To start things off, two players and both managers were ejected before the third inning was over!

The Long Beach starter made it to the bottom of the eighth with a no-hitter intact, but there was controversy even up to that point. In the first inning, I had awarded a Flyers player a hit on a dribbler to third that the third baseman couldn’t handle. The Armada coaches looked up at the box, and my boss came in and told me to change the call.

Per our agreement, I did without and argument. It was a hit in the Golden League in my eyes, but changing it to an error was water off a duck’s back.

The Armada defense put together eight sloppy innings. The pitcher handed out four walks and dosed two guys, and the defense made three errors, including the one from the first inning.

So nine Flyers reached base, and though none of them scored or got a hit, it certainly didn’t feel like a special game to me. Oh, how I underestimated the importance of that zero on the board for the 2,197 in attendance!

Back to the eighth: the Armada pitcher retired the first two Flyers easily. The third hitter of the inning lifted a fly ball into shallow left field. The left fielder and shortstop both hustled after the ball, and the shortstop called the outfielder off.

The left fielder peeled off and let short have it. It was a very tough play for him and the left fielder should have taken it. The shortstop’s back was to the plate and he was tracking the ball over his left shoulder until the very last step he took, which he used to turn his body toward the plate.

The ball wasn’t where he expected it to be and was going to land in front of him, so he stuck his glove out to catch it as his weight was pulling him away from the ball due to the momentum from his long run. The ball struck the heel of his glove, and ball and boy hit the ground at the same time.

A lot happened, but in real time, he never stopped running and was still moving away from the plate when he took that last awkward step and made a stab at the ball.

I think a Major Leaguer makes that play, and that it would have been much easier for the left fielder. The rulebook doesn’t have a stipulation for questionable baseball instincts, though, and the scorer has to call it as he sees it happen.

I raised the H paddle. The scoreboard operator flashed the bulb for HIT and changed the zero to a one. The no-hitter was gone.

I had made calls like that all season long. An error in MLB is a hit in the Golden League on many occasions. Unfortunately, this one came right in the middle of a potential no-hitter on Beer Night.

The ejected Long Beach manager barged into the press box and got right in my face, screaming, “What the **** is that? Don’t you know he’s throwing a no-hitter? This kid is trying to make history and you #*$&@&(#)@*…”

He was closer to me than Lou Piniella gets to umpires when he goes out to argue. I sat there and looked straight ahead. I hadn’t thought about the no-hitter when I made that call, it wasn’t in my job description and it wasn’t in the rules. I called what I saw and I’ll take that to my grave.

Well, the throng of 2,197 liked the call a lot less than the manager and didn’t hesitate to tell me about it through the window that I always left open to enjoy the pleasant weather:

“Don’t you know baseball?”

“You have too much pride, you #@#*$&$!”

“I was a pro baseball player for nine years, and that’s an error!”

This was all happening simultaneously, and to this day I am surprised that I didn’t scream at anybody or throw any punches. The wrath of 2,197 people plus one manager all at once was a lot to take, and I didn’t have any help from anybody in the press box for what seemed like an eternity.

Few people have had a couple thousand rabid humans out for their hide all at once right in front of their eyes, and it’s pretty damn scary. I had a sudden appreciation and empathy for Steve Bartman, who endured 20 times what I did (at the ballpark alone, not counting the rest of his witness-protected life) over something much more important.

Still, I didn’t want to change it. To call that an error would have been a lie.

As the members of the press box closed the windows and shooed people out of the fishbowl, the boss came in and told me to change the call. I did. I was alive, and the people had their precious no-hitter. There was still a lot of game left, though.

The bottom of the ninth rolled around and the Flyers trailed 2-0, still looking for their first hit. The leadoff man struck out. The second guy tapped a routine ground ball to the shortstop, who air-mailed it over the first baseman’s head for the fourth error of the night.

I raised the E paddle and nearly choked to death when I saw the ONE underneath the H column on the scoreboard. That single digit pierced the night sky and pointed at me like a dagger.

I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t move, and I screamed but no words came out. I turned to the board operator.

It was obviously an error and obviously a mistake, but the crowd was having none of it and charged the press box again, pounding on the closed windows with their fists. The operator didn’t realize what she had done, and probably still doesn’t. She was staring off into space, her job done until the next pitch.

I had used up every shred of tolerance and count-to-ten endurance in the eighth inning. I lost it and screamed at her:

“IT’S AN ERROR!!!! IT’S AN ERROR!!!! WHAT THE **** ARE YOU DOING, IT’S AN ERROR!!!!”

It got changed and the game continued, but I was a wreck and the press box was very uncomfortable. Wouldn’t you know it, the next hitter spun the pitcher’s cap around with a sharp single up the middle to end the whole mess.

The first hit was up on the board for the fourth and final time on that magical night.

Now, with one out and runners on first and second in a 2-0 ballgame, the Long Beach pitching coach summoned a reliever to close out the game. He walked a man to load the bases and then set the next hitter down on strikes.

With two outs and the bases full, the hitter lofted a long fly ball to left center that had both outfielders on the run. The center fielder left his feet and caught the ball a half-inch off the sod, sliding all the way to the warning track with a fantastic game-saving catch.

So why did the left fielder continue running toward the fence? Our eyes had fooled us - the ball had barely eluded the reach of the center fielder’s glove and skittered away from the left fielder.

The Flyers rushed around the bases with their first, second, and third runs of the ball game to take it, 3-2. With the near no-hitter and surrounding controversy, the multitude of errors and shining plays, and an extremely joyful (and painful) walk-off situation, this was by far the wildest, greatest baseball game I had ever laid eyes upon.

It was a circus and a comedy. I apologized to the board operator for screaming at her, but I don’t know how I could possibly have handled it any better. Anyone who tells me they could keep their head after being rushed by thousands of angry people TWICE in one night is quite possibly reptilian.

It was awfully short-sighted of the fans to react that way, even about the first call. It was not a well-pitched game; the pitcher was not dealing at all. A no-hitter is great, but speaking as obejctively as I can, the game up until the eighth inning was not that special.

They wanted dollar beers and a zero up on the board. They did not care about what was actually happening on the field. I think there’s something terribly wrong with that.

I know in my heart that, taking the whole season and the whole league into consideration, I made the right call in the eighth inning. But should I have lied to save the no-hitter? I really don’t know.

Put anybody in that ballpark in my seat for that play, and it’s an error simply because of the zero on the board. But is that right?

Life is Hard

Published by Bob Sanchez on August 22, 2008 in Lessons. 0 Comments

During a rain delay at a baseball game in the Tokyo area, I chatted with a professional scout from an MLB club. I don’t recall how the conversation got to the price of living in California and its implications for my generation, but it did and he brought about an interesting characteristic of Japanese people that I had known implicitly until he put it into words.

“They do all of the little things you need to do,” he said. No, he wasn’t talking about having the three-hitter bunt with one out. Rather, it was a remark about what they do in everyday life.

They take trains. They ride bicycles into their 90s. They hang their laundry. They walk from Point A to Points B, C, and beyond. They live in their parents’ houses with their own families to take care of the one parent left behind.

I look around Japan and feel like it’s the 1970s. Our Greatest Generation grew up during the Depression, made sacrifices and won the second World War, and worked to transform the United States into the greatest superpower the world has ever known.

Japan’s Greatest Generation, economically speaking, accomplished this in the 1980s, going from “Made in Japan” crapola to selling more efficient cars and buying up the seven wonders of the world and some golf courses.

Subsequent American generations have enjoyed the wealth and prosperity for sixty years; people in Japan my age look to their parents’ generation the way that I do to my grandparents’. They haven’t enjoyed the lavish lifestyle as long collectively and seem to understand the long climb up better than my American peers and I do.

And so, in some ways they are where I think we were 30-35 years ago. I don’t know for sure because I wasn’t there, but if “I Love the 70s” is at all accurate, I think I have a good picture of what it was like.

Rampant consumerism is just as much a problem here as it is in the States, but it takes a slightly different shape. Here, it’s name brand junk and plastic packaging, and in the U.S. it’s gasoline and living above one’s means.

I think the scout’s comment was geared toward Japan’s apparent solutions to Americans’ current housing and energy problems, though in fact the way that Japanese handle housing and energy has been the way it is for a long time.

Japanese people seem to believe that life is necessarily hard and that there’s nothing much you can do about it. Traveling is going to take a long time and cost a lot of money. Housing is going to be ridiculously expensive and cramped. Getting into the best schools and getting the best jobs will require heinous amounts of study and testing.

Yet they live their lives in ways that allow them to get through it. They do those little things that the scout talked about. They organize drinking parties to help them connect and complain about inconveniences, but wake up the following day ready to combat them with a stiff upper lip.

They watch celebrities make the game show circuit, winning prizes and money Lord knows they don’t need. There is no hope of a regular Joe or Taro getting there, which is what makes game shows so fun for us.

Japanese fans watch baseball players receive huge bouquets of flowers and giant checks (on top of their high salaries) for such mundane events as 1,000 games played or being voted the Best Dad in the Central League.

They sigh and wish that life could be that way, but they are firmly rooted in the reality that it is not. Then they smile and continue to air dry their clothes, make lunch for the octogenarians in the house, or arrive at the meeting 46 minutes early because the next train gets them there 1 minute late. True story.

In short, they are much better at bending over and taking it up the tailpipe than we are, collectively and generally speaking. Of course they know about drying machines and old folks’ homes and believe that public transportation in the countryside is awfully inconvenient, but that’s just the way life is.

When I left the States, the housing bust was in full bloom and the gas crisis was just around the corner. Sometimes I feel like I’m hiding out here in Kochi, with no car, no mortgage, and no debt. If I return, I feel like I’ll be able to put myself in a good position to live within my means and be more tolerant of the inconveniences of that lifestyle thanks to my experiences in Japan and the underlying acceptance that life is tough that I feel from Japanese people.

Unfortunately, it looks like friends and family can’t do much about situations that they’re in. Gas wasn’t four bucks a gallon when they chose to live 15 miles from work. Or when they chose to work 15 miles from home.

I hope the situation improves, but I also hope that people in my generation are able to give up things they don’t need (or avoid having them in the first place) and accept a less convenient lifestyle for better long-term happiness and success. I’m very fortunate to enjoy a great lifestyle for less right now.