Archive for March, 2009

Things Spring

Published by Bob Sanchez on March 31, 2009 in Baseball and Observations. 1 Comment

Spring Training was awesome! My trip kicked off with an evening with my best friends. It was our sixth year together in Phoenix, and while it was just one night with all of us together this time, it was still special and enjoyable.

For the rest of the week, I wandered the minor league complex in uniform, asking instructors and coaches about the many facets of the game and scouting players, writing reports, and comparing notes with some of our other international scouts.

I continue to be amazed at how much there is to the game of baseball. Nobody knows it all, and people who think they do don’t last long in the business. Great nuggets of information are just as often right in front of your eyes as they are buried in yarns spun around postgame beers. To really get to the bottom of things, you have to devote time under the blazing sun during the day and time in the bar late at night.

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I came into camp struggling with pitch recognition. At the WBC Tokyo Round earlier this month, I got into it with my supervisor a little bit about a pitch that Yu Darvish was throwing. It looked like his slider, but it was the speed of his curve ball. My supervisor said that Darvish was throwing the curve ball incorrectly, and I insisted that the pitch was behaving like a slider so I was going to call it a slider.

Every scouting outing following the WBC found me wrought with concern about what I was seeing. I doubted myself and struggled to evaluate pitchers, and I needed to do something to fix the problem. My boss had me chart a couple of Major League spring training games from right behind the plate, and while it took me a few innings to let go and just see the game and see the pitches, I finally got it and restored my confidence.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. A scout’s job is to describe the action, life, command, and control of a player’s pitches, and sometimes you really can’t tell exactly what a pitcher is doing because it happens so fast. Yet, I also think there is a right and a wrong, and clearly I was concerned about being right.

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My role in camp this season seemed to be to explain Japanese baseball to several of the coaches and instructors. It was interesting to see how little we all knew about each other’s countries; even our Director of Player Development learned some very basic stuff by visiting Australia, Taiwan, and Korea for the first time last season.

The game has long been international, a fact impressed on me in the 90s with Ramon Martinez, Ismael Valdez, Chan Ho Park, and Hideo Nomo in the starting rotation for the Dodgers. Connections and understanding among people in the business has been slow, however, and I’m no different from anyone else.

I know a lot about baseball in my current region, but even the simplest things about baseball in Latin America are outside my focus. I’m trying to get sent over there for some education, and I think my organization is one of the better ones at exposing its personnel to those experiences.

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We invited a Japanese pitcher to camp this year, and he failed to make the big league club. It was still nice meeting him and seeing him make the most of his chance. It seemed like every time we met, one of us had something to go do right away, but we finally got together for dinner on my last night in town. He brought his wife, his young daughter, and his interpreter along and I introduced them to the Cheesecake Factory.

I asked him where he was going to live in the States, and he said, “Actually, I’m getting released on Friday, so I don’t know!” I feared a long, uncomfortable dinner, but he had such a great attitude about his situation that my fears were unfounded. Our club was giving him a few more appearances to impress some other scouts and hit the ground running in his search for work with another team, and he was going to do his best to market himself.

His six-year-old daughter has been learning English and was somewhat outgoing with it, so I gave her a lot of attention and English practice and she loved it. I heard her mother say something about nobody else paying as much attention to the little girl as I did, and the couple enjoyed seeing their daughter succeed in communicating in English.

They were very interested in my life in Kochi, and of course I raved about it like I do to everyone else. They understood the difficulty of travel, but I told them that it was all worth it. The pitcher had been several times before for spring training back when more teams trained there, but he said he’d never really explored the area.

By far the most interesting person at the table was the interpreter. His father is American and his mother is Japanese, but he grew up in Japan and went to Japanese school all through university. He spoke English very well and had only a slightly Japanese demeanor to him.

He had interpreted for the Orix Blue Wave right after Ichiro left in 2001, and quit that job a few years later in order to attend flight school in the United States. He is now a fully licensed flight instructor who can’t find work in that field, so he’s interpreting again until those opportunities arise.

The food was delicious, the conversation pleasant and enlightening, and the people just plain good. It was one of the best dinners I have ever had, and I hope that there are many more to come.

More baseball people have recognized me at Japanese spring training this year than last year, and I can see this summer being full of informative trips to the restaurant districts of Japan’s big cities.

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So much of this job is watching, talking, and making connections. Shooting the breeze with baseball guys gets easier as time goes on and I know more people, while observing games gets more and more complex. I hope that soon I am made able to commit more time to being a better scout and learning more about baseball.

Plugging Away

Published by Bob Sanchez on March 30, 2009 in Misc. 3 Comments

I’d like to say that I haven’t been adding to this site because I’ve been busy, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. I haven’t had any time to do it in the last two weeks, but I wasted all of my free time for the month or so before that.

I fell asleep at the wheel in Kochi. Baseball responsibilities were limited, but I still had the business card and the fun stories, so I talked a lot of scouting without doing much of it.

My students finished their final exams at the end of January and I had nothing to do at school for a month and a half. Rather than spend time churning out stories for the site and looking around for better work, I sat at my desk and read about baseball on the Internet all day. Not quite a waste of time, but hugely inefficient. I realized that there’s a lot of stuff out there and that nobody has time to keep up with all of it.

Rain washed out a lot of early morning bike rides, but I rolled over and went back to sleep just as many times on dry mornings. I did set some personal records on my frequent routes, but I could have gotten after it more often and more consistently.

For months now I’ve been considering trying to earn money by doing freelance translating through online agencies, and I got great tips from that older woman and other members of the translator’s association that I joined.

They gave me a website with a list of 300 agencies; all I had to do was make a cover letter, slap my resume onto an email with the letter, and copy and paste a bunch of email addresses. But every time I sat down to do it, I’d take a look at the first agency on the list and freeze up. Then I’d make myself a sandwich or start writing emails or polish my shoes.

My piano sat in my room collecting dust, and I hardly even played at school. The longer I wait to practice and get timing and technique back, the harder it will be to do.

In sum, I sat around all winter becoming one-dimensional and collecting teaching paychecks. I let everything stagnate and there were no signs of awakening until I got an unexpected call from the Good English Company.

They lost the contract to the Evil English Company. To continue teaching, I’d have to take a pay cut and spend more time sitting in the office during testing and non-school periods under Evil English’s ridiculous policies.

That was the kick in the pants that I needed. I went straight home and applied to ten translation agencies, thinking I’d hit all 300 eventually and receive a handful of responses. Nine of those first ten responded, and suddenly I was busy sending samples and filling out employment forms.

I talked out the situation with whoever would listen – I wanted to do freelance translating and scout more. I could wake up early and bike for a few hours not having to worry about being somewhere at 8:30. I could translate as much or as little as I wanted to, taking work on the road for the baseball trips. This was a chance to live an exciting, free life!

Of course, my favorite people had something else to say about that. I got on the horn with Immigration and they advised against the move, saying that I would have to prove that I could make a living translating and that I had a good reason to be in Japan to do it. I still had to keep scouting income a secret, so I faced the very real prospect of losing my privilege to live in Japan if I tried to make the jump right away.

That was fine with me, because I knew that not having the security of the teaching income would force me to fight for my life with translating. My baseball employers also said that they would find a way to keep me working in Japan, even if I had to fly in for a few long business trips every year.

I was ready to tell Evil English where to shove its contract when someone reminded me that I can’t ignore the worldwide economic situation. To be completely honest, I hear the gloom and doom but don’t really see or feel any of it. The economy is always depressed in Kochi. I don’t owe anybody any money or own anything that was valuable. I’m at least 40 years away from retirement. I live on the cheap whether times are good or bad.

I thought over all of the scenarios I could imagine and decided that it would be too risky to jump now. To be a successful freelance translator, you have to have work, and I’ve heard more translators say that the amount of work is dwindling than the other way around. On top of that, I don’t know if I’m any good at it yet!

I place a high value on being in Japan and being able to study Japanese baseball very closely. The worst-case scenario if I try to make the jump now puts me in the States on a part-time scouting salary and not much else.

Teaching for another year will be frustrating and will turn the screws on my scouting time, and I’ve got to find time to try translating to build something up for next year. However, I think the guarantee that I will be here ready to see players and show my face around baseball warrants another year at the status quo.

The baseball boss has talked about stepping up the club’s commitment to me, and I may even have a visa through an agreement with a Japanese team before the year is over, rendering all of this moot. I can always quit teaching mid-year.

So, I’m not making as bold a move as I’d like to, but I am awake and feel more like myself than I did during the winter, when I was in hibernation. I know where everyone stands and simply have to wait to see where the pieces fall and do my best at my work in the meantime.

KFC Statue, Curse Lifted From Filthy River

Published by Bob Sanchez on March 12, 2009 in Baseball and Funnies. 3 Comments

From the murky depths of the Dotonbori River emerged a symbol of the Hanshin Tigers’ prolonged championship drought: a plastic statue of Colonel Sanders.

The Colonel was thrown over the Ebisu Bridge and into the river during a wild celebration following Hanshin’s only Japan Championship in 1985. It was said that the Tigers would never win another championship until the statue was located and returned to the front of the KFC from which it was taken.

The Curse of the Colonel, entering its 24th season, kept the Tigers in last place for ten out of 17 years and has repeatedly put the whammy on them in recent playoff appearances.

Brave divers located all but the Colonel’s glasses, shoes, and left hand over two days earlier this week. If I had come face-to-face with that creepy, algae- and river muck-ridden smile, I would have soiled my SCUBA gear and escaped to the surface.

Or maybe I would have left it down there because Hanshin fans are insufferable and go absolutely ga-ga for very average players.

I’m putting my money on the Hanshin Tigers to win the 2009 Japan Championship. The exhumation of Colonel Sanders will lead this year’s bunch of forty-somethings, punch-and-judy hitters, role players, and five-inning starters straight to the top.