Archive for April, 2009

Whirlwind Weekend I

Published by Bob Sanchez on April 14, 2009 in Baseball and Observations. 1 Comment

This is my favorite part of the year, and I’m so lucky that it lasts for six or seven months. It’s hot outside and baseball is being played everywhere. Almost makes the winter worth it.

I was in fine form, kicking off the weekend with the school’s welcome and goodbye party for incoming and outgoing teachers. There is a Kochi tradition called henpai (literally “return drink”) which entails walking around the ballroom with a small bottle of sake, pouring drinks for several partners, and receiving one in return for each.

Given my plans for the weekend and recent events in Orange County, I decided not to participate in henpai and the teachers were disappointed. I was surprised at their reactions; they explained the importance of henpai to me as though I didn’t know it. It was as though they had forgotten the year-end party that I had set up when the official one got canceled, and didn’t recall the many other henpais we had exchanged in the past.

One thing a foreigner has to live with is people constantly illustrating Japanese customs like they are new. Japanese people seem to do things that custom dictates and feel that they can’t deviate or beg out of these cultural obligations. I’ve got the magic foreigner card that I can play, and as an adult, I decide what I do and what I don’t do. It’s usually difficult to get Japanese people to join me and exercise their choice.

Those that pull me aside and expand upon Japanese traditions think that I don’t understand completely, and it’s pretty useless to try and tell them that I am aware of them and choose to go my own way sometimes.

The baseball coach admitted that playing for him wasn’t fun enough, but he felt helpless going against the long history of Japanese baseball. He couldn’t call himself a proper coach without forcing the players to run miles before practice or keeping them at school until eight o’clock at night. He wants me around the team to buck the trend and make it more fun, and I’ve been unsuccessful in convincing him that he can do it himself.

Saturday began bright and early as I met a friend at the local driving range at 6:30. It’s a tiny spot with about 20 mats, and the range comes to a point a hair under 100 yards from the mats. It’s not much bigger than my parents’ backyard, but it’s close to home and great for iron shots.

The old lady that runs the range leaves it unlocked, and patrons arrive as soon as the sun comes up to hit some balls. They sign in and leave some money in a tray by the office door. There are no cameras, and there are even range clubs available to use for free. I love having people’s trust in this way, and it reminds me of the life and times that my grandparents talked about. People here hold themselves accountable and don’t abuse that trust.

I rented a car at 8:00 and headed out to Haruno Ballpark to watch an industrial league tournament. There were but a few players worth writing up, but the games were exciting and the sunshine and sea air were delicious.

The starter for Mitsubishi Hiroshima set down the first 19 players in order and could not be touched, but he hit the 20th batter as soon as I pulled out my camera to shoot him from the side. Two base hits found their way through the middle, and I returned to my station behind the plate to watch the pitcher battle with a 1-0 lead and the bases loaded.

He hit the left-handed batter with his 2-2 pitch, but the umpire called the batter back for not making an attempt to get out of the way. I called that a fair bit when I umpired, but as I watch more and more baseball, I’ve come to view that as a rather tic-tac call, especially when the pitch in question is traveling 90 miles per hour.

So my boy on the mound thought he got a huge break, but the hitter lined the next pitch into right field to put his team ahead 2-1 and turn the game around.

Late in the second game with the bases loaded and the go-ahead run at second, the pitcher picked off the runner at first base and the base ump called the runner safe. It was a lucky break for the trailing team, and the gutsy little guy at the plate jumped on the following pitch and hit a line drive headed for right field. The first baseman snared it and stepped on first for a nifty double play to end the threat.

What can you say about a game that lifts you up and drags you down again within seconds?

I jumped in the car and drove two hours to Takamatsu City to see my first independent league action of the season, the Ehime Mandarin Pirates against the Kagawa Olive Guyners. Can you imagine two Golden Baseball Leagues called the Orange County Kaki Kaizoku and the Long Beach Sakura Shotaigun? Those names would make about as much sense to us as Olive Guyners must make to Japanese fans. As much as Japanese consider baseball to be their game, the American influence is present in spades.

After a hike with Noodles and some new friends on Sunday morning, I drove three hours to the Tokushima countryside to watch the Tokushima Indigo Socks tangle with the Nagasaki Saints. Not a single prospect did I see in either indy league game.

The performance of all four teams underwhelmed me and left me hoping that the Kochi Fighting Dogs or Fukuoka Red Warblers run away with the league. They’d have to if they had any good players, because there was little defense, power, or plate discipline to speak of in both contests that I saw.

I sincerely hope that the new Kansai League, with its higher salaries and 17-year-old female knuckleballers, has simply drawn the talent away from the Shikoku Island League. Independent baseball is in its fifth year in Japan, and while there are now three leagues and 16 teams, the talent has to be there for the leagues to survive and serve a purpose.

There is little in Japan in the way of professional player development, and these indy leagues are supposed to fill that hole. Each of the twelve major league clubs drafts signs five to ten new players a year (compared to thirty to forty for each of the 30 MLB teams), and in a country with over 4,000 high school baseball teams, that means that the Mike Piazzas, Jason Bays, and Albert Pujols’ of Japan are not getting signed and must find other means of improving from a young age.

I know that the talent is out there, and I’d be on the train every day going to high school tournaments and practice games if I wasn’t teaching English to earn my bread. Guys who think they can play should be gravitating toward these new independent leagues, but the pressure to make money and have a stable life are so strong here that I think many boys give up far too soon. As far as I have seen, the independent leagues have not yet filled the need for player development and I am disappointed.

The industrial leagues offer a more secure future for players because they’ll have a desk job waiting for them at Japan Railways or Toyota if baseball doesn’t work out. However, the company hierarchy keeps many good first-year players on the bench and development in the company baseball system is rather slow.

I’ll still go and observe the indy leagues and speak well of the opportunity to continue playing in Japan every chance I get. It’s tough to find young guys who will take the risk and go all-out after a baseball career.

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Zooming along Japan’s wide open expressways is invigorating and gives me time to reflect on baseball and life. All I did at home this weekend was sleep; I got back after midnight every night. I wouldn’t have it any other way during baseball season.

Hold Still!

Published by Bob Sanchez on April 8, 2009 in Misc. 3 Comments

On Friday nights in the winter, I model for an oil painting class downtown. Most of the students are elderly and are just looking for something to do, and, well, the model is young and just looking for something to do.

They like me because I have a beard and heavy eyebrows, and they don’t get to paint people that look like that very often.

I pose for four shifts of 25 minutes each, six times throughout February and March. I got a red envelope full of money last time, and I wonder what it’ll be this time.

Last year, I posed fully clothed in a chair with my arms on the arms of the chair like Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Monument. I straightened my back and stared straight ahead at a clock on the wall.

At first, it was fun finding things to think about during the shifts, and 25 is a nice number for that. I used one shift to name all 50 states and their capitals and found that I had forgotten four of them (Lansing, Michigan? Come on!).

One whole night was devoted to baseball history, and I used a minute on each year. Things got fuzzy in from the forties on back, but I had enough thoughts to get through 100 minutes. Another time, I went through the baseball franchises and meditated on their histories.

Then, I reviewed each of my 25 years of life for a minute. I was working on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue on the piano at the time, and while that takes 16 to 17 minutes to play, if I “played” in my head and stopped and reviewed parts, it usually took 25 minutes.

I ran out of things to think about at the end, but it was an interesting exercise nonetheless.

This year, I opted for a more relaxed pose in the chair, with my left leg crossed on top of my right. I held a book in the space my crossed leg created and looked down to read it. With all of my clothes on.

Surprisingly, reading was a lot harder than staring and thinking. While I was able to read quite quickly because I had nothing else to do, it was difficult not to be able to take my eyes off the pages or move my head at all. In fact, I fell asleep a few times during my first shift of every class.

My left leg also fell asleep and became dead by the time 25 minutes was up. It had 5-minute breaks to wake up before being numbed again. Professional models are tough human beings. It takes a lot of skill, balance, and concentration to maintain a pose for a long period of time.

We tried out a few poses before settling on the reading pose, and I stood for 25 minutes during one of those tries. My hat is off to professional models, because that was excruciating. My lower body was on fire, yet I couldn’t feel any of it, and even my hand started screaming out to me from its position on my hip.

This year has been tough because it has rained every single Friday night on which we held class. I came to class in my rain suit and had to stuff my book and shoes in my pants underneath it to keep them dry on the way. That nixed my tradition of heading out to the hot springs after class, but this winter wasn’t that cold, so I didn’t miss it that much.

The WBC Tokyo Round and Spring Day (one of four wonderful Japanese national holidays denoting the first day of a new season) sucked up a couple of Fridays, so our last class is this Friday, April 3.

The forecast calls for rain and a confession of love by the thirty-something single mother who always sits in the front row, takes lots of pictures of me, and tries to speak English to me after every class.

EPILOGUE: Got a white envelope with more money in it than last year’s red envelope. The paintings all came out differently, and once again nobody chose to include the pen I stuck in the ring of my Harry Caray Holy Cow! T-shirt. I escaped before the lady had a chance to talk to me. I will not model again next winter.

Sakura-it To Me, Baby

Published by Bob Sanchez on April 3, 2009 in Bike and Comforts of Home. 2 Comments

2009 is the fifth calendar year in which I have done some time in Japan. I’ve spent over half of my working life in this country, but there are two very Japanese things I have never experienced - the New Year celebration and cherry blossom viewing.

I may never be here for New Year’s for various reasons, but I’ve had five chances at hanami and finally made good on one of them this year.

Cherry trees were shedding their delicate, pink petals when I stepped off the plane in Tokyo in April 2005, and I actually made it to a famous park in Shinjuku in time to see them scattered on the ground.

It being my first-ever visit to Japan, I was so overwhelmed with everything else that I couldn’t fully appreciate what I was seeing. Imagine teaching a foreigner all about American baseball for three years without letting them go to the United States during that time, and then taking them there and giving them plate seats at a Yankees-Red Sox game. It was kind of like that.

People go crazy waiting for sakura to bloom, and the faintly pink blossoms carry significant cultural meaning. Obviously, they’re a welcome sign that spring is on the way, and consequently for Japanese an excuse to spread out a blue tarp and get blasted outside during the day with one’s coworkers and friends.

The school year begins on April 1 in Japan, and new graduates begin work around this time as well. This sets off a never-ending cycle of things beginning and ending in early spring, so the sakura also stand for new life, painful goodbyes, and exciting hellos.

Many schools and companies rotate their workers within prefectures or even countrywide, and these seemingly arbitrary transfers are often made for unknown reasons; they are simply decided behind closed doors by those above. Married couples and families with young children are not always exempt to these transfers, and I have met more than a couple young fathers who spend their nights alone in Kochi while their families miss them from places like Fukuoka, Iwate, and Gifu.

March is a time for anxiety, and when the day for transfer announcements (Black Day) rolls around, employees rush to log on to the company website and check their fate. What follows is a flurry of text messages, clutched chests, clenched fists, frustrated moans, relieved sighs, teary eyes, and gut-wrenching, down-on-one-knee, face-to-face with destiny moments.

No wonder Japanese bust out the blue tarps and go nuts. After finding out whether or not you have to pull up your roots by next week, it must be nice to have something as beautiful as cherry blossoms to gaze at and appreciate.

I’ve missed this the last three years because I was out of the country each time. In 2006, I couldn’t stand the cold winter of Fukushima and bailed out early. In 2007, I was in Seattle forging another step on my baseball journey. In 2008, I spent two weeks in Phoenix at Spring Training and was gone for the exact amount of time that the cherry trees were in full bloom.

How maddeningly ironic that the sales point of my new apartment was not the Washlet, but the proximity to an aquatic boulevard of beautiful sakura. The trees are not ugly by any means during the rest of the year, but their value lies in the ten to twelve days that their blossoms are on display.

If anything, that has taught me that I am never going to see everything in the world, let alone in Kochi. Even my most routine bike trails are different every time I take them; I cannot go somewhere once on one day out of the year and fully appreciate that place. That I will never know everything is apparent, but has still been a humbling realization.

I arrived home from Phoenix and the cold wind promptly blew away about half of the sakura. There are still some out now, but they are disappearing fast. I decided to tour Kochi in search of places I’d heard about, and it took a whole day to do.

I began, simply enough, with the Horikawa Canal right in front of my apartment. Tourist boats pass by at all hours and folks walk by on the docks all day. I happened upon a grandfather showering his grandson with fallen petals and having a merry time at it. Those are my clothes hanging behind the flowers.

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I cycled out to Tosa-Yamada Town to see a temple that is run-of-the-mill but for its sakura-lined road. There were just a few canopies selling octopus balls and okonomiyaki, and it looked like I had missed the party by a couple days.

Next, I followed the Monobe River northeast for a spell, happening upon a scene that I hadn’t expected on the opposite bank. I love the low-hanging trees off to the right of the cherries but didn’t know that the little trees in the picture were sakura.

I tried three different roads in an attempt to find the back way up to the Ryugado Caves, but each one was steep and ran out of pavement after a few kilometers. When I finally made it to the caves, I was flogged. I hadn’t cycled in two weeks and the wind was a bit brutal. Ahead of me lay the Ryugado Skyline, a steeper, inland version of the Yokonami Skyline with grittier pavement.

I love pain and only had today, so I trudged up the slope. Usual views were still just as breathtaking, but it looked like I missed the best of the sakura. Still, the one newly-paved section was a big dip between peaks that was shrouded with cherry trees and was probably awesome last week.

The hanami party was at my place that night, and we tried to start some Korean barbecue out on my balcony, but it turned out to be a bad idea because of the smoke. We ran through my apartment and carried the flaming barbecue outside, where it promptly began to rain. We finally found shelter next to a clapboard warehouse, and seven friends showed up in the freezing cold to eat, drink, and look at flowers.

Just get hot, already!