Archive for May, 2009

Ninety Feet to Meltdown

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 27, 2009 in Comforts of Home. 3 Comments

I’ve loosely mentioned golfing, and that’s because I recently picked up the clubs for the eighth time (after laying them down or throwing them into trees and lakes seven times).

Japan is a most unlikely place to rekindle the golf flame – equipment and facilities cost about three times what they should and there is five times less space in which to use said equipment and construct said facilities.

The Kochi Youth Center offered a weekly golf class last winter for ten bucks, so I took the bait and signed up. The highly prohibitive start-up cost included a rental club and seven lessons, and we were on our own for range balls. I showed up to the first class, got a seven-iron and a range card, and went to work.

The teacher, a grizzled golf pro who resides at the fabulous Tosa Country Club to the east in Aki City, had leathery skin and a gravelly voice abused by mountains of cigarettes. He spent two hours a week each Tuesday with the seven students and me, tinkering with our swings and offering more advice than we could ever use.

I got the sense that Golf Pro particularly liked working with me, and if he didn’t like it then at least he always went home with some question of mine on his mind.

I was concerned with him changing my swing after I’d find a groove that produced positive results. Golf Pro said it was like building a sandcastle as the tide went out; I’d get something going and then he’d have to knock it down and expose some flaw, then I’d build that up and he’d knock another part down, until the tide was completely out and my beautiful, fundamentally strong castle could stand unmolested.

Each time, I resented going from finally being able to hit a long, straight ball five times out of ten to shanking or slicing everything and only hitting it eighty yards. Then, each time, as I subdued the rage within, I improved until I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing or trying my hardest to hit the ball, which is exactly how one ought to go about hitting a golf ball.

None of this was real golf, keep in mind, it was just practice. Still, it felt wonderful to have some semblance of control over where the ball was going and to feel smooth, natural, and athletic in so doing.

Then, in the seventh and final class, Golf Pro passed out the pitching wedges and told us to work on approaches. He showed us how to do it and said that we needed to acquire a feel for hitting the ball with a certain loft and distance. We were to work on hitting the ball thirty yards, fifty yards, and seventy yards.

This is where the wheels come off the temper train for me. Nothing frustrates me more in golf than trying to hit a ball ninety feet and failing. I can spit into a cup ninety feet away, for cryin’ out loud. Why shouldn’t I be able to put a golf ball close to one?

It didn’t take ten swings for all of those feelings to return and make me wish there was a lake at the range to chuck my rental club into. I reverted to the only way I knew how to make a golf ball go straight for a short distance, which was to face the target with my body and take an awkward, short swing by drawing my arms out and pushing them forward. It’s not pretty and not very consistent, but at least the ball goes in the right direction.

Golf Pro told me that wouldn’t hold up at Tosa Country Club.

Golf Pro: Mac, you can’t do that at TCC. They’ll laugh you off the course.

Mac: Well, what if it works for me? Look, I can hit that target better by doing it my way.

I took five of his swings and shanked every one of them, and then five of my goofy swings and hit a sidewalk thirty yards away each time.

Mac: See? This works!

Golf Pro: Can you hit it fifty yards that way?

Mac: No, I’m sure I can’t.

Golf Pro: What would you do if you were fifty yards away from a hole, then?

Mac: Triangulate and hit it thirty yards twice.

I wasn’t trying to make him laugh; I was serious. I have the most fun playing golf when I walk up and simply hit the ball closer to the hole. Correct mechanics and scorecards turn a pleasant day outside with friends into a thorny, muddy, sandy walk through hell for me.

Golf Pro laughed and suggested that I do things the right way, his way. I told him that I wasn’t trying to be a professional and asked him if there wasn’t some middle ground.

I was able to admit that my way was dumb and inefficient and that I lacked the patience to suffer through thousands of failures, but I also believe that there is validity and importance in remembering that few of us are professionals. Par is by definition the number of strokes it should take for a professional to knock out a given hole, and by comparing ourselves to pros in that way, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.

This middle ground I sought did not exist in the mind of Golf Pro, and we went back and forth on the subject for the better part of an hour. I didn’t understand how there couldn’t be a way to improve without striving toward a meticulously professional swing, and, as is typical, kept on asking questions aggressively until I did understand.

Golf Pro finally said that golf wasn’t for me. He said the words,

You can’t play.

I almost believed him. I almost dropped the pitching wedge and left right there. Life certainly wouldn’t be any worse without golf. I could have left it all behind in that moment. I have so many other things going on, so many other activities that challenge me and bring me happiness and positivity.

But his words challenged me. Taking the entire conversation into context, he was saying that I lacked the mental fortitude to play golf. This had nothing to do with hand-eye coordination or anything physical; Golf Pro was saying that I was not good enough in the head to play his game.

Seething, I went back to my mat. I put my head down and took 400 approach swings, intending to do it his way until it worked. I didn’t get there that night.

I turned in my rental club at the end of class and bought a wedge for myself. I became a member at the dinky practice range near my apartment, the one whose owner leaves the door unlocked at all hours. I have budgeted an amount of money to spend each month on enduring the anger and frustration and learning how to toss that ball up to the cup with my club.

It’s working. Two months of sunrise practice later, life is much better. I’ve found ways to re-channel the rage and improve in golf, and can even use those methods in everyday life. I am going to continue to invest in this and use this as a way to leave behind my biggest problem. And I’m not far from taking money to hit a ball ninety feet.

There’s a bald old man at the range every morning, Mr. Doi. He’s even there when I go after school sometimes. The school schedule came out this week, and I have no class on Wednesdays. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him there when I start going Wednesdays at lunch.

This morning, as I toweled off and turned to head home and prepare for work, Mr. Doi stopped me:

Mr. Doi: Mac, going so soon? That was really fast!

Mac: Well, Mr. Doi, some of us have jobs.

Mr. Doi: (laughing) Yeah, that can’t be helped, I suppose. Say, let’s go golfing some time. You got a set of clubs?

Mac: (waving pitching wedge) You’re lookin’ at it.

We’re not going to get out together until summer vacation, but I really believe that it will happen. Seeing Mr. Doi at the range in the mornings is just one more thing that helps me deal with the frustration, and one more thing that makes Kochi home.

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The Winning Hand

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 25, 2009 in Funnies. 2 Comments

I had so much fun learning English as a kid. I’m completely serious. I used to spend hours in my room writing stuff down, doing word searches, fill-ins, and crossword puzzles, and playing the word games on my electronic dictionary.

New words, phrases and idioms were a pleasure to pick up and I always looked forward to trying them out for the first time, even if I didn’t get them quite right.

It follows that word play is enjoyable for me in Japanese. I get to be nine years old all over again, and I think that Japanese people enjoy teaching me and seeing the light bulbs come on in my head when we run across something new.

One word that I’ve always liked is katte, the characters of which are “to win” and “hand.” The pronunciation is funky and doesn’t follow the rules for paired characters, so katte stuck out in my mind from the beginning.

It has a couple of uses. As an adverb, it means to do as you please, to act on a whim, or to be a little inconsiderate to someone else while having your way about something. The dictionary offers “freely” and “arbitrarily” as single-word solutions, but if I had to interpret the word katte in speech I’d probably alter the sentence and use more casual English.

I went with “inconsiderate” when I wrote about Mr. Felice closing the doors to his magnificent restaurant, Trattoria Felice. He used katte to describe his decision to close the restaurant, and the pencil graffiti artist wrote, “Yeah, that IS really katte, isn’t it?” underneath Mr. Felice’s note.

(I chased Mr. Felice and his shuttered business all over town. I tried the landlord, City Hall, the Tax Office, the Business Bureau, and the Food and Sanitation Department. They all told me that his contact information and reason for shutting down Kochi’s finest Italian joint were confidential.)

The katteguchi of a shop is the service entrance, and that of a house is the kitchen door to the outside. The dictionary says katte can refer to the ins and outs of something. The example sentence says that “I don’t know this area’s katte” is like “I’m new around these parts.” I haven’t heard katte used in that way, but I pass a few katteguchis on my way to work every day, so that one is alive and well.

Teaching is starting to get dry and I don’t want to put any oil on the machine. I haven’t worn out my welcome at the high school by any means, but the limitations of the job grow more apparent as each day passes.

I’m not an official, full-time employee of the school, so I am on the outside. Quite a few teachers, including the baseball coach, are not full-time, and they’re on the fringes of the in-group. But as a part-timer and a foreigner, well, let’s say that I’d have to pray that there were seats open on the last lifeboat off the Titanic.

In the past, I tried to take a more active role at school than my job description required. I asked to be responsible for a section of the school during daily cleaning time, I asked to be assigned to the front gate for daily greetings, and I showed up at a few staff meetings that lasted until well after I was supposed to clock out and go home.

In truth, nobody cares if I do those things or not. My job is to be there and be foreign. I’ve got my sights set on better things as early as this fall, and this job has been dead-end from the beginning. What does all of this mean?

It’s time to KATTE! I have no class on Wednesdays this year, but I still have to be at school for eight hours. That’s OK, I’ll just KATTE and take a golf club to work so I can sneak off and practice approach shots down by the river.

The general school meeting is next Saturday, and all teachers have to be at school for some silly reason. There’s one class in first period, and then the students are free to go. The committee teachers all have something to do, but Mac has nothing to do.

This day cost me a chance to go on a road trip to Nagasaki with the bike club last year, and this year’s Nagasaki trip falls on the same day. Guess what? KATTE let’s go to Nagasaki!

KATTE is good, cheeky fun. I prepare everything for my lessons and never shortchange the students during class time, so I feel like I’m doing my job and can KATTE a little here and there in ’09.

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The students competed in the Shikoku Qualifying Tournaments last weekend and we had to report to work on Saturday and Sunday to cheer them on. On Saturday, I dutifully (and quizzically) watched the Japanese Archery team compete and got my fill of fast-pitch softball, track and field, and baseball.

On Sunday, the skies opened up with rain and the outdoor events were canceled. I wasn’t going to repeat with archery, and I don’t enjoy watching people beat each other up, no matter how “graceful” and “artistic” they’re supposed to be, so judo, kendo, and karate were out. All of the indoor sports teams had already qualified for the Shikoku Island Tournament in June anyway, so they didn’t really need cheering.

I had been invited to participate in a Mud Sumo tournament way up in the mountains of neighboring Nangoku City and had regretfully declined the invitation due to my obligations at school. It was a shame, too, because the tournament was to take place in a yet-to-be-planted rice field, and who knew when I was going to get another opportunity to flop around half-naked in a rice field?

It was nine a.m. when we got word that baseball and the other outdoor games were canceled. I faced the prospect of sitting at school all day doing nothing or grimacing and covering my eyes every time a judo guy went airborne or upside-down. It was most definitely KATTE time.

I donned my rainsuit and bid goodbye to the teacher’s office. I changed into ratty old clothes and biked up to the mountains to catch what I could of the sumo tournament, happy to be taking advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at the small expense of bending the rules and being naughty for a day.

The small mountain town that was to host the sumo tournament was empty, and I cycled through the winding, climbing main road looking for any signs of life or muddy frolicking. I came around a corner and spied a farmer backing a tractor off the bed of his pickup truck and slowed down to ask him to direct me to the correct muddy rice paddy.

The bill of his cap hid his face, but when he snapped up at my Hello, I saw that it was the principal of my school! Mouths agape, we stared at each other for a second or two before erupting with laughter.

This stoic, serious guy whom I had only seen in pressed suits was wearing a blue farmer’s jumper and galoshes caked with gray mud. Driving a tractor. In the middle of nowhere up in the mountains. On this day when we were both supposed to be clapping and singing fight songs along with everyone else back in Kochi City.

The principal explained that he lived in the area and that his family owned several rice fields in the town. He wanted to take advantage of the rain and stir up the mud with his tractor before planting the rice the following week, so he, too, took off from school after the outdoor games were canceled.

Giggling at our fun little secret, we parted ways. I found out that muddy sumo had been canceled because of the rain and wished that there was a handy Japanese word for “does not compute.” Seriously, the plan was to romp around in a muddy rice field. Wouldn’t rain help make that more fun?

I was KATTE’d out for the day, and I didn’t know which rice field was designated to take the wear and tear of a Mud Sumo tournament, so I just rode around a bit and then turned toward home.

I saw my principal churning up the muck in one of his rice fields on the way down, and he waved at me to stop, hopped off the tractor, and came sloshing over to me through the rice paddy. It looked like so much fun, and that was definitely the fastest I’ve ever seen him move.

He led me to a beat-up old farmhouse up the road where his wife, ancient parents, and younger brother were slicing up bamboo shoots to sell in the city. They pushed a gigantic bag of bamboo shoots into my arms and told me how to cook them.

I thanked them and laughed all the way down the mountain. I love this place.

Their Space

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 13, 2009 in Baseball and Observations. 0 Comments

Japanese baseball fans make me love them and hate them. Our relationship has changed a few times since I started watching Japanese baseball, and I’ve realized that the reasons I hate them aren’t always their fault.

When I saw my first couple of Japanese baseball games, I was blown away by the organization and strength of the crowds in the outfield. It much resembled American college football, with fans separated into sections according to team loyalty and musical instruments to lead the singing and chanting.

(This person does a much better job describing it than I do)

I then observed that the cheering had little to do with what was going on out on the field and that fans seemed to devote the same amount of energy to stars and role players alike. While that’s cool in some respects, it bothered me because I was trying to concentrate on the game, and these people would cheer their heads off regardless of the situation.

By 2005, I had lost almost all of the baseball fan left in me; I loved to watch the game and didn’t care who won or lost. At the same time, I didn’t see the point in believing that a .190 career hitter will drive in a guy from first base with two outs, yet the Japanese fans do and implore him to do so. They yell and cheer as much in that situation as they do when their best hitter is up with the bases loaded and nobody out.

If it wasn’t so damn loud I wouldn’t have minded so much, but I found myself rolling my eyes quite a bit in that first year. It was somewhat similar to sitting in front of the know-it-all who just has to pipe up with silly misperceptions about the game and about his importance as a fan.

I probably sound pretty crabby and frumpy, and I suppose that I am. It’s just so much easier to take in a game in the relative peace and quiet of an American ballpark. It’s baseball, not soccer or football.

Since I’ve begun scouting, I’ve been able to let go and just let the fans have their fun. I have a job to do and have learned to tune out the mindless noise, and almost all of it takes place in the outfield seats, anyway.

MLB parks have seats set aside for scouts from other teams, and if a Japanese scout shows up to look for future Nippon Pro “helpers,” they are accommodated with a seat, even at crowded bandboxes like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field.

In Japan, MLB scouts are generally tolerated at best but scorned at worst. The Nippon Ham Fighters and the Seibu Lions treat us very well and give us seats right behind home plate, and a few other clubs can’t give us seats because of the rabid fan base but do their best with passes to the park and early access.

The Chunichi Dragons and Yomiuri Giants treat us horribly. The Giants charge scouts for tickets when they feel like it and give us seats 70 rows back of the plate and off to one side. The Dragons sat my boss behind the left field foul pole once and their international guy makes me feel like I’m putting him out every time I ask for arrangements.

Compared to how well Americans treat Japanese, the situation in Japan is not good. It starts with “horse” and rhymes with “base hit.”

Literally in the middle of all of this are the fans. At parks where we have passes, we have to guess with our seats and often get bumped by fans that arrive late. Since we don’t have seat numbers, we have no choice but to pack up and move. Do this three or four times when you’re trying to zone in on a player and it gets very frustrating.

Of course, fans buy food and spill beer and cheer for their teams. The difference in Japan is that they’re doing it right next to scouts in smaller quarters; it is not a good working environment for us. Sometimes, I find myself getting short with the fans. They invade my working space and cause distractions that shouldn’t be there.

The Hanshin Tigers sometimes give us unassigned seats, which means that we have to get to the park early and plop our stuff down on a bench or a seat to reserve it. Depending on the location of the game or the opponent, we may have to arrive as early as four hours prior to the first pitch.

I did so at Hanshin’s first spring game at the end of February, arriving at the ballpark in Aki City (in Kochi!) at 9:30 a.m. for a 1:00 game. I elbowed my way into a single bench seat behind the plate and waited for the game to begin.

An older fellow on my left lit up a cigarette, and I bristled at the smoke and the audacity of doing that in a huge, tightly-packed group of people. Who went and made it 1960 when I wasn’t looking? Japan isn’t quite as up on anti-smoking as, say, California, but it’s certainly to the point that most people realize the inconvenience and rudeness of smoking in a public place with children and non-smokers present.

As I prepared a diatribe to unleash on the dude to my left, I looked around for a No Smoking sign to back me up and, to my disgust, found none. As I panned the crowd, I saw many smokers and counted quite a few close enough to me to make my anti-smoking hill a bad one to die on.

They were pouncing on the lack of signage and enjoying an age-old pleasure, and I realized at that moment that it was not they who were in my work space, it was I who was in their fun space. And not just at Aki City Ballpark, but everywhere in Japan.

The system has made it so, and the fans and I are just pawns in that system.

Should the Japanese teams make special seats for scouts? Absolutely. Americans extend the same courtesy to them. I would hate to take that courtesy away for the sake of the few teams that treat us very well and for the others who do the best they can.

However, I am more than a little fed up with my job being harder than it has to be for no good reason. I had to move five times a few weekends ago and laid into two guys who were having a good laugh at my expense. I usually let comments by fans slip by, but I allowed those two clowns to get under my skin and probably didn’t make them any smarter in the process.

Look, I’m not Jackie Robinson by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s difficult not to feel wrongly discriminated against when you see all of the Japanese scouts comfortably seated in the best seats for scouting with their cameras and radar guns propped up in empty seats, and when you know that your club is being hospitable to Japanese scouts in the United States while your makeshift workstation is constantly changing.

Either way, it’s not the fans’ fault and I need to do a better job remembering that. As I get to know the Japanese professionals more deeply, I won’t need to sit in the best seats and can probably spend time roaming around the park and getting more views from the side.

In the meantime, I’ll have to continue to sit amongst the masses that include chain smokers, drunks, leather-lungs, the manager’s mother, starry-eyed children, village idiots, gangsters, pop stars, groupies, and good old baseball fans.

The Best Slider I Ever Saw

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 7, 2009 in Baseball. 1 Comment

It’s fun to ask older baseball guys about the best fastball, the best swing, the best start out of the box, or the best catch they ever saw. They have much better perspective than us younger guys, who are almost constantly updating our “best ever”s by virtue of not having seen enough.

I’m getting to the point in my scouting career where I trust my eyes to make me say, “WOW!” when there’s something worth saying “WOW!” about. I’m not going to miss something obviously good, and my Rolodex of curve balls, frozen ropes, and outstanding plays is getting larger by the weekend.

A great friend of mine loves baseball because he sees something new every time he watches it. While I can’t claim to have as fresh an approach to studying the game as he does, I often see things that challenge my views and force me to reconsider how I think about baseball.

Seeing something completely new is highly stimulating and is one very good reason for why I keep going out to watch games. The thrill of pushing out into the unknown burns itself into my memory and I look back fondly on those influential firsts.

I was ten the first time I saw a curve ball in a game, and only one kid in the league was throwing them. I actually hit it, a feeling that I wouldn’t get used to until the last year I played competitively, but only when I returned to the bench and heard the manager’s disgusted remarks about nine-year-olds throwing curve balls did I even begin to think something was amiss.

Realistically, it was just a ball spinning sideways. We played with a real, MLB-sized baseball and few kids that age have fingers long and strong enough to throw a decent hammer. In my five years as an umpire in youth baseball, I saw kids as young as six years old trying to throw curves and it was laughable and deeply saddening at the same time.

I was a catcher until high school mainly because I wanted to play in every game and couldn’t hit. Volunteering to catch ensured that I wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle of kids made to stand out in right field for their mandatory three innings. It’s also a huge part of how I came to know and love the game of baseball.

Catcher is the defensive position with the most bits and pieces of knowledge to learn, and it’s very physical, so both the body and mind are firing. I had absolutely no baseball or athletic instincts, but I was able to learn the game much more quickly by squatting and watching thousands of pitches and swings up close than I would have by standing in right field, pounding my cup, and counting ladybugs.

The idea that there is more to the game than meets the eye at any given time was constantly reinforced during my education as a catcher. When I was eight years old, my father took me to a game at the next level, 9- and 10-year-olds, and told me to watch the catchers.

“See? You’ve got to watch out for bunts, stop the ball from getting behind you, and throw to second on a dime.” I was terrified – those ten-year-olds looked like men and moved like mustangs. The game was so fast, and my responsibilities would increase tenfold.

That first season of real baseball (kids pitch all year, balks, stolen bases, dropped third strikes, the whole bit) was a big one for me. I couldn’t hit a lick, so I bunted every single time I came up to the plate. It got to the point where Bob Sanchez would walk up to the plate and the other team’s catcher would say, “Watch the buuu-uuunt!” in that taunting, ten-year-old way. It was humiliating and drove me crazy, but it was better than striking out every time.

Luckily, I was able to get lost in catching, because in addition to being physically demanding and taking up the thickest chapter of the book on defense, there are a lot of places for a kid to look for positives. Throw a kid out stealing, back pick to first base, field a bunt and throw out the lead runner, catch all third strikes, block the ball with runners on – these were my goals. So what if I couldn’t hit?

My father worked with me before and after practice and in our back yard after he came home from work. We didn’t make much progress with hitting, but I always enjoyed the catching drills we did together. He showed me how to block, how to throw like a catcher, how to scoop up bunts with both hands, and the quickest way to return a wild pitch to the pitcher covering home.

We worked on receiving pitches, and he’d stand forty-something feet away and throw the ball to me, working it in there a little faster each time until he was throwing harder than my teammates. Sometimes it hurt my hand, but I’d never tell him that. I’d like to think that I knew that I’d return the favor some day, but I can’t be certain about that.

One day, a year before I’d see one in a game, my father taught me about curve balls. I was in disbelief, because hitting was already hard enough as it was, but now he was telling me that the ball can curve, too?

I got down into my squat and awaited the next pitch with anxiety. My pop let it fly, and, sure enough, it broke down and away. Since it started out on course for where the left-handed batter’s box would have been, I didn’t have a chance at it anyway, but I most certainly saw that ball curve.

I asked him to throw it, again and again, until I could catch it. I didn’t even think to ask him how to throw it myself, I was just so amazed that a ball could change directions in mid-flight and was engrossed in trying to get my glove on it.

Thinking back, the ball moved like a slider, with more horizontal break and just a little depth. I didn’t know any better and even now have trouble telling the difference, on occasion, between a pitcher’s curve and his slider.

I wouldn’t catch a breaking ball for another two seasons, but by the time most pitchers were throwing them, I was ready to catch them. The education continued, and before long I was rolling down on my knees to throw the ball back to the pitcher to save knee strength, framing the ball, and backing up first base on infield plays. I asked my father why he didn’t teach me these things earlier, as they are all basic and necessary. He replied that I wasn’t ready, and he was right.

I don’t know what made him think I was ready for a slider that day in the backyard, but it, like every other baseball lesson, seemed to come at just the right time. Every nugget I learned about baseball kept me interested in the game despite the plentiful failures I experienced on the field.

I’ve probably seen several thousand sliders since that day, but that one will stand out as the best, if not as the one that had the most impact on me. I’ll never sign him to a contract, but I am so thankful for the man who threw it to me.