The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (10 page)

942. Fouled back for a strike.

943. Swinging strike.

944. Chopped foul.

945. High and outside. Ball one.

946. Fouled back again.

947. Fouled down the third-base line.

And then, at last: 948. Tanaka struck out, swing and a miss.

Saito lifted what was left of his arms into the air. Because he was small, and because he looked as though he'd been broken, he wasn't deemed a kaibutsu. There is more to the title than endurance, than simple suffering. A true kaibutsu inspires fear as well as awe. A true kaibutsu doesn't get damaged. He does the damage.

After graduating from high school, Yuki Saito played college baseball. Today he is in the Japanese minor leagues, presently out with a shoulder injury. It is unclear when he will pitch again. For now, his only physical reward for having sacrificed his arm to baseball is a plaque at Koshien, written entirely in Japanese, except for the three digits that shine like lights: 948.

Tanaka has gone on to become one of the top pitchers in Japanese professional baseball. At the end of this season, he will likely be posting, like Dice-K, like Darvish, auctioned off to the highest American bidder. A major league team will probably pay tens of millions of dollars for his rights and sign him for tens of millions more. Despite Cashman's misgivings, rumor has it that team might even be the Yankees. If not them, someone, somewhere, will overlook everything we now know about Japanese pitchers and the childhoods they survive, hoping against hope that Tanaka won't be the next Dice-K or Igawa or Yoshii or Fujikawa.

Or the next Yuki Saito. After telling the story of that fabled Koshien, Gondo rises out of his chair and reaches for his phone. He has been doing some math, some private equation, but he's not sure he's found the right answer. He calls Saito, whose voice crackles into the room.

Gondo asks Saito if he has any regrets.

No, Saito says. No regrets. He won Koshien, remember?

Gondo hangs up, and he brings his hand to his mouth. He remembers. He remembers two unstoppable boys throwing themselves into each other, inning after inning, pitch after pitch. He remembers how it was one of the most perfect, terrible, lung-heaving things he's ever seen. He remembers how that baseball game felt like love in his chest, how it still feels that way. His eyes glisten behind his glasses.

“I thought I had my mind made up,” he says. “Now I'm not so sure.”

 

On Monday afternoon, the boys of Saibi, now back home in Matsuyama, are informed that today's practice will be eight hours long. The first order of business is to tend to their field, on which heavy weekend rains have left a small lake where third base should be. Joko supervises the digging of a network of trenches that would impress a corps of engineers. Then most of the team sets upon the lake with wooden rakes and buckets and sponges. It takes them close to an hour of quiet, tireless work, but slowly the lake recedes. At last the bag is put into place.

All the while, Anraku has been nearby, working on his mound with his own rake, shaping its gentle curves. It is necessary, Joko says, that the boys maintain their own field. They need to learn a place in order to learn their places in it. Joko is not teaching them to be baseball players, he says, because most of them will not be baseball players. But one day all of them will be men. After they finish tending their field, they bow to it, because there is honor even in dust.

Next, they assemble in tight rows on the dirt, the starters sitting in the first row, the backups and the hopefuls sitting in two neat rows behind them. Joko gives them a talk, gentle, reassuring. “I have taught you the only way I know,” he says. Then his voice grows stern. Between their weekend games, the boys had tucked into lunches behind one of the dugouts, and one of them had left his empty bento box on the ground. “We were their guests,” Joko says. “We must leave these places cleaner than we found them.” He turns to Anraku. “This is your responsibility,” he says. “This is up to you.”

At the end of his speech, Joko asks the boys to stand and turn to face toward home—not home plate but the place they were born. They turn in every possible direction, north and south, east and west, toward the cities and the mountains and the sea. They take off their caps and hold them to their chests. “I want you to think of where you come from,” Joko says. “I want you to think of your mothers and fathers, of the people whose love brought you here. I want you to think of what you mean to them, how precious your gifts are. I want you to think of them and decide what it is you want to do today. Will you do your best? Will you make them proud?” And then he has the boys stand in quiet contemplation for a minute, for two minutes. Their faces crease; paths form in the dust under their eyes.

It's hard to imagine an American coach making the same speech. It's hard to imagine American boys taking off their caps and turning to face Philadelphia and Yonkers, San Antonio and St. Louis, and making up their minds about what it is they want to do today, and how well, and to honor whom. It's hard to imagine our physical pursuits also being spiritual ones. It's hard to imagine an America in which something as rare and special as a fastball is seen as less a possession than a sacrifice, more a communal property than a personal one.

It is just as hard to imagine an American manager asking his 16-year-old star to throw 772 pitches in a single tournament.

The boys begin their practice. It too doesn't look like something we would ask our children to do. It is two hours before any of them touch a baseball. At one point, heavy logs are lifted and swung. Anraku, wearing a leather jacket to prepare his body for summer's heat, watches the sweat drip off the end of his nose. Soon he will leave for a six-mile run on a hilly golf course. He runs every day. He must get stronger. He must reach the next level.

“Let me ask you,” Joko says to an astonished guest. “Why do Japanese arms break in America?”

He has heard many theories. He has heard that the Americans don't let the Japanese throw enough and they get weak. He has heard they get too muscle-bound, or too fat on American food, and it alters their formerly perfect mechanics. He has heard that the ball itself is different—the American ball is bigger—and so their grip must change, which changes everything else.

He has never heard that it's because Japanese children field too much, or hit too much, or throw too much. Nobody, he says, has blamed Koshien or nagekomi, or if someone has, he's been deaf to such complaints. American pitchers get hurt too, don't they? If anything, Joko says, the Japanese aren't working hard enough anymore. It's not that they risk losing something important to us, to our softer way of thinking. “We've already lost it,” he says.

He is not alone in his fears. “If Koshien changes,” the former Met Masato Yoshii says, “I think we would lose what is beautiful about baseball.”

“What a game that was,” Gondo says, remembering Saito's 948 pitches once again.

Joko concludes his chat about American misdeeds by walking onto the field with buckets of balls. The boys surround him in a tight circle. Joko picks one. The boy stands maybe 30 feet in front of him, and Joko starts rifling balls, left and right, left and right. The boy dives, gets up, dives again, again and again and again, the balls mostly just out of reach. A dozen, then two dozen, then three dozen, now four, until at last the spectacle is over. The boy retreats out of the circle, and he is dirt-caked and heaving. Sweat and snot and tears cover his face. Several minutes later, his hands are still on his knees, and he still struggles to catch his breath.

Meanwhile, another boy has been chosen. It's the catcher, the whippet. Now he too begins diving, left and right, left and right, left and right. The boys are screaming encouragement, and he continues, stretched out and back to his feet, again and again. He is covered in earth from head to toe, but Joko continues to throw, and the whippet continues to dive, until suddenly, out of the dust: he smiles. Somehow he is smiling, and Joko is smiling back at him, until finally the whippet catches one last ball, exhausted, facedown in the dirt. The boys roar in unison. They have just witnessed the difference between victory and defeat.

“That's how we communicate,” Joko says, the smile still on his face. “We speak without talking.”

The afternoon passes into evening, with so much speaking and so little talking, until the sun starts to set beyond right field and the brown earth goes golden. Anraku has returned from his run at the golf course. He is still wearing his leather jacket; his giant teenage body continues to cook. Joko has told him to be ready, that if they make Koshien again, he will throw every pitch. “I want to prove this is the right way,” Anraku says. “I want to prove the Japanese way is the right way.”

He knows that if he gets hurt, then the Japanese way might be finished along with him, his arm the final straw. It is his greatest fear. Unlike Hideo Nomo, he won't be the start of something. Anraku will be the end, the monster that leaves his city in ruins. “It will be my fault,” he says. His manager was talking about a discarded bento box, but he wasn't really talking about a bento box: this is up to him.

If he were an American kid, if he really were Stephen Strasburg, he would be that almost mythical brand of prospect whose gifts are appraised by baseball jewelers looking at him through loupes and locked away in a vault. Instead, Anraku was born Japanese, which means he is a different commodity, measured by different values. Anraku is not from this place; he is of this place. He is this place. He is his high school and prefecture and Japan. He is his mother and father. He is his manager. Most of all he is the rest of these beautiful boys, everything they are and everything they hope they will be remembered for having been. He knows that his fate will also be theirs. He knows by heart which way is home. And so off Anraku goes unafraid into the night, swinging his arm at his shoulder, as though he's only just begun to warm up.

FROM
SBNATION.COM

 

T
HOMAS “TJ” WEBSTER JR.
waits impatiently for the ball to be tossed in the air. The only white player on the court, he can sense the eyes of the few dozen spectators lounging around the steel and plastic bleachers.

At half-court, the sole referee delicately balances the ball on his fingertips while simultaneously judging the slight breeze coming off the Harlem River.

Across the street, rising out of the ground where the once-famed Polo Grounds stood and Willie Mays tracked down fly balls, four 30-story housing projects known as the Polo Grounds Towers loom ominously over Holcombe Rucker Park.

TJ anxiously tugs at his long black shorts once, then again. The tattoos that start at his wrist and crawl toward his slender biceps glisten under the sun. At five-eleven, with a lithe upper body that more resembles that of a tennis player, he doesn't seem built for this game, or, perhaps, this place.

As the players wait for the scorer's table to set up, TJ bends his knees, then jumps straight into the air, landing with controlled force. It's as if he's testing the durability of the newly installed NBA-grade wood floor placed over the blacktop.

Despite his small size and light frame, he carries, like a weapon stashed under a vest, a 38-inch vertical jump. Along with his self-proclaimed “great” outside jump shot, he knows that during this 20-minute open tryout he'll have to do enough to impress one of the handful of coaches glaring at him from the stands. They represent teams in the upcoming Entertainer's Basketball Classic, an eight-week-long tournament and the jewel of New York's basketball summer circuit.

Just two days ago, TJ stepped off a cross-country bus with every penny to his name wedged into the bottom of his bag for a chance to change his life. It's a long shot; he understands that, and so do the other nine players on the court. There are only two ways to make an EBC team, either by reputation or by being selected after your performance in the open run.

Each year, one, maybe two players, at most, will be good enough to be granted a jersey and, in essence, a pass inside the halls of the cathedral of street basketball; a chance to feel the nearly religious power of Rucker Park—the same court that has hosted some of the greatest players to ever play the game.

In 1947, Holcombe Rucker, a Harlem teacher, started the predecessor to the EBC tournament on 128th Street, a mile south of its current location on West 155th Street, in the park now named in his honor. He viewed the tourney as a way to keep local youth busy during the summer months.

Over the next few decades, the tournament expanded and became vital to the community. Every local player with any game had to go through the crucible of Rucker's tournaments to prove he could play. Not only to himself and to other players, but also to the fans on the street who would sometimes wait for hours to squeeze inside the small park and watch basketball in its rawest form.

Although the tournament games are generally governed by the same rules as the indoor game, streetball has its own unique subculture. At its core, the attraction to the playground is the spontaneity and the depth of human expression. Without many, if any, set plays, extreme displays of individual skill and athleticism can flare at any moment. Early on, NBA players seeking a break from the stodgy confines of their winter league, and to solidify their street credentials, began flocking to the tournaments uptown. A young Lew Alcindor perfected his footwork there. Dr. J was a regular, and locals like Earl “The Goat” Manigault, Herman “The Helicopter” Knowings, and “Pee-Wee” Kirkland became legends almost equal in stature to their NBA counterparts.

On the court, other players with ability, but who lacked a name, had the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with the game's best. Overnight heroes and streetball legends appeared from seemingly nothing and nowhere in a way that could never happen in the inaccessible castle of the NBA. Reputations could be made, but dreams could be destroyed, at Rucker Park.