I was recently asked to give a presentation to a meeting of Tokyo’s Association of American Baseball Research. My topic was the reasons why Japanese and American baseball have diverged so much. Today’s post is part of that presentation.

Since the day I first watched Japanese pro baseball back in 1984, I was struck by how different it was. I wasn’t just broadcasts beginning an hour after the first pitch and ending before the last out.

NPB games in the 1980s were like watching different theater groups performing the same play, with the only variety coming from different stage directions and actors’ pacing, timing and quality. Some performances were inspiring, others vapid, but one went into the show knowing the script by line by line.

At the heart of it was a clear reverence for one-run tactics and complete games as pillars of the only real way to play baseball. Virtually every analyst and announcer discounted home runs and the idea of pulling effective starting pitchers as unfortunate intrusions into the purity of Japanese-style baseball.