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.
It was head scratching, and started a 40-year quest to find out how baseball in Japan and the United States, which started from essentially the same style of play, evolved so differently.
Part of the answer, I believe, lies in the timing of Japan’s initial exposure to high-quality American competition. The other key element is how Japanese culture responds to change.
In the 1870s, foreign educators and Japanese returning from America provided modernizing Japan with a baseball starter set, but little guidance beyond the basics. By 1905 Japan’s game had taken off in popularity with school and club teams drawing huge local followings.
According to professor Tetsuya Nakamura, exceptional middle school and college players became celebrities. Star athletes would get cash from tournament promoters to ensure their participation, and from local businesses to make public appearances. Their supporters frequently went on rampages and the players themselves often behaved like rock stars–that is to say, badly.
For years, I expected that Japan’s authoritarian style of baseball had been due to pressure from the Meiji Era government keen to rein in republican ideas in a political system that was bound together by the recently fabricated mythology that the Emperor was a living god.
Professor Nakamura, however, said that the players, who from the start had seen the game as an exercise in meritocracy and democracy, themselves acted to regulate themselves, creating behavioral rules as regional associations were formed to organize tournament play.
In 1905, three years after Tokyo’s Waseda Vocational School was renamed Waseda University, its champion baseball team toured America in 1905 and initiated a flood of ocean-crossing exchanges in both directions with American pros and top amateurs.
The exchanges that created a Japan baseball template took when small-ball, the sacrifice, hitting behind the runner, and base-stealing were the way to advance runners, long before home runs became acceptable in American baseball in the 1920s.
As national tournaments began in 1915 with the inaugural national middle school championship – that evolved into the current Koshien summer tournament, former players and coaches, writing in the media, most famously Suishu Tobita, defined dead-ball era ball as THE way to play baseball.
And just as Japanese basebal was establishing its style, American baseball took off in a new direction thanks to two things.
The first was the incredible popularity of Babe Ruth, who demonstrated players could home runs often enough to outweigh up for the fly outs and strikeouts. The second was the decision in 1921 to keep clean balls in play and outlaw the spitter – except for pitchers who had been throwing it already.
Clean, easier-to-see baseballs were introduced following the death of superstar Ray Chapman in 1920. This enabled other hitters to emulate Ruth, and the popularity of the long ball allowed MLB to recover from the damage it suffered from the revelation that the 1919 World Series had been fixed.
Home runs changed MLB much to the dismay of the advocates of dead-ball era small-ball “Scientific Baseball.” Ty Cobb disparaged the idea that big swings had supplanted the teamwork, cunning, and execution needed in one-run offenses.
Small-ball remained a part America’s baseball culture in MLB into the 1990s, but the home run quickly became normalized in the U.S. media. This last part, is what has taken forever in Japan.
Japan’s coaches, too, no doubt caught on to the value of the home run, but the steps needed to elevate the power game here have been continually undermined by cultural restraints.
One of these is what I call Japanese politeness rule No. 1: Rules are beyond criticism. You don’t have to believe in the rule, or even follow it, as long as you pretend it can’t be helped.
Criticizing doctrine that your predecessors dutifully paid lip service to is considered disrespectful, so innovation tends to be slow. Weight training is considered antithetical to doctrine and potentially harmful, so many teams tread lightly on the subject.
Another is Japanese baseball’s historic amateur structure, where youngsters compete in knockout tournaments and every game is an elimination contest instead of in league play where losses are not fatal.
Coaches tend to focus exclusively on winning, and that injects an emphasis on learning to exploit opponents’ weaknesses rather than developing individual strengths.
People in the game have told me that this results in teaching every fast player to bat left-handed and to slap the ball to the left side of the infield, where novice fielders have trouble making the long throw to first.
This has developed a large cohort of professional left-handed players, who tend to be small, fast middle infielders and center fielders, who can bunt but rarely hit home runs or strike out.
How Japan’s left-handed hitting profile differs from MLB’s
And because playing for one run is rarely if ever criticized in Japan, it is the managerial path of least resistance, and thus is common even at the highest level.
Of course, the games in the 1980s and ’90s were probably more predictable than in any other time in Japanese baseball history, but that is a story for another day.
