As Japan’s players this past week began their quest to win the World Baseball Classic for the fourth time in six tries, many of them have been sporting T-shirts that read “March is our time.”
I ought to get one of those.
Because of the WBC, I got on the field in Japan this past week without any of the groveling Nippon Professional Baseball teams expected from me last year after I left my cushy day job at Kyodo News.
Since last year’s MLB openers at Tokyo Dome, MLB has tasked its longtime promotion partner here, the Yomiuri Shimbun Sports Business Department, to handle media credentialing. Because of that switch, field access, where reporters can randomly access players and coaches in unsupervised spaces, has been severely curtailed.
For the second straight year, Yomiuri let me in Tokyo Dome with “no field access.” Instead of actual access, I was offered the chance to purchase expensive pairs of front-row seats near the dugouts marketed as “reporting seats.”
I remain the only foreign reporter to ever vote in elections for the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame — at least until the Japan Times’ great Jason Coskrey gets his paperwork done. On the MLB side, I have never covered a regular-season MLB game except one pitched by Masahiro Tanaka in New York and the season openers in Japan or South Korea.
Despite that, 32 years of writing about Japanese baseball has earned me more credit with MLB than I ever got in Japan. I got on the field for last year’s Dodgers-Cubs openers, because MLB bent over backward to help me out, handing me and my photographer field access passes.
This time, the U.S.-based WBC staff came fully prepared with sheets of printed sticker seals that allowed them to upgrade the access of whoever they wanted and thus foil Yomiuri’s instinct to limit media access to the bare minimum.
Japanese baseball is my home, and I love it. But without MLB’s help, I would be outside my home, wondering why my key doesn’t fit the locks anymore.
