On Sunday, I wrote about how my sudden shift from Japanese baseball insider to outsider taught me about Japan’s group dynamics and its media in “Japan’s Sound of Silence.” But being an insider comes with serious limitations that disappear when one is on the outside looking in.

After spending the past month dwelling on what I’d lost, a recent dinner with Robert Whiting, the author of “You Gotta Have Wa” and “The Meaning of Ichiro” as well as numerous other wonderful non-fiction works, reminded me that my new non-status comes with real opportunities.

When I lamented—or perhaps more accurately, whined about—my loss of easy access to players, Whiting said he wrote his three seminal books as a virtual outsider without any help from teams.

That inspired me. I was reminded me of how many insiders embraced my early work that was so hypercritical of Japanese baseball’s ways.

In the years before the Central and Pacific leagues were incorporated into the commissioners’ offices and each was still administrated by its own president, I lived in fear my fledgling “Jim Allen’s Guide to Japanese Baseball” would make me persona non grata in the Ginza office building the two leagues shared. Boy was I wrong.