On a cool afternoon and evening in Yokohama, the DeNA BayStars and SoftBank Hawks held worked out at Yokohama Stadium. I’d say these were the final pre-series workouts but those will come tomorrow before Game 1, since to paraphrase Thomas Edison, Japanese baseball is 10 percent inspiration during games, and 90 percent perspiration preparing to play them.
The Hawks, who play about 70 percent of their regular-season games in parks that can be sealed off from the elements, arrived in Yokohama earlier this week and have been working out in the great out of doors.
It was a chance to catch up with Tyler Austin and learn what kept him going when it seemed his career was turning into one injury-related dead end after another, and Carter Stewart Jr.. who talked about how a poor result this season gave him a fresh perspective.
The highlight, however, was a chance to take part in a discussion with Hawks chairman Sadaharu Oh, along with former Giants pitcher Hiromi Makihara, his TBS announcing partner and a couple of veteran journalists.
It was free flowing on a range of topics without any one focus, but my chances to engage with Oh-san, once frequent when he was a manager, have all but evaporated about nine years ago when his former communications officer, Hiroshi Kimura, was involuntarily retired by SoftBank when he turned 65.
One of the first things former Pacific League executive Hiroshi Yoshimura told me 30 years ago when I began to publish my research on Japanese baseball was this: “The job of the PR person in Japanese baseball is to keep people away.”
Oh’s former PR guy, Mr. Kimura, tried to end my first long scheduled interview with Oh during spring training in 2005 by pointing to his watch when my 15 minutes were up. Oh-san looked at him shook his head and said, “why don’t you go get us some coffee.” The interview went on for about 45 minutes until I ran out of things to ask. And after that it was easy, and Kimura-san was my buddy.
Since he left, however, every request for an interview has been denied, and I’ve had to ambush Oh when I had specific questions. But on Friday, it was a free for all, although I admit I failed to ask him a few things I’d been dying to ask him over the years.
Instead we talked about this year’s bad baseballs, prizes to Japan Series MVP winners — Makihara said he got a side of pork from sponsor Itoh Ham that was delivered in a case of cuts that he shared with teammates.
For a few years, Series MVPs received cars, but Oh-san said he never got one, and talk turned to the different cars they had owned. Oh’s first car was a Toyota Cedric, and it sounded as if his favorites were a Cadillac and some different Mercedes Benz’s although he said he doesn’t drive any more.
There was talk about pickoffs, salaries, and how wonderful Oh thought it would have been if during his playing days he could have just had an agent negotiate his contract.
On the subject of baseballs, Makihara revealed that he learned the reason for this year’s dead balls, but that it had been off the record and he was not allowed to say it on the air.
When I told him that livelier balls were in play sometime from the middle of the summer, he said, “How the hell do you know that?” To which I replied that all one had to do was look at the data and it was fairly obvious.
Damn that was fun.
