All fungoes, all the time

Believe it or not, the year-round extravaganza that is Japanese baseball is gearing up for another season.

It seems like only yesterday -- mere weeks after my arrival here -- that the Trey Hillman-managed Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters bested the Chunichi Dragons in the Japan Series.

What prompted this post? One of the sports channels offered by my cable provider has been showing Hanshin Tigers spring training round the clock all week. And by spring training I don't mean exhibition games -- actual training. Over the past several days I've seen catchers doing pop-up drills, pitchers going through their daily workouts, and hitters taking simultaneous live batting practice with a row of batting cages lined up at home plate. These aren't highlights or anything: just raw footage with commentary.

While I know that the Hanshin Tigers are a special case, as Tigers fans are perhaps the most fanatic in the world, this strikes me as a bit much.

Then again, I hope that I'll catch infield drills one day. Japanese teams run infield drills with greater intensity than I'm used to back in the US.

Matsuzaka is signed

So at the last minute, the Red Sox reached a deal with Seibu Lions pitcher Matsuzaka Daisuke (or rather, Scott Boras, his agent).

Total price tag, including the posting fee? $103.11 million.

There's no question that Matsuzaka is a phenomenal pitcher, but then you read an article such as this from the IHT, which includes the following insight from Marty Kuehnert, general manager of the Rakuten Golden Eagles:

"It's like a time bomb. When is it going to go off?" said Marty Kuehnert, an American-born resident of Japan and the first foreign general manager of a Japanese pro team, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. "Any Japanese pitcher, these guys included, has thrown too much. The Japanese mentality is that it will make them stronger. But if I was trying to sign these guys, I'd take a good look at them."

Foreign players in Japan often joke that Japanese are "all thrown out at age 30" because of rigorous training from the age of 12, Kuehnert said by phone from Sendai, Japan.

"They throw easily two to three times more pitches in their career than Americans," he said.

"They play 360 days out of the year. It's taken to an extreme that you don't see in America. So the level is very high, but they break down sooner."

So after all this, the Red Sox are taking a tremendous risk on a pitcher who could potentially have a shelf life well under the six years for which he has been signed.

It may well reap tremendous dividends for the Red Sox, but I wonder how patient the Fenway faithful will be if "Dice-K" starts slowly.

Bell on the Chinese way of sport

The always enjoyable Daniel Bell has an essay in Dissent called "The Politics of Sports: Watching the World Cup in Beijing." Before elaborating further, I just want to note as an aside how much I look forward to Bell's essays from Beijing. Bell is one of my intellectual heroes, and he has an extremely sharp eye for observing societies, which in recent years he has cast upon China and East Asia in general.

In any case, in this essay Bell dissects how the Chinese view international athletics. I have previously looked at how at Japanese attitudes towards international competitions, so I found this essay particularly useful for the sake of comparison. The Japanese too are greatly interested in how their national teams perform in international competitions (and how Japanese nationals perform in foreign professional leagues: witness the nightly recaps on how Japanese baseball players in the US and footballers in Europe perform). But at the same time, I haven't noticed a prevailing pattern in Japanese attitudes to competitions in which Japanese teams or players are not involved (although there is apparently some interest in American football, based on there being university football teams and broadcasts of NFL games).

But Bell finds something interesting about the teams Chinese fans support internationally:

Chinese fans support traditional soccer powers such as Germany, England, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy. It is difficult to overestimate the passion for such teams. In the 2002 World Cup, the CCTV hostess Sheng Bin wept openly at Argentina’s early exit. When England went down in defeat against Portugal in 2006, my son’s piano teacher’s husband was so depressed he could barely get out of bed. Partly, the preference for traditional soccer powers can be explained by the love of the game: Chinese fans support teams that have performed well in the past and are likely to generate exciting games in the future. But there may also be a special form of internationalist nationalism at work. The support for established teams may be an expression of a more general appreciation for nations with long and rich histories and cultures.

Bell suggests that the flip side of this attitude is an aversion to supporting underdogs in sports and in politics, which is hardly surprising given that the CCP has tried to cultivate the impression that it is the natural heir to five thousand years of Chinese civilization, and the rightful counterpart to other nations that are heirs to great civilizations. A good example of Beijing's about-face since Cultural Revolution is the creation of Confucius Institutes beginning in 2004. It seems that the more the CCP appears as the guardian of Chinese civilization, the more legitimacy it expects to enjoy at home and abroad.

Accordingly, expect the Beijing Olympics to be steeped in Chinese history, presenting China as a worthy world leader.

What were the Red Sox thinking?

Switching gears, the big news in sports this week is that the Boston Red Sox had the highest bid in the auction for the right to talk -- that's right, talk -- to Seibu Lions pitcher Matsuzaka Daisuke. They reportedly paid $51.1 million.

Mull that over for a minute.

$51.1 million. To talk.

...

Sorry Red Sox fans, but I'm with ESPN's Sean McAdam on this one: "...In submitting the winning post for Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Red Sox also forfeited the right to whine about [the Yankees'] economic might ever again."

I've never understood the whole "Yankees-as-evil-empire" trope as mouthed by Red Sox fans. After all, in 2004, the year that the "Idiots" succeeded in their assault on the, er, Death Star, the Red Sox payroll was second in Major League Baseball, around $50 million behind the Yankees. I'm afraid that hardly counts as virtuous. Now had the Red Sox beaten the Yankees with the Brewers' MLB-lowest payroll ($27.5 million), that would have been something to get excited about.

Arguably, the Red Sox only upped their payroll because the Yankees did first (time to break out the game theory). And that reasoning is certainly understandable. But at the same time, given that the Red Sox management decided to copy the Yankees, the Red Sox (and their fans) have indeed forfeited the right to complain about how the Yankees are outspending everyone. As McAdam writes:

No more suggestions, please, that the Yankees are some financial superpower capable of trampling the rest of baseball with their reckless and boundless spending. No more talk about the Red Sox being the plucky underdogs that somehow must make do with less.

The Sox's insistence that the Yanks were economic bullies always seemed a bit hollow, anyway. Sure, the Yankees have baseball's deepest pockets, as might be expected in a sport in which local revenues are critical to a team's financial footing.

Here, though, is what the Red Sox never acknowledged: Although the Yankees could indeed outspend them, the Red Sox, in turn, could outspend the other 28 teams in baseball.

Do the Gettys complain about the Rockefellers?

It was the Red Sox's misfortune that the one club with more resources just happened to be their longtime rival, with whom they're locked in an annual battle for divisional supremacy.

That's not some cruel inequity; that's merely geographic bad luck.

I secretly hope that the Red Sox will be unable to seal the deal with Matsuzaka, but then signing Matsuzaka might provide a greater opportunity for schadenfreude. To spend upwards of $100 million on a pitcher who has never pitched in the US, to spend that much on any pitcher -- given that pitching involves motions that the human body wasn't designed to perform -- seems absurd. Consider, moreover, that Japanese teams have historically run down their pitchers' arms early in their careers, meaning it's possible that the Red Sox could only get a couple good years out of Matsuzaka before he's finished.

In any case, if the Red Sox manage to sign Matsuzaka, they will be an elbow ligament tear away from wasting an awful lot of money. As a Cubs fan, I have seen two very promising young pitchers' careers go up in smoke in recent years. Don't think it can't happen to Matsuzaka.