Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime

Introduction: Around the Horn

Introduction Around the Horn A televised baseball game from Puerto Rico, Japan, or even Cuba looks much like the North American game. The players use the same gloves and bats, wear similar uniforms, and play by the same basic rules. But beneath the outward similarity there is usually a very different history, and a culture influencing the nuances of the sport. Even how players and their fans think about the game and what they value may not be the same. As Joseph Reaves notes about baseball in Asia, “It can look so similar and somehow feel so different.”1 The essays in this collection explore such differences in fourteen baseball-playing nations. The essays are diverse not only in the cultures they describe, but also in the perspectives adopted by their authors who range from anthropologists to historians, from journalists to English professors, with a few independent scholars as well. The essays are also diverse because I placed few restrictions on what they chose to write about. I suggested some topics, such as the origins of baseball in their country, its development , and how local versions of the game differ from that played in the United States, but otherwise the contributors were free to write about whatever aspects of the sport they thought American baseball fans (the intended audience) would find interesting . Some of the essays deal exclusively with the professional game abroad while some, especially where there is not a strong professional league, also look at the amateur level. I could have organized the essays in several ways. One way might have been by the level of baseball’s development, such as ฀ xiv ฀ tier one, two, and three countries, with tier one comprising nations like Japan and the Dominican Republic, where baseball is a major national sport and a well-established professional league exists; tier three would include countries where baseball is a minor sport with few followers and no professional league, such as Brazil. Ultimately, however, I felt it made more sense to group the essays by geography. Each region—Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific—share similarities in history and culture that have resulted in some parallels in the origins, development, and local versions of baseball found within them. The collection begins with Asia, with two essays on the Japanese game. Baseball is not a postwar, General MacArthur–inspired American import as some American baseball fans believe; it was introduced in by a young American teaching at a Tokyo university. Baseball became popular among schoolboys and eventually won recognition from the government for its educational and health benefits. In the first essay, “Japan: Changing of the Guard in High School Baseball,” Dan Gordon reveals the unique characteristics of Japanese high school baseball and the all-Japan national tournament at Kōshien. Far more than a mere sport, Japanese school ball is a philosophy and an educational tool. It is considered a spiritual discipline that teaches many of the values that define the Japanese bushido tradition of teamwork, dedication, discipline , and respect. Gordon also notes an unhealthy side to Japanese high school ball, including hazing, corporal punishment, and its sometimes excruciating and borderline abusive training methods—activities that would not be tolerated in an American high school. Gordon’s essay has personal significance for me in that his research on international baseball dates back to when he was a student at Union College, where I have taught for the past twenty-five years. I was on the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Committee, which screened student applicants for a generous grant that enables a lucky few to travel abroad and explore a topic of their choice for one year after graduation. Dan came to my office to talk about the fellowship, and out of that conversation emerged the idea of looking at local versions of baseball in four cultures. Dan wrote a compelling proposal, won the fellowship, and a few days after graduation embarked on an eighteen-month global baseball odyssey to Japan, Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. ฀Around the Horn xv Fifteen years later he returned to two of these countries for follow-up research and is the author of two essays in this volume. In “Japan: The Hanshin Tigers and Japanese Professional Baseball,” Yale University anthropologist William W. Kelly examines professional baseball and its place in Japanese society. American fans may be surprised to learn that Japan...