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  • Racing to Find Home
  • Terumi Rafferty-Osaki (bio)

Baseball is fond memories of walking up the hill to the second floor of Hovey House (at Boston College) to meet my mentor, Professor Andrew Bunie, for our weekly discussions of the Pittsburgh Courier, ethnicity, and our shared love of the game. Since I was adopted from Japan at three years of age, race has always been prevalent in my life. I could not fathom why people didn’t see my nice Irish eyes. Sure, my dad is Japanese, but it was my Irish mother who raised me. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, people praised my articulation: “You speak English really ‘good’” and later asked, “What are you studying: Engineering, Math, or Pre-Med?” Over time these stereotypes as a perpetual foreigner and model minority (the good Asian, out-whiting the majority of Americans) frustrated me. Why was I so different? Am I an American? I loved hot dogs, apple pie, and of course, baseball.

I grew up on the national pastime, and it’s a generational affair. My mom loved the infinite possibilities and kept scorecards while my dad taught me the strategies of pitching. Throughout high school and most of college, I discussed baseball with teachers and professors who were all intensely passionate about the game. But it was just that, a game. Every time I proposed researching baseball with these same people, they discouraged me. Their initial reactions were either wincing in pain trying to smile, attempting to find a diplomatic way to say “no,” or taking the more direct approach by sneering at the thought, asking, “What could we learn from baseball?”

Though I was “shut out” from studying the sport, college heightened my interest in the relationship between race and identity. I was not the most dedicated student. I lacked focus and discipline, but there were several issues, like race, where my passion outweighed my immaturity. I thought I wanted to become the greatest civil rights lawyer and fight against injustice and discrimination. I thought the most direct route was through Political Science, at least that’s what I believed since a majority of the lawyers I met majored in the subject. But this changed in the spring semester of my sophomore year. I enrolled in a history class called “Race, Class, and Ethnicity” taught by Professor Bunie. During the middle of the semester, I was running late to class again—it was [End Page 119] the third block class I had in a row, and I tried to grab snacks beforehand. But this particular day, I came in during the middle of a conversation about the Dodgers.

I thought, “Wait a minute, is he talking about sports?”

“. . . the Los Angeles Dodgers again broke through stigmas . . . signing Fernando Valenzuela . . .”

Holy shit, he is using baseball!”

Bunie connected Valenzuela as a champion for pay equity for Mexican MLB players. In 1983, he won his arbitration hearing and was the first Mexican player granted $1 million. Two things happened after this lecture: I was never late to Dr. Bunie’s class again, and I found my mentor, thesis advisor, and lifelong friend.

I tried to keep in touch with Dr. Bunie throughout the summer of 2001, emailing him about my experience on the Lest We Forget Holocaust study tour in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. I also wanted to talk about baseball and the phenomenal start of “rookie” Ichiro Suzuki. He never responded to any of my e-mails! I thought I did something wrong. When I approached him in his office before school started up again, he said, “I don’t use e-mail, I like the telephone.” It was at this point I noticed he used his computer display screen to post pictures of his family and his keyboard was buried under mounds of paperwork and books.

We then sat down and had another long conversation, and it was here that Dr. Bunie approached me about serving as his research assistant. I jumped at this opportunity. By chance, I was working late one night on his project on the Boston Police department and For the Soul of the Game, a docudrama about the Negro Leagues...

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