Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime

5. Korea: Straw Sandals and Strong Arms

5 | Korea Straw Sandals and Strong Arms Hee Seop Choi was on his way to the U.S. Major Leagues and knew he had to work on a few things: hitting a curve ball, making the - - double play, and learning a new language. So he started practicing his Spanish. Choi realized if he was going to play for the Chicago Cubs, he had to learn English. But as many as half his teammates would be native Spanish speakers. He had better learn Spanish, too. By the time Choi became the first Korean to emerge as an everyday player with the Cubs during the season, he had long rid himself of the translator the team had hired for him. He was speaking enough halting English and fractured Spanish to endear himself to his teammates and make life in a strange land a lot more comfortable. By the time he hit his first home run with the Los Angeles Dodgers, his third big league team, in the spring of , his English was better than that of some Major League announcers. Playing in the Major Leagues long ago morphed from the exclusive dream of young men and boys across the United States into a burning ambition for ballplayers across the globe. In the morphing, of course, rosters changed. But so did the way players get on the roster. The great baseball writer Ring Lardner once telescoped into a single quote the staggering maw between wanting to be a Major League player and actually becoming one.“Be home real soon, Mom, they’re beginning to throw the curve,” he wrote in the book-turned-movie Alibi Ike. Killer curve balls still separate the men from the boys a cen- ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ tury after Lardner was reaching his prime. But as baseball becomes an increasingly global game in a new millennium, cultural complexities and sensitivities can be as difficult to deal with as anything that happens between the lines. For decades scores of U.S. Major Leaguers struggled—and all too often failed—to adjust to life in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kobe, and other exotic climes when they were offered lucrative salaries to play in Japan’s professional leagues. Probably the most embarrassing cultural bust was former New York Yankees first baseman Joe Pepitone, whose bodacious, self-indulgent ways on and off the field were repugnant to Japanese moral codes. Pepitone lasted just games, batting a miserable . with the Yakult Atoms in . He complained that no one spoke English, that McDonald’s hamburgers were too expensive, that his longdistance phone bill was too high, that he had to carry his own equipment bags, and that his manager asked him to play when he was hurt. Twice, team management gave Pepitone permission to fly back to the United States during the season, once to finalize a divorce and once to consult his personal physician about an injury. Both times he was supposed to be gone one week. Both times he stayed more than a month. Don Blassingame, a former Major Leaguer who was coaching in Japan at the time, said Pepitone came to him one night and said he was trying to decide what medical condition he could complain about the next day to keep himself out of the lineup. And there were other Pepitones. One of the most notable was slugger Frank Howard, who twice led the American League in home runs. Howard was thirty-seven and out of shape when he joined the Fukuoka Lions in . He went hitless in his two at bats on opening day, said he was hurt, flew home to the United States for surgery, and never played again. Howard walked away with $ , for his two trips to the plate in Japan. But for every Pepitone and every Howard there were others from the United States who worked mightily to fit into an alien culture. Clete Boyer, Wes Parker, Don Buford, Leron Lee, Randy Bass, and scores more excelled in Japan and were embraced by Japanese fans. Professional baseball was just beginning to become global when U.S. players first started going to Japan in significant numbers in the s, and clearly still was a long way shy of being a truly international game Straw Sandals and Strong Arms in the s when Pepitone and Howard were playing prima donna in the Orient. But decades later, with the globalization of the game a reality , players on all sides...