Baseball Diary Vol 1, #10

August 10, 1982
Los Angeles

(To the left: Two of the BD staff at the Dodgers/Braves Baseball Ball, celebrating Los Angeles' entry into the 1982 pennant race.)

"...[S]ometimes the game can hold us too closely, when its unique events and their attendant hopes and anxieties so seize us and wear us down that we almost wish ourselves free of such exorbitant pleasures."
--Roger Angell

The article below was preceded by the following letter:

Dear Editor:
I am encouraged by the promising issue #8 of the Baseball Diary. A finer thematic of American experience could not possibly exist. Editorial superlatives allowed to co-mingle with experimental sentimentality, stubborn card collectors cheating on their Yoga teachers, and two psychics who can speak to the dead. (OK, so they're not actually dead, but being Orioles and White Sox almost qualifies).
Viola Weinberg
Sausalito, Ca

BASEBALL SATORI
by Viola Weinberg

(Note: Satori is the Japanese word for "sudden illumination or awakening", literally "kick in the eye".)

The houseboy, Senzo Yamabe, taught me how to run Viceroy Filter Tips from one corner of my mouth to the other by using my teeth and tongue. My father taught Yamabe how to chew and spit, and told us both glorious stories of Babe Ruth's tremendous capacity for home runs and junk food.

This is were it started, in the kitchen of the Tokyo house, the Washington Heights house. It was in the wake of Yankee (!) occupation, away from my mother's maternal vigilance. The big brown cabinet RCA radio continually mumbled on low. It was never turned off, as my father insisted we would waste more electricity turning the knob off and on. We got the news the hard way, picking out words like "co-ria" and "Hairy True-man" and "RBI".

Yamabe loved the Americans. Why not? We shared the joys of Kosher pickles. We took to chop sticks. there was baseball. In return, we took lessons in Japanese cursing, fed the coi, and taught Yamabe how to make Oregon snow angels during Tokyo's unlikely winter blizzards.

As I said, this is where it began. One day, Yamabe heard one too many Abner Doubleday stories. He grabbed Pop by the shoulders. "I want to have the baseball game!" Yamabe had some "natural characteristics" for the game. He was wildly enthusiastic. He could chew and spit a plug of Brown Mule in less than 60 seconds. And he was a consummate competitor. In addition, Yamabe was built like a saxophone reed, and could run like a whippet. He had an adenoidal problem and big bunny teeth that made him a fierce opponent.

In a moment of truth, my father confessed his sporting limitations. In actuality, he confided to Yamabe and me, he only knew about baseball stories. He offered to find a suitable coach if we swore that we would never reveal this fact. (I'm dead if this ever reaches him.)

Pop drove the black Chrysler up to the Officer's Gym and talked to Dick Grey, the big, lunky guy with the medicine ball and the precise flat top. Dick thought baseball was "a sissy deal", but said he'd give the "gook" a chance. My father whacked his hands together and hollered his customary "Now we're cookin' with gas, boys!" We replied the same.

The months passed. Yamabe got a mitt, a ball, a bat. Dick Grey "whipped his ass into shape". Yamabe wrote to his ancient mother, "I am being the baseball, sooner." Yamabe conquered the bunt. He became the baseball. He learned to pitch: the slow ball, the corkscrew, and the final tribute to my father, the spitball.

It was time. My father drove Yamabe over to Yokohama for the tryouts. Mother had captured me, and forced my attendance to "White Gloves and Party Shoes", the military version of debutante trining for scabby-kneed Air Force brats. Yamabe had a great deal of apprehension about the tryouts. He prayed to Buddha and spoke to his ancestors. "Hell, Yamabe," said my old man, "this is Japan. They don't know from Jack about this baseball stuff!" The black Chrysler backed out of the driveway as I was shepherded into the green Plymouth Town and Country Wagon.

Hours after I had peeled off the patent-leather pumps, the Chrysler rolled up the drive. Everyone in Washington Heights could see that Yamabe was in. My father was waving a bottle of B and B out the window. Evidently, both passenger and driver had imbibed. Yamabe was laying across the seat in a liquid version of "home from the hill." We were out one houseboy.

The Yokohama Yankees (!) were quite a team. "American" rules did not apply to their version of the game. Stealing was preferred. Spitballs were encouraged. Throwing garbage at the players was a common practice. If that didn't get their attention, the fans would charge the field and make their feelings known.

In a dirt field, in the peeling GI bleachers, I took my first seat at a "professional" baseball game. Yamabe was in the starting line-up. He never popped fly balls. Instead, he cracked bats in powerful line drives that whizzed through the mitts of the Tokyo Dodgers.

The fans were in a state of bliss that sweaty summer day. Well, perhaps in a state of frenzy. In post-war Japan, the riots always came, everyday at the Diet Building, and every Saturday at Eisenhower Field (a great insult to the resident general, MacArthur). There was no 7th inning stretch. There was no 7th inning. The umpire called it quits in the bottom of the 5th, when Senzo Yamabe stole home by running backwards and spitting on the third baseman.

Years later, I found a surrogate for Yamabe and the Yokohama Yankees. In the vast cistern of the Oakland Coliseum, in the liver spots on Charles Finley's shit smeared hands, came the only other team I've ever really been able to relate to. Billy Martin's addition to the A's would make Yamabe delirious in his golden years. I saw the amazing parallels at once: Henderson Heights, Washington Heights, the watery beer, the raw hot dogs, an eerie, but true circumstance.

Yamabe was no fool. He made some money in baseball, learning the game better as it developed in the Western Emulation of post-war Japan. Like many US counterparts, he bought into nightlife, and opened a club on the newly rebuilt Ginza Strip. He married Aku "Honey Bucket" Araki, a woman my father would only describe as "very modern" for Japan.

In the following years, Yamabe would send me photographs of Nobuyuki, his son. In the cap. In the spats. With Yamabe's bat. With the look.

Yamabe retired on Hokaido with Honey Bucket when Nobuyuki chose engineering school over a baseball education in the States. He says he's never been the same. Now he lives at the remote crossroads of the northernmost train tracks and a country road, where he has a simple country inn. My Uncle Art, who married my Japanese nursemaid, and kne Yamabe well, flies a jet for Pan Am. He visits Yamabe once a year, taking the bullet train through Tokyo, and the steamer up, up to Hokaido. Last year, as he stepped from the train, he was greeted by Yamabe and Honey Bucket, now grey-haired and slightly bent. "Slide!" yelled Yamabe, "God damn you, slide!"


LETTERS TO BASEBALL DIARY

Dear Editor:
Thank you for smearing my words, my face, and my personal effects all over the lurid pages of your tabloid. Thank you also for answering my question regarding the term "cootie hole" and costing me a half case of Olde English 800 (AKA the yellow peril) as well as making me appear the chucklehead before your entire circulation of 5. Yeah, thanks a lot! Still, I must grudgingly admit #9 was another superb issue of BD although I was surprised by Jagne Parks' omission of the fact that the main reason Bernice Gera quit baseball was because the manager of the team against whom she made her unfortunate call referred to her, rather loudly, as "that cootie hole"! Thus the term came into common usage to describe the umpires' locker room. Strange but true!
A Loyal Reader
Los Angeles


Baseball Diary Circulation: 9
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Baseball Diary Editor and Publisher: William Fuller