America, over the years, has given a lot of cultural significance to the sport of baseball. We place it alongside apple pie and fireworks in the grand list of material symbols of our country. Not only that: baseball, over the years, has often reflected our country’s struggles back at us. It’s confronted discrimination in Jackie Robinson, and labor disputes with Curt Flood. It’s helped heal us, as well. Mike Piazza’s post-9/11 home run brought more joy to New York than anything that followed during the War on Terror.
But baseball is also of waning interest to many Americans. The sport is long, with games usually clocking in over three hours long. It also doesn’t market itself very well. Some of the greatest of all time are playing right now, but has any non-baseball fan heard of Mike Trout, Jacob DeGrom, or Shohei Ohtani? Likely not. The sport isn’t going away anytime soon, but there’s no doubt baseball’s cultural significance is declining in America. Fortunately, that isn’t the only place the sport is cherished.
Baseball was introduced to Japan during the late 1800s by way of an English professor from Maine named Horace Wilson. It didn’t take long for the sport to become a national pastime; professional leagues have existed since 1936, and the country’s national high school baseball championship, Summer Koshien, began in 1915. Today, baseball is Japan’s most popular sport; an almost bizarre outcome considering the existence of nationally-developed sports like sumo and globally adored sports like soccer.
But the popularity of baseball in Japan would be diminished if it weren’t for the homegrown players who have starred overseas. The first Japanese player to play in the MLB was a pitcher, Masanori “Mashi” Murakami, who debuted in 1964. Murakami wasn’t an elite player, and was even forced to return to Japan after two years due to his restrictive contract, but his appearance in the bigs opened the floodgates for others to make America’s game their own.
The first bona-fide Japanese star was pitcher Hideo Nomo. In 1995, Nomo’s first year in Major League Baseball, he posted a league-leading 11.1 strikeouts per nine innings to go alongside a 2.54 ERA (ERA stands for earned run average, or the average number of runs allowed every nine innings. Anything under 4 is considered good. Under 3? Great.) His rookie season is his best known (“Nomo fever” was said to have hit LA), but Nomo went on to have an excellent career, eventually retiring in 2008 after 323 games, 1918 strikeouts, and 2 no-hitters.
A fan holds a “Japan National Team” baseball flag at the World Baseball Classic. Steve Rhodes. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
There is also the case of Ichiro Suzuki, who with his illustrious career and unique style of play became one of the most well-loved baseball players of the 21st century. Ichiro had exceptional speed, stellar defense, and a superhuman ability to take care of his body, but he was best known for what he did with the bat in his hands. Ichiro’s approach was simple: he would slap the ball around the field, and beat out singles and doubles. He rarely walked or hit for power, but was so talented at this contact-oriented approach that it didn’t matter. It was primordial baseball planted firmly into the twenty-first century, and it worked. In 2004, Ichiro broke the single-season hit record, a record that had stood for 84 years and seemed all but unbreakable with how the game had changed. The principles of hitting have strayed from Ichiro’s even further since then; it’s not unlikely that Ichiro’s grand total of 262 hits in 2004 will stand until the earth is swallowed by the sun.
There’s only one active player who has a chance of topping Ichiro in the Japanese pantheon of stars, and his case is being made this very season. He’s a 27-year-old, currently having not just the best-ever season by a Japanese player, but possibly the best-ever season by anyone.
To explain Shohei Ohtani, one must first note that over its 150-year history professional baseball has become more and more a sport of specialization. Teams today might feature hitters who only hit against left-handed pitching, and speedsters who rarely start but are used late in games as pinch runners.
Ohtani is the one man who breaks up modern baseball’s prime order. He is a pitcher who hits; it’s as simple as that, really. Baseball players have long been separated into hitters and pitchers. Hitters don’t pitch (not seriously, anyway), and pitchers don’t hit (at least, not well; perhaps the best example of baseball’s specialist tendencies is how pitchers haven’t cared about being able to hit for a hundred years, despite the fact that half of the league still requires them to on a regular basis). But Ohtani plays both roles.
That in itself is historic. No player has been both a MLB pitcher and a lineup regular since Babe Ruth, who served the role in 1919. But here’s the kicker—Ohtani is really, really good at both his positions. He has hit 44 home runs while pitching to a 9-2 recond and a 3.36 ERA so far this season. Those are elite statistics, better than Ruth’s 1919 numbers. The value of one man bringing a season of premier pitching and hitting to his team is hard to quantify. But the case can be made that Ohtani’s 2021 season is the greatest of all time, at least so far. There’s no doubt the man is a one-in-a-million player, a gift from the baseball heavens. By coming from Japan, he also represents a nation that may lead in taking the sport forward.
This year, Japan beat the United States to win the gold medal in Olympic baseball. The victory, though marred by the fact that the best players from both countries stayed home, represented another step up the baseball ladder for Japan. As baseball exits America’s zeitgeist, it continues to grow in the island nation. The NPB’s level of play is going up—it’s still behind the major leagues, but not by a massive amount. Even more important is fan interest. In 2019, the last full season of the NPB, the league’s total attendance numbers grew to second in the world across all professional sports leagues.
As more stars are born and made, Japan’s baseball legacy will only continue to grow. Who knows? Maybe in a century, Japan will have come so far that baseball fans will diminish the careers of MLB stars like Trout, DeGrom, and Ohtani. They can’t be that good, the fans will say. They were playing in the United States.
Finn Hartnett
Finn grew up in New York City and is now a first-year at the University of Chicago. In addition to writing for CATALYST, he serves as a reporter for the Chicago Maroon. He spends his free time watching soccer and petting his cat.