Football, they say, is a funny old game, but it has at least always made
more sense to me than that other ball game they like to play here. Unlike most
of my countrymen, I don’t actually have anything against baseball, I know what
an RBI is, and I have been known to spend the occasional and most enjoyable
evening at Koshien watching the Hanshin Tigers. I even understand that, despite
matches taking twice as long to complete as a game of football, the number of
variables involved in baseball means that even the top teams only win about 60%
of the time – and the worst teams still win about 40% – so they end up needing
to play 150 times each a season to decide who is the best. What I’ve never
quite got, however, is why after playing six times a week, every week, for the
best part of seven months, they then suddenly feel the need to discard their
league tables completely, and determine the actual champions with a handful of
‘post-season’ matches over the space of just 28 days.
The recent World Baseball Classic is, of course, a special case. A
commitment to the packed schedules of the North American, Japanese, and various
other national leagues means that one month in pre-season is all the global
competition is ever going to get, and a knockout format is therefore the only
viable option. It does, however, seem strange to me that the same countries end
up playing each other repeatedly in separate halves of the draw, and that while
everything is do-or-die at the very end, the earlier rounds are full of repechage
matches designed to give losing teams a second chance. The end result was that
five of the nine matches played by each of this year’s finalists, Japan and
South Korea, were against each other, and either side could still easily have
made it to the showpiece occasion at Dodger Stadium last week even if they had
lost all four of their previous meetings.
As it happened, it was two games all going into the final, and while
extra innings may just have underlined further how little there is to choose
between them, the eventual victory for Tatsunori Hara’s ‘Samurai Japan’ team
deserves to be recognised and praised just as any other world title would. Japanese
baseball is currently on a real high, with a succession of stars like Hideki
Matsui and Daisuke Matsuzaka gracing the ballparks Stateside, and it is easy to
forget that when Ichiro Suzuki led the batting averages in his debut season in
the Major Leagues back in 2001, he was the first Japanese-born position player
ever to even be there in the first place. Now that Japan has won both of the
fledgling WBC tournaments played so far, perhaps the United States could do
with shedding its ‘World Series’ mentality, and – just as England has had to
with the sports it gave the world – accept that it could probably learn a few
things from the way the ‘foreigners’ play their sport.
Still, it might not all be good news for Japan. Compounded by low birth
rates and a shrinking child population, there are fears that the rise of
football over the last 15 years could affect Japanese baseball to the point where
the current high will be remembered as the peak before the fall. High school
baseball at Koshien is a jewel in the Japanese calendar, but a drop in the
number of children playing threatens the quality of both the tournaments
themselves and the subsequent supply of players to the professional leagues. Perhaps,
then, this innovative concept of having a world tournament actually feature
teams from different countries should serve as inspiration for modernisation in
Japan as well. Wider visions and less prescriptiveness will help ensure that
the current momentum can be built on, rather than lost. With its stated aim of ‘creating sports clubs where you can enjoy
whatever sport you want, not only football’, perhaps the baseball authorities
need to swallow their pride and become a closer part of the J. League’s own 100
Year Vision.
