American baseball fans – and, really, Americans in general – are, where alien athletes are concerned, recalcitrant gawkers. A broad spectrum of white players, from Bill Lee to Josh Hamilton, have been embraced by the baseball-watching public. Others, though, whether you’re Carl Crawford or Hanley Ramirez, are permanently prefixed. This is not to say we’re still wallowing in the moral dungeons from which we once leered at Elston Howard and Pumpsie Green. It is in fact perfectly natural – “we” can’t help but to notice those different from “us,” but given the fact that you need not pass a common sense exam before you’re given a license to open your mouth or put pen to paper, the general spectrum of our subsequent reactions is generally catalogued for all time to judge us by. Ryan Howard is different. So are Moises Alou and Pedro Martinez and B.J. Upton and a million like them that never made it. Regardless of the intent behind such observations, they may occasionally turn out rather noxious, and in fact often do.
This sort of thing was once confined to African-American (and to a lesser extent, Latino) ballplayers. Part of it may be latent guilt over the marginalization and persecution of generations of such individuals. Part of it is attributable to a kind of xenophobic dehumanization, whereby we magnify (and subsequently marvel at) their physical prowess, implicitly creating characters that can’t balance a checkbook or appreciate fine art but sure can swing the lumber. Both of these sorts of things continue today. Some legends are born of long-lost accomplishment and of the game’s never-ending desire to play itself out across the span of time. What modern fan wouldn’t crawl fifty miles to the ballpark to see Josh Gibson play?
Gibson, reported to be the only man to ever hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium, is such a legend, constructed half by ability and half by awe. His kind are harder and harder to produce, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. Mysticism is dying, and along with it are the number of 600-foot home runs that can be hit without someone being there to capture it (or the lack of it) on video camera. Some of that is undoubtedly good: it’s harder to keep fungible talent excluded from the pool, and if there’s some young black lefty hurling 98 somewhere, he’s at least got as good a chance as ever of getting paid. Still, people want legends, they crave guys like Toe Nash, the mysterious switch-hitting Bayou giant who was going to take the major by storm before a slew of arrests and legal problems ushered him out of a contract and into a jail cell. His raw talent was crafted in the cane fields of southern Louisiana, a place still foreign enough to most Americans to allow for the cultivation of a proper folk icon. Who is this guy, people can ask, what does he look like? In years past, Americans could glimpse such foreign freaks and beasts at circus sideshows. They possessed physical abilities the onlookers could only dream about, yet were kept behind metaphorical bars and fences, so as to not make them too human. So, too, goes the mighty slugger.
With the gradual disenfranchisement of the black community within major league baseball – and the oversaturation of the generally homogeneous Latino market – has come a novel new source of mystery and intrigue in baseball: the far East. Hideo Nomo took major league baseball by storm in 1995 when he bailed on his Japanese contract and latched on with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Nomo’s peculiar tornadic delivery confounded American hitters and provided a source of wonderment for American baseball fans – not to mention a motion for a generation of young baseball players to mimic (no late-nineties baseball fan worth his salt doesn’t know Nomo’s delivery by heart).
The group took a massive leap forward when Daisuke Matsuzaka’s arrival in the U.S. was accompanied by the legend of the “gyroball,” a new pitch supposedly invented by Japanese scientists. This was the perfect sort of thing to be born of the Japanese game: new pitches are the baseball equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster, so it was all too fitting that this one was created in a laboratory computer in Tokyo. There were grainy Youtube videos and rumors of an untranslated Japanese book on the mechanics of the pitch. After two full seasons, Matsuzaka has shown an impressive (if occasionally uncontrollable) arsenal of fastballs and breaking pitches, but has yet to produce anything new (his backup sliders and cutters are occasionally pegged as gyroballs; smartly, the right-hander isn’t exactly adamant about correcting this mis-perception). Still, his success in the majors – and in Japan, where he is practically a national hero – has fed the legend. Per the Western conception of the East, Americans don’t expect to find fearsome sluggers in the Land of the Rising Sun: Sadarahu Oh is seen as a novelty, and Ichiro, for all his abilities, is a speedy singles hitter in the eyes of many. Westerners expect mysterious, disciplined hurlers whose deliveries have been crafted half by Jujutsu masters and half by modern science.
Just as Elijah Dukes continues the legacy of monstrous, half-human sluggers, so too do players like Junichi Tazawa maintain the attentions of American baseball fans eager to leer at the next alien talent agglomerate. Tazawa, a slender 22 year old rightie (5′10″, 175), has made a name for himself with Nippon Oil of the corporate league. Still an amateur, he has bypassed Japanese professional baseball for the chance to play in the majors, and he appears set to get his wish, as the Red Sox will likely announce the signing of the pitcher some time next week. Tazawa throws a fastball (88-93) that he can run in on righties, a changeup/splitter (77-82), and an over the top curveball (74-77). His delivery leaves something to be desired: his legs are underutilized, and he finishes tall and stiff; American coaches may try to heavily tinker with his mechanics.
He has, by all accounts, the repertoire of a solid young American prospect, but is receiving a heavy amount of national media coverage. As the latest Japanese export, he has been afforded a certain level of mystique: will he be the next Matsuzaka? Will he be even better? What tricks does he have up his sleeve, what aura will hang about him, what secrets lay fallow in his mysterious eyes? He’ll be given a multi-million dollar bonus by the Red Sox to sign, and isn’t guaranteed to ever throw an inning in the majors – most scouts consider him as a 2010 callup at the earliest. Still, he will bravely cross the ocean and enter into a world he doesn’t know, facing competition he’s never faced. One can’t help but wonder whether or not he’ll grasp the sort of things expected of him, fairly of unfairly, by American fans eager to peer over the infield at the next Mister Miyagi of the mound.
