Yokohama unexpectedly one the Japanese baseball championship this year. I followed them all year. I saw they had great potential. I thought deeply about why they were flawed in the way they were flawed and if they could ever overcome it. They were a third place team. Barely over 500. And the playoffs set up had them so disadvantaged but it would seem to need a miracle to get it done.
Here is an English language recap of the series and I think it’s accurate enough for anybody.
I got into the Baystars last year while following the story of Trevor Bauer. The MLB cast off ended up in Japan and had a pretty decent season for the Yokohama club. It was an emotional year for Bauer. This was his first attempt at playing baseball outside of MLB and obviously, everything he wanted had to do with getting back to the States. He gave somewhat of an insider’s view of the Yokohama baseball club. He told us that there were many rules about what he could and could not film and whether he could reproduce the games or not. There were also some issues about interactions with teammates. It was a difficult year for Bauer because he was on his absolute best behavior. He had no idea what was happening to him or if he could ever get out from under the rock They had put on him.
But then there was an issue right at the playoffs. Bauer has his brand and he has his people and his Arizona batting cage. He is a blogger with his own image being more important usually than the league games that he plays. Any baseball game he is in is pretty much a collection of people for him to pitch to. There isn’t really much else going on in my opinion. And when he brought his fat king of juco Eric Sim and his group of trailer trash to the games, they immediately set up shop and started creating content. Most of this was so unbelievably uncomfortable to look at, it made everybody facepalm at the same time. And then of course all of this pressure had Bauer off his game. He stepped wrong coming off the mound and pulled a groin muscle and was not available for the playoffs. Yokohama had two games in Hiroshima to try and get into the playoffs. Bauer was unavailable for either of them and both of them were lost and that was last year.
I think sometimes after divorces, there are people who like the in-laws they had during this time and keep these relationships going. It’s odd maybe but I became much more interested in The Yokohama baseball club then following Trevor Bauer. Bauer was tiring. Japanese baseball was tight.
The first problem I ran into was that they do not broadcast their games abroad. They have security that beats VPNs. They don’t want your money. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. They just don’t want you looking at their broadcasts so you cannot buy the package. There are also better packages for some teams than others and unfortunately, the Yokohama club is probably one of the worst covered in the league. Perhaps that’ll change next year. It doesn’t keep them from having a particularly strong following in the fan base but, they are cheap when it comes to sharing the images from their games.
To make up for this, there are YouTubers who do radio broadcasts and scoreboards of the Japanese games live. There were one or two that were very good and I eventually settled on one. I don’t speak Japanese very well at all but there are enough English language baseball words sewn into the fabric of Japanese baseball language that you kind of can start figuring things out. Once you know everyone’s name, you can hear the names in the broadcast and you know basically where the ball is. If you learn a couple of specific Japanese words that have to do with hits or fouls or good plays, you get the idea. Or you wait a few seconds in the scoreboard tells you something. It’s not watching baseball, but it is following the games.
Once in a while, somebody would start broadcasting a game on YouTube. Immediately 3 or 4,000 people would tune in for the opportunity to watch. Sometimes you got to see the whole game. Sometimes infuriatingly, a box would show up blocking a portion of the screen. You’re not allowed to watch this. It’s enough to give you a nervous disorder. It’s a completely different thing listening to our kids speak rapidly in Japanese and trying to figure out what’s going on on the field and another to just be able to watch the game.
The Stars have a talented team. 3/4 of the infield were all stars. Miyazaki at 3rd is a solid defenseman and a 300 hitter with enough pop to get the ball in the seats at least 10 or 12 times a year. I believe he was a batting champion one year. Maki at second is a potential league mvp. He hits for average, he hits for power, he’s fast, he steals bases, he plays an excellent second base and seems to be a very good team leader. And he’s in his early twenties and already a major superstar who only needs one name for people to know who he is. More at Short stop is a pro ball player. Late in the season his back kind of woke up a little bit. He is not a star but he is good enough to give the team defense. They had a pair of catchers also worthy of all-star note and five starting pitchers who could throw seven innings of goose eggs every time. They had an outfield who were reasonable until they started letting Kujiwara and his Canon arm into the games.
They were streaky. They could win 10 in a row. And then something would go wrong and they couldn’t score any runs or keep the teams from scoring in the late innings. They started blowing games daily in the late innings. Late in the season when every game was important they were still blowing games. It was a head shaker. How could a team with this much talent not be elite? And they weren’t. It was a fight for the last place in the playoffs. And truly, there was an epic collapse in Hiroshima. All of this could just as easily never have happened.
The setup for the climax series, this was the playoffs, was that the third place team would play the second place team best two of three. I think all three games would be played at the stadium of the second place team. There would be no traveling. Yokohama took the series to to nothing. Amazing. Outstanding. It was against the tigers. The tigers are a nemesis. The tigers are one of those teams that truly play baseball well. They are loud. They are aggressive. They run well and they are intimidating. Truly, Yokohama was intimidated. But not this time. Now they were on their way to Tokyo to face the Giants.
Here was the rules for the league championship series. It would be best for out of seven but the first place team was already awarded a win. They only had to win three games. What is more, all six potential games were to be played in Tokyo. The stars would not even get a home game to play.
Who were the Giants? They are the Yankees of Japanese baseball. They are the Boston Celtics of Japanese baseball. They are the team that has won all of the championships and never stops being in championship consideration. And this was their jubilee 90th year. The entire league shared the 90-year emblem as part of its history. The Giants were the darlings. The Giants were supposed to win. What happened? Really, what happened?
They won. They want it handily. They want it like there was nothing else to do but win it. They want it like it was theirs to lose and it wasn’t an uphill battle. They won the whole thing. They were champions of their league. And now there was nothing but the nippon series. The Japanese World series. Seven games against the softbank Hawks, The most dominant team in Japanese baseball this year.
The Hawks had the number one offense and the number one defense. They won their league by 20 games. No one else was even close to this year. They won 2/3 of their games and it wasn’t even close. They owned the year. This was absolutely their year.
The first two games were lost. Yokohama looked lost. By virtue of how they play the game every year, Yokohama was the home team for this and the first two games were at the stadium. Both lost.
There is a sense of fatality in being a baseball fan. The truth is that the game really is a 50/50 proposition even with a very good team. You end up losing a lot of games. Even the greatest hitters rarely achieve anything close to a 50% success rate in their at bats. That means even the greatest of the great lose more than they win. And then sometimes you just feel it like you’re dead. This is what it felt like in Yokohama. Even though they had managed to find a solid place in third and to get by their league challenges, the truth is that no one is really used to winning the last game. It had been 26 years since the last championship. 26 years of never winning the last game. 26 years of knowing that you’re not going to get it right.
It was Tsutsugoh Who started it. First inning, playing left field because there was a DH and he puts one into the right center field seats. One nothing Yokohama. The first lead of the series. The first time that the balance was in their favor. Literally, baseball is a game of subtle pressures that rarely give way. To get the first run in a game that was guaranteed to be a pitcher’s dual was amazing. They got two more runs that inning. And then something amazing happened or didn’t happen for a really long time. 26 consecutive score listenings by the pitching stuff. 26 consecutive scoreless innings and the bats came alive!
Every inning how to guarantee of at least to base runners. Yokohama became a juggernaut. They could hit anything thrown at them. They were running the bases. Tyler Austin, the superintense All-Star first baseman basically carried the team in the latter part of the ear. He was not getting any pitches to hit but it didn’t matter. The rest of the team picked up the slack and everybody was barreling up.
It was turning out to be one of those series where the home team loses every game. I seem to remember one of those in MLB back in the ’80s. It’s tough especially if you’re paying premium prices for the tickets. But Yokohama came home for games six and seven up three – two. They only needed to win one game.
Saturday’s game got rained out. Just no baseball today. They had to wait for Sunday. And what happened on Sunday? It was all Yokohama. There was no question. They were a complete ball club at exactly the right time. Everyone who appeared to be better turned out to be less.
As a person who’s been around for a while, I’m a little tired of these four media displays. I’m sure there was a time when they put a bunch of champagne or beer in the locker room of a winning team and the guys would pop the champagne and spray a bit. But this was part of the party where everyone was drinking because the game was over and they had won. It was time for a celebration. It’s like congregating at the mound. That’s not unusual for the team to go greet the pitcher. But to have everybody bounce up and down like that. Why did they adopt these rather silly affectations? Why do they cover the locker room in plastic exactly so people can play with champagne? Why do we need these artificial ceremonies of celebration? And really, how many? There was the big congregation immediately after the game and then there was some picture taken, and then there was where they put on blue T-shirts and got a trophy and got to jump up and down again. And then they got the champagne stuff to do. All of these were planned. What do we do next? We have to get excited before the cameras again.
But it’s okay. I really didn’t need to watch these things. I took a look at them. I’m happy. But when I think about the ball club, I like to imagine what it feels like to be one of the ball players on the team this year. If I visit these guys who I’ve been watching play a very clean and sincere game of baseball all year, if I feel I understand some sense of their humanity, I bet it feels really good. They won the whole thing. They won the last game. They are the greatest team in Japan right now and no one can argue with it. They won the championship but they beat the best teams to get there. Outstanding!
