GREEN TEA FOR GATO

[Arroyos]

GREEN TEA FOR GATO


“Please trade me!”

When Little Gato burst into the Yuma front office, everyone working stopped and stared. The young man is hardly little—6’3” and nearly 250 pounds, almost 20 pounds over his weight at the start of the season. But that isn’t why they stared. The Yuma staff are accustomed to ballplayers putting on significant weight during the season. For one thing, it’s hot in Yuma, so the players chug energy drinks and soda, and the calories add up fast. But more importantly, some players—this is where Gato comes in—can’t seem to adjust to the Yuma philosophy that losing today is how you build a winner tomorrow. Ballplayers, and athletes in general, have been brainwashed since childhood into thinking all that counts is winning or finishing first or beating your previous time. They are addicted to short-term goals and long-term thinking befuddles them.

In Gato’s case, he not only has been pushed, prodded, challenged and rewarded for winning by every coach he’s worked with, but he has the added burden of coming from a very success-driven culture. Gato is Japanese, born in Okinawa. He didn’t come to the States until he was 23, traded to Florida in 2021, then to Yuma in 2029 as part of the trade that finally liberated the Dozers from long-time Dozer catcher Danny Burke’s monstrous salary.

No, the Yuma staff were staring because Gato fell to his knees and pleaded, vociferously, “Trade Gato! Trade me!” He was nearly in tears, dressed only in his pregame sweatpants, no jersey, and he was barefoot. He looked as unlike the neat and proper young Japanese Gato that the staff were accustomed to seeing as it is possible to imagine.

“Please trade! Please!”

Gato has never been happy in Yuma. Why would he be? For the first time in his career, he’s playing for a losing team during an era when the entire Bulldozer organization was in upheaval: first the departure of Burke, a real steadying influence in the clubhouse, then the firing of the manager and the GM, followed immediately by the sudden departure of the members of the local owners consortium, who absconded with millions of the team’s cash earmarked for investment in new talent.

Did Gato understand all this? Of course not. He struggles to understand English sometimes, and he’s never really grasped the selfish greed that motivates most ball club owners. In the Japan he longs to return to, individual owners, managers and players sacrifice the goals of the individual for the good of the team. Not in America, and certainly not in Yuma.

“Please,” he urged again and again, until the Acting GM Roberta Tipitina knelt down and comforted him.

“It’s okay, we’re doing our best, but it’s not going to happen right now. Why don’t you come sit over here and I’ll fix you a cup of tea.”

The 32 year old pitcher looked at Roberta as if she were his long lost Japanese mother. “Tea?” he said. Roberta nodded. “Japanese tea?”

Roberta called across the room to her assistant, “Do we have any Japanese tea for Mr. Gato?”

“We have some green tea,” Denise called back.

“Green tea,” Roberta said to Gato. “Will that do?”

Gato nodded, then smiled, then bowed his head slightly toward Roberta. She half bowed back, got flustered, stood and crossed the office to make tea for Gato. The young man just sat and stared at his knees. Tea was not going to improve his situation, not in the long run, he knew that, but for the moment it would suffice. He was reminded of what his mother used to say to him, “If you have no tea in you, you will never understand truth or beauty.”

Gato longed for some beauty. He had lost his sense of the beauty of the game. Losing day after day will do that to an athlete primed to win, especially one who’s been winning for as many years as Little Gato: Minor League Pitcher of the Year in 2017, Pitcher of the Month for June of 2018, #1 Prospect in the LRS-JPN for 2019, the same year he was selected to the Rising Sun All-Star Team. Eight years after that, in 2027, Gato still had his stuff when he was selected to the PEBA All-Star squad. He had never known defeat, until he joined the Bulldozers. Never known humiliation until he joined the Bulldozers. Never felt so useless, so unappreciated, so untalented as he has felt with the Bulldozers.

Is it any wonder he has come to hate Yuma?

Not to mention how little beauty a man from Japan can find in the barren Sonora Desert, or how little in the way of cultural events or rituals a small desert town like Yuma offers to the Japanese. Yuma’s former GM, Pam Postema, made a point of introducing Gato to a couple of the Japanese-American families residing in Yuma, but to Gato they seemed fully assimilated Americans with little or no contact with the Japan he missed so profoundly. And now, to add to his misery, GM Postema had been fired, the one person in the organization who tried to understand what he needed.

So today, before the game, Gato decided he had to speak for himself, for his needs and his wants, because no one else was going to do it. His agent was only concerned with extending Gato’s contract, the team translator expected Gato to have learned more English by now, and the new manager, Kunitaro Aoki—coincidentally Japanese—has spoken just two words to Gato all season long: “Play better!”

Aoki, it seemed to Gato, has severed all ties with Japan, refuses to speak Japanese, and discourages his Asian ball players from persisting with Asian cultural traditions. Aoki refuses to drink green tea—any tea, in fact—and insists on coffee as the only hot drink available in the clubhouse. He drinks his black. Black coffee makes Gato gag.

He sips the green tea Roberta has served him and feels better. Maybe he can survive the remaining week of the season. Maybe he can endure until his annual post-season trip home to Okinawa. Maybe.

But he cannot—he will not—endure another season in this hell hole desert town playing baseball with a bunch of losers. He will be traded.

After he has sipped his tea, he bows to Roberta once again. When she bows, hesitantly, in response, Gato states his demand once again, though in a soft and polite and very Japanese tone of voice.

“Please trade me, please.”

Roberta nods at him and says, “We will do our best, Mr. Gato, but no promises.”

Gato nods back to Roberta, rises and heads back to the clubhouse to prepare for the game. As Roberta watches him go, her assistant, Denise, sidles up to her and says, “We can’t do any more than we’ve been doing.”

Roberta nods yet again. “I know. No one wants him. I’m afraid we’re stuck with an unhappy Little Gato for another season.”

“And he’s stuck with us,” Denise says, and Roberta nods.