It Was All the Losing

(January 2020)

The note read: “He wanted to win.”

It was all I would ever get from Eijoro Sogo, Jr, the last owner of the Hyakujuu Shinkansen, and a man who now made it clear that he had no intention of actually talking to me. Through his intermediaries I had asked for an interview, and he had responded by asking what I wanted to talk about. I sent a note back saying I wanted to spend some time understanding why his father had hired the man the baseball world now knows as Mr. Slimeball, but who at the time was living some part of his life as merely “Charlie Cooper.”

Sogo san the senior, it seems had hired Cooper, then passed away and left the team to his son.

The note answered the “why” portion well enough.

To go all the way back to the old MLB for a frame of reference, Hyakujuu was the Chicago Cubs of the LRS, a team with its own independent television station, a huge bankroll, and an owner who was so dedicated to win he sold naming rights to the team in order to mine every resource he could. Yet, success did not come, and the elder Sogo was a proud man, a self-made man as it were. His life as a successful businessman was well-documented, and it was clear he was a perfectionist, and that he was geared for success. For him every defeat was a pill coated with bitter poison. The death certificate says it was a bad heart that did Shinji Sogo in, but ask any team insider and they’ll tell you the truth. It was all the losing that destroyed Shinji Sogo.

And it was all the losing that, the story goes, was why he was willing to take a chance on a brash young GM like “Charlie Cooper.”

It is one of the biggest “whys” in a string of “whys” that combined over the course of a season and a half to bring the League of the Rising Sun to its knees.

But still, the case was hard to understand.

Why?

There are too many whys.

When I first decided to be a real live, honest-to-god, Walter Cronkite-serious, Jon Stewart-idoling journalist, I did all the things you might think a kid like me would do. I went to night school, and I attended conferences. I read how-to books. I talked to people who knew their stuff, and I worked my royal tail off absorbing everything I could. At the end of that very long process, I decided that it all came down to the classic five Ws–Who, What, Why, Where, and When. And then that last question, the H: How?

But the whole culture of journalism seemed out of whack to me because of all the questions it was “why” that seemed to always be the kicker. Why? seems somehow to have become the Holy Grail of the investigative reporter. I mean, journalists just seem to have this mantra going. Ohhhmmm mani-patra … get into people’s heads. Ohhhmmmm mani-patra …. get into people’s heads. Ohhhmmmm mani-patra … Maybe it started with Barbara Walters (can she get them to cry?). I don’t know. But add up everything I learned and it balanced out to a rule of thumb that said if you understood a person, if you understood the “why” someone did something, then the rest was easy.

That’s what separates me from a real journalist, I guess.

Because I don’t see it that way at all.

Why is usually not that hard.

He wanted to win, for example.

That was my mistake with Sogo, the younger. I asked a question about why.

But, as I said, I’m different from other journalists. I like to think that if I can figure out how something happened, the rest of it all just kind of falls out–and usually just consists of money following the path of least resistance, or, in the rarer case, the fact that someone just wanted to win.

And, using my normal haphazard logic, I decided the best way to figure out how “Charlie Cooper” was able to do what “Charlie Cooper” did was to begin from where it all started.

My next play would be to tour the flats of “Charlie Cooper.”

Mr. Slimeball’s apartment is a small place, as most are in Tokyo. But it’s clean, or at least it’s orderly. Nothing’s been moved in the two months since the crap-ola hit the rotating device, so a layer of dust is starting to form over most everything. The room’s been picked-over a bazillion times earlier, of course. Forensics, investigative crews, television reporters, and the occasional law enforcement dignitary have all spent time here. The computer system was confiscated, and all the normal 8×10 digitals were stored. These were all reasons Yuni–Inspector Ichihara–kept telling me I didn’t need to actually come here and that I wouldn’t learn anything from it, but I still wanted to see it myself. It turned out he was testing me, though. One I had pressed the point far enough that he finally raised a hand and said, “Yes, I will authorize admission,” he told me he was impressed with my methods, and that now he was certain “beyond all doubt” that I was the right person for this job.

Yuni is like that, I’m finding.

He tests people. All the time. Always testing.

I think that’s why he’s risen to where he’s at. I also think that’s why he won’t rise much further. There is a level of authority, after all, that does not appreciate being tested.

Ichihara had a cop escort me to the place. He introduced her as Lieutenant Haruka Ine, She was a fit woman, trim and precise in her uniform. We did not speak much beyond her giving me directions.

The apartment was quiet as I walked through it, hands clasped behind my back. I thought maybe I should whistle or something.

For the next thirty minutes, I took things in.

I would like to say it worked just like it always does in the flicks. If that were the case, then the soundtrack would dally a bit as I picked through the impeccably hung suit coats in MSB’s closets, and maybe we would get a little guitar riff as I opened the liquor cabinet or a violin as I took in the memorabilia that covered an entire wall of his room. The man had a beer coaster for every occasion, and a poster for pretty much every team in existence and then some. Baseball, football, bass fishing, bowling, auto racing, male, female, basketball, volleyball, “footy” … teams from Trinidad to New York, teams from Perth to Jacksonville. He had a life-sized image of a guy in a red uniform with Thunderbirds written in script across his chest dunking on a pair of defenders. Yes, friends, you’ve been posterized. I remember the dude wore #13, because that’s my number.

In the good days, Mezzy said 13 was my favorite number because I liked to tempt fate. At the end, though, she said it was because I’m afraid of commitment. Actually, she didn’t phrase it quite that way, but I intend this to be a PG-ish rated thing, and to give her the benefit of a very direct quote at this point would pretty much ruin that.

Mezzy.

Yeah.

If you read my first book you know that’s the girl. If not, well, I guess you know it anyway now, eh?

Anyway, everything I had heard about “Charlie Cooper” said he pushed every boundary he could push, and that he lived his life on “Full Speed Ahead.” Nothing on this wall would refute that.
I went on.

Checked the kitchen nook, and the semi-view out the back that looked onto a marketplace where they were selling fish and some kind of root and T-shirts with silk-screened faces of dead rock stars.

But this wasn’t like a movie.

There was no soundtrack, and, unfortunately, nothing that reached out and grabbed me by the collar.

As I left, epiphanyless, I looked at the poster of #13.

“Thunderbirds,” I said, glancing at officer Haruka Ine. “Ever heard of ’em?”

She shook her head no.

“Me neither.”

That’s life, I suppose. Dunk on two guys all you want, but don’t expect the world to care all that much.