Shiba Taguchi, Ryukyu Sports News

Naha, Japan – February 3, 2022: Alex Bothwell plays first base for the Shisa Triple-A affiliate Shizuoka Anguirus. Born in New York City in 1999, Bothwell grew up in the aftermath of the death of big league baseball in the Big Apple. He played his youth baseball in local city leagues before heading off to college to play for the Pittsburgh Cathedrals. In his senior season at Pittsburgh he hit twenty-six home runs in fifty-eight games and had a slash line of .313/.465/.754. The Amsterdam Lions (then known as the Connecticut Nutmeggers) drafted Bothwell in the second round of the 2020 draft. That winter, the Lions traded Bothwell, along with the Amsterdam first, second, and fourth round draft picks to Okinawa for pitcher Grim Reaper Kokan. Last year Bothwell largely split time between the Shisa’s AA and AAA franchises, and he made a brief appearance at the major league level late in the season.

I caught up with Bothwell while he was in Naha for some organized off-season team activities, which the first baseman describes as Japanese etiquette and language lessons for the team’s growing list of gaijin players and prospects, what those players have begun to refer as ‘Shisa Charm School’. My first question for him was how he had gotten the name ‘Red Hook’, which seemed to be a new appelation.

“It’s funny because I mostly grew up in the East Village. My family moved to Brooklyn when I was in high school. That neighborhood we moved to is known as Red Hook. Nobody called me that until I started playing for the Anguirus. The skipper, Enrique Cortéz, started calling me that when I came up from Double-A. I guess I’m stuck with it, because [Shisa manager Kijuro] Yoshida started calling me that too, though not always in fun. I didn’t exactly turn heads in the PEBA last season when they brought me up,” Bothwell recalls. He tallied just four hits, all singles, in forty-one at-bats. “I remember Yoshida asking me ‘Red Hooka, how you hit twenty hoomuran in minors? Your swing,’ and he just shook his head, ‘terrible!’”

Bothwell laughs this off. “He was right. I’ve been working on shortening my stroke so that I don’t get blown away by big-league pitching again. They were killing me with inside fastballs and I just couldn’t turn on them. I’m excited to see the results of that this year.”

It helps to have a thick skin when playing in the PEBA, and Bothwell’s upbringing in New York seems to have prepared him well. I asked him about the experience of playing youth baseball in the Big Apple.

“People are usually surprised to hear it, but New York is probably the best place to play ball as a kid right now. The fields, equipment, coaches … everything’s first class. It was a blast.”

This wasn’t always the case. In 2008, when it was clear that New York’s big league professional teams weren’t coming back, and that the PEBA wasn’t going to be moving any teams in, the city was in a funk. There was, for a time, talk of establishing a rival league, and in stepped Bernard Kohl. Kohl, a well-known Wall Street corporate raider and founding member of the private equity firm Redmond Kohl Kirkpatrick & Co. (or RKK), decided to put his considerable personal fortune to use.

That July, New York Times sports writer Alexandra Poole wrote that Kohl, a man known more for mass layoffs at newly purchased companies than any sentimental streak, had what she called “his Ebeneezer Scrooge moment.” At a brief press conference, Bernard Kohl simultaneously announced his departure from RKK and the formation of not one, but several new baseball leagues. “Baseball was born here on the banks of the Hudson, and by God we are not going to let this great game die here. New York has lost professional franchises in the past, and I believe that one day big league baseball will return to Gotham, but that’s not what I came here to talk about this morning. Rather than morn the loss of our professional baseball clubs, let us make this promise to the youth of this great city, ‘that they will not have to live in a city without baseball’. To this end, I am announcing the formation of the New York City Youth Baseball Alliance that will organize and equip youth baseball leagues from Tee-ball on up to the Babe Ruth level, serving all of the youth of New York from the ages of four to eighteen.”

The NYCYBA (or YBA for short) then swung into action, purchasing land in the five boroughs of the city to greatly expand the number of fields available for youth baseball, including land that had once been occupied by major league stadiums. The YBA became a very fashionable cause in the city, with many businesses and wealthy individuals joining in and sponsoring teams. Between 2009 and 2014 participation in organized youth baseball trebled in the city.

Bothwell recalls the time his Babe Ruth team, the Pirates (sponsored by Jerry Seinfeld), won the city-wide championship series in 2015. “It was big time. Seven thousand fans came out to MCU Park, where the [Brooklyn] Cyclones used to play. The YBA bought the park a couple years before to hold the post-season tournaments. We were based in Brooklyn, so we kinda had home-field advantage.” Bothwell went three for four and drove in three runs in an 11-7 victory in the sixth game of the series, a win that clinched the NYCYBA championship for the Pirates. “It was a heck of a way to go out,” says Bothwell.

Two years ago the YBA purchased another parcel of land, this time in Manhattan, after the Polo Grounds Towers, a public housing project, was torn down. This past summer, baseball again was played in the shadow of Coogan’s Bluff on the six fields of the Polo Grounds Youth Baseball Complex.

Players used to come from all across the globe to play professional baseball in New York. Today, New York serves as a source of players for professional teams all across the globe. As of this writing, there are twenty-four New Yorkers on PEBA active rosters, and thanks to a burgeoning alliance of youth leagues, there are more, like Red Hook, on the way.

Does Bothwell think that professional baseball will return to his hometown? “There’s a hunger there, that’s for sure,” he says. “The PEBA is moving into bigger and bigger markets. Tokyo has a team, London has a team. There are a lot of people in New York asking ‘why not us?’”