A Man, Leaning Against a Tree

(March 2020)

It was a beautiful day, mid-60s with a gentle breeze, but it could have been in the 20s with a gale force as far as I cared because after all this time, baseball had finally arrived.

I was, you see, sitting on a bleacher seat with DK and with Yuni Ichihara, and with about five thousand other fans to watch a spring training game between the Fushigi Yugi Celestial Warriors and the Lupin Cliff Hangers. We are seated along the third base line.

The League of the Rising Sun is split into two groups (which are similar to a division in US baseball). Both Fushigi Yugi and Lupin play in the Bright Blade Group, along with Naha and Edo. Where in the past there were six, now there are four. The Silver Sword Group also consists of four clubs: Shin Seiki, Niihama-shi, Neo-Tokyo, and Kawaguchi. At least, that’s what it will look like this year. Next year will see Fushigi Yugi head to the richer climes of Dayton, Ohio (good luck, there). Edo will head to Havana, and Kawaguchi will take a post along the Rio Grande river. What remains will group behind in what the PEGA has announced will be the Rising Sun division.

“Lupin won the Bright Blade last year,” Ichihara tells me as he eats the egg sandwich he has purchased. “First time in a decade.”

“And last time!” DK says. “This year will be the Battousia!” He is eating a hard pretzel made with seaweed.

Ichihara giggles. I don’t think I’ve heard him giggle since I’ve known him, but sitting at a ballpark and using the moment to forget about the completely weird ideas that are beginning to circulate the investigation may well be giggle-inducing. The two of them go off on a run of Japanese that I can’t follow, but I can remember well enough. They remind me of Don-o and me sitting in stands all around the country, poking fun at each other and soaking in the moment without even being aware of it.

I fill the space but sipping beer and watching the pitcher.

Lupin scores a run in the first with a pair of singles, and then a ringing double off the bat of Sadatake Sato.

“Watch that man,” Ichihara says. “Sato san. He is a player’s player.”

Sato is the Cliff Hanger centerfielder, a guy who the US scouts would say is a “five-tool guy.” He signed a five year extension with the club last season that will pay him $7 mill this year, and escalate–and that was before news of the merger happened. From the looks of him, that will wind up being a sweet deal. Switch hitters with power from both sides of the plate don’t grow on trees, and at 27 he’s just hitting his prime.

“Could steal 30 bases if they would let him run,” DK said.

The team goes strikeout, ground out, fly out, though, and Sato is stranded at second.

I watch the event as it happens, pitch by pitch. You can feel the seams of time in this game, you know? Not to be too melodramatic, or anything, but in this very game I can feel the old and the new pressing together, the traditional Japaneseness of the place and the fans, yet the worldliness of the future as it hangs over the it. No one will care about this particular game, in the end. It’s just spring training, after all. But still the game has meaning, and I hear the word resilient echo in my thoughts.

It is as if I’m watching that word as the game plays out and as I watch the chief inspector laugh with his baseball buddy.

Resilient.

I feel alone, yet filled up. The past moves to the present moves to the future.

Today, though, is all about Japan.

Where spring training in the US is pretty laid back, in Japan it’s about being crisp, both in adherence to ritual and in the process of getting your sharpness back. That goes for both the players and the fans, who tend to sing and chant. I heard Lupin’s fight song like it was on an auto-loop. And beer flows, too. The team’s provide beer sellers, who basically just strap a keg on their backs and wander around collecting money for filling up your cup. And where spring training facilities in the US are generally pretty high-class, one has to admit that Japanese facilities are … well … they’re better than high school parks, but not by a ton. This field, for example, is fine as it is, cement block dugouts and chain link fence all around. The “stands” are rickety things built to last maybe a few years and easily halfway through their lives.

The players line the field, taking their exercises together, and then breaking off into groups to practice fundamentals. Fundamentals are important in Japan, baseball teams are to play the way baseball teams are to play, and the idea of a pitcher not covering a base when they are supposed to will cause ripples through the crowd. I know this because Cliff Hanger hurler Yosuke Kono is doomed to misplay a ball in the fifth inning today, and will actually hesitate to bow to the fans in apology.

The Celestial Warriors send 26-year-old Nobuharu Okamura. He’s a solid pitcher from what I can tell, and someone says he’s got a 47-33 career record, so I suppose it shows. The Cliff Hangers counter with 24-year-old Akira Watanabe who has a heater up in the mid-90s and a splitter that drops off the table. Both look pretty solid in their few innings of work, with Okamura eventually taking home a win for his efforts.

At the seventh inning stretch, I stood up and went to find a restroom. One downside of having your beer topped off as you go is that it’s easy to lose track of yourself, and I admit that the world swayed a little as I got up.

I found what I needed, and as I was … well … as I was using it, I started thinking about the investigation and the logos on the walls of five apartments that didn’t belong anywhere. I thought about the theories that had been chased down–none of which made any real sense, but had to be looked at. Things like high school names, and names of fantasy teams, and whatnot. One kid in Canada was almost retained for having a fake team in a computer league named something similar to the Ozark Mountaincats.

But there wasn’t anything to those. And “MSB” was nowhere to be found.

What the hell was going on?

Those were going through my mind as I left the wash area and got something that was as close to a polish as I could find, and slathered it with something that was very mustardlike. Then I headed back to where DK and Yuni were sitting. I almost didn’t want to go back there. It felt like I was interrupting them, you know? They had their flow to a game, and it broke something when they had to lean back and tell me about it. But what was a guy to do, eh?

I had to climb a grassy hill to get to the stands, which I did, realizing again that I was both too tipsy for my own good, and too out of breath for my age.

I stopped when I crested the hill, I stopped, grabbed a bit of my “polish” and stared over the field.

What I saw stopped me in mid-chew.

Across the field, passed third base, and the mound, beyond second, and over behind the right field fence. Holy, freakin’ …

I squinted.

Could it be?

It was a man, leaning against a tree. Frumpy, with long hair–longer than before, anyway. He was wearing an old Hawaiian shirt that fluttered in the breeze.

Could it be? … no …

But the frame looked right, and he had that same beard he always had. And his dark sunglasses hid his eyes–like they always had. Suddenly I was smiling and grinning so hard I thought my teeth were gonna crack.

Don-o.

It was Don-o, taking in a freakin’ ballgame here in the middle of freakin’ Japan. Holy freakin’ crap.