Kusatsu, Japan – I don’t often get a chance to visit my father these days especially at times when we can sit on the sofa, drink Sake and watch the PEBA All-Star Game on the TV. Since my mother died a few years back my father has been going a bit senile, he doesn’t understand why I am here. “Why you here?” He say “You should be there, on TV, showing them Yankees how good Japanese pitchers are, why you not there?” And for once I didn’t really have an answer.

Perhaps we ought to start at the beginning of my story though, I was born in 1988 in Kusatsu, a small city in the Shiga prefecture in Japan. My father was a baseball fan, a fanatical fan, and therefore I was a fanatical fan. Whenever he could afford it we would drive the 80-odd kilometres to Nishinomiya where the Hanshin Tigers played in the Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball league. It was my dream to play for the Tigers but my father said I should aim to play in the MLB in America, that was where all the real money was. I was a pitcher, sorry, am a pitcher. I always liked standing on the mound and watching the batter’s face as they missed another of my fast balls, and boy they missed a lot! At 15 I was able to get on an exchange program where I spent a year with a host family in Pontiac, Michigan which is twinned with Kusatsu. I wasn’t that keen to go, to leave all my friends and family behind but my father insisted. “You go, big Yankee scout see you and give you many dollars to play for Tigers! It would be the Detroit version though rather than my beloved Hanshin ones.

I soon settled in though and my host family were good enough to take me to nearby Detroit to see some real major league baseball on a few occasions. I played for the school and every moment I could in the local park and scouts and college recruiters did come to see me in ever increasing numbers. After my year was up in America I returned home to Japan and set about trying to get the Hanshin Tigers to notice this unusually tall gangly lad. It was America that beckoned though, a recruiter rang my parents, he had seen me in Pontiac and would like to offer me a scholarship to Michigan State University. My parents were thrilled and there was no way then I could disappoint them.

And so it was that I was back in Pontiac in 2006 preparing for my freshman year at Michigan State in 2007. I couldn’t understand though why American baseball was in such a state, with team after team in trouble it was looking bleak for MLB but they had come through worse. When I finally left my Pontiac friends to enter my freshman year the whole face of American baseball had changed. MLB had succumbed to sleaze, scandal and mismanagement leaving a new bright, fresh league The Planetary Extreme Baseball Alliance to spring up in it’s place. The crowds flocked back to baseball and I made a few trips to see the new PEBA team in Kalamazoo with my new college friends but we didn’t have much time as I was busy playing for the Michigan State Persians in the newly formed United Sates Collegiate Baseball Association which had agreed to provide players for the upstart PEBA. I had a goal! I could play in the PEBA and really make my parents proud.

My freshman year was not the outstanding success I had hoped for. I was a durable pitcher who ate up the innings and sat the batters down with unerring accuracy if I say so myself but in 11 starts I posted a 3-4 record abet with a respectable 2.73 ERA. I did also set the Persian’s single season record for K/BB with 10.13 which has only since been beaten by myself in 2010 and Jorge Morales last year. I also led with 10.5 K/9, 81 K’s and 2.4 WAR all of which still remain in the Top 10 of Persian records in those categories. My sophomore year was more disappointing as I went 4-5 in 13 starts while my ERA rose to 4.05. I was beginning to doubt myself and had stopped writing home so my parents wouldn’t feel my shame at not being good enough. I did however pick up my nickname that would stay with me for life due to the Hanshin Tigers lighter that I always carried with me on the mound, a leaving present from my father.

All of that changed in my third year, the penny had finally dropped …..

[TO BE CONTINUED]