DECEMBER 13, 2019

I’m Casey Neal.

You might already know my story. Or, you might at least know the particulars that are visible to the standard net search, or run on the mind-numbing television churn. There’s more to it than that, though …

That’s how my first book started. You might a read it.

Or not.

I meet a lot a people who never heard of it. That’s all right, though. It’s a good story no matter how many people come to it, and it fits a place in my life that I can’t ever get back to. If there’s anything I’ve learned over these past six years it’s that time is like that. You only get one shot at the second you’re in, and if you don’t do anything good with that second, it’s gone forever.

But I suppose, it that’s true, it’s also just as fair to say that every second gets you a new chance, right? Every new second you step into is a new second you can use, a new shot at making a good decision and doing the right things. And if that’s true, then I guess you get as many fresh chances as you do seconds of life.

I’m thinking all this bulllcrap while I’m sitting on an airplane with a vodka on the rocks on the seat tray that is fully extended out in front of me.

A lot’s happened since I wrote See the PEBA. Got the girl, lost the girl, pretended it was all her fault, and that it didn’t hurt a lick, and that sometime she would be the one who was sorry I was gone. I wrote some books, and got paid for some books. Got a job, jumped ship on the job. Wrote some more books, and decided that, even if no one ever buys a single thing I write from this point forward, this thing with words is about all I’ll ever really understand. So I figure I better pay it some mind. That learning alone was probably worth the six years it took to get my sorry-assed be-hind to this point and time.

Yes, friends, time flies when you’re not paying any freaking attention.

And now I’m sittin on this 767 headed west to the Far East and thinking about stuff I haven’t thought about in years.

Like, I’m thinking about Miley Cyrus.

You remember, right? You remember that shortly after See the PEBA came out, she had this song out called “Wrecking Ball” that got everyone’s knickers up in wads because she didn’t wear no clothes for part of the video, and that was a big A’ed deal because back then everyone was still trying to shoehorn her into their own little image of Hannah Montana, but she had already gone past that herself and wasn’t having any part of it. So she did the song, and she did some dancing in ways that a lotta folks thought was too danged far over the top, and she said a crap-ton of crazy-weird things that, let’s face it, pretty much every kid in their late teens and early twenties says.

Who would of thought she would be where she is now, eh?

And I’m thinking about cars.

I’m remembering a long, beautiful rust-bucket of a convertible we named Annie, and that made her way across the country with just a touch of loving care. And I’m thinking about ballparks. I go to a lot of ballparks, you know? Part of the “job.” But today as the vodka sits on my tongue I’m remembering how we shivered in the Duluth “spring” and I’m remembering squirming in seats out west as I nursed both my beer and a sunburn that woulda peeled skin offa Scrooge McDuck. I’m thinking about outfield fences, and green grass, and popcorn, and DozerDogs.

And, yeah, I admit it.

I’m thinking about Don-o.

Still got his last letter to me. I keep it stashed away in the apartment.

Never saw him again after all that stuff that happened in the summer of 2013.

So, yeah, six seasons.

It’s long enough that the League of the Rising Sun went from drawing 20 million fans a year to nearly double that this past season. It’s long enough that the revenue stream of baseball in Japan grew to be able to compete with the bigs over in the US, and long enough to (allegedly) draw the attention of the seedier side of the underworld.

That’s what’s taking me out here, of course.

Like most every other baseball fan in the US, I kinda scanned the news pages when the Japanese scandal first broke. It was interesting, but didn’t seem that immediate, you know? It felt like it did when I hear news that an earthquake has devastated some distant shore. I was worried for folks, but it didn’t mean much to my daily life. But then things happened so damned fast, and next thing you know the PEBA itself announced the whole merger thing.

And it was like: Holy Freaking Shazaam!

Sure, the league has always had the Underground in London, but this was inter-freaking-national baseball on an entirely whole new level. Suddenly I needed to pay attention. Suddenly I needed to understand.

So I went back and I read the news reports.

I read about fraud, about identity theft, about organized crime and baseball, about strange things happening in the front offices of clubs all around the world (including some interesting tid-bits that suggest baseball in the US was not so clean of the scourge itself). I took in the struggles that authorities are facing in performing what is, essentially, an investigation hampered by international politics and the all-too-human ugliness that surrounds everything that such efforts entail. And amid this seemingly endless flow of legal wrangling and police procedure, I read about the games. I saw wonderful words thrown on the page. Phrases like: Wasei Junkesshou (the playoff series), Gurabukin (the Japanese Gold Gloves, and a phrase that roughly translates to “Grab the Gold”), and Saiyu-shu-senshu (the MVP). I read about fans in Niihama-shi who cried when their GM resigned, and created such a groundswell that he actually came back for a year. I learned about the Eva empire. I marvelled at the rise of the Lupin Cliff Hangers. And I felt somehow drawn to the Edo Battousai, a team whose logo carries a samurai–a logo that will now see its last stand in 2020.

What does it all mean, right?

Against the low-grade simmer of an investigation into the most corrupt workings in a sports league for years, the League of the Rising Sun plays its last season as an independent organization. It’s like a senior year in college, isn’t it? A last go-around before stepping into this big, bright world that would just as well chew you up as give you an inch. One last season. One last year. As they say in Rent, that’s five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes to spend both in the moment, and in thinking about where your future might go, or (assuming I’ve got my vodka-laced math about right) something over thirty-one and a half million seconds of fresh chances.

Every time I learned something about this place, about this thing called the League of the Rising Sun, and about the strange goings on that led to its near-demise and its rise from the ruins of it, I realized I wanted to know more. And more. And more.

That’s when I knew I needed to write about it.

That’s when I started setting up interviews.

That’s when I spent three days at the league’s winter meetings.

And that’s when I bought this ticket, and hopped onto this steel horse that is, as I’m writing these very words, riding westward and chasing the setting sun.