He Made Me Raise My Game

(March 2020)

Two days later I’m in Nogoya, which is the capital of the Aichi prefecture, and is (more important to my purposes) home of the Shin Seiki Evas.

To understand what the Shin Seiki Evas are to the League of the Rising Sun, one might do well to picture the old New York Yankees, and them imagine as if the Yankees were owned by Amazon. And then, to hear some fans tell it, imagine if Amazon had saved the old MLB by buying it before the 2007 season.

The team is huge. It’s $138M budget this season would make it the 10th most liquid team in the PEBA, yes. But before this season, the Shin Seiki Eva’s budget was twice that of any other LRS team–and even now there exists a gap of about $40M between it and the rest of the league. Today they are hosting Chief Inspector Ichihara’s Kawaguchi Transmitters in a spring game that will mean nothing, but which Shin Seiki will eventually win by a score of 3-0. Last season, the Evas made almost as much money in merchandising and playoff appearance fees ($17M US) as Kawaguchi drew from their base gate income ($23M).

I was here today to meet with Kevin Vail, the team’s general manager.

Vail has been as controversial of a figure as the Evas themselves, which I suppose is befitting him.

But facts are facts, and when the league was collapsing all around them, it’s no surprise that the LRS leadership banded together about Kevin Vail, and it’s no real surprise that he led them out of the murk and onto this path of merger that, to be fair, looks in retrospect to have been so brilliant. He came into the league early in its inception on the coattails of his brother, but has made Japanese baseball the lifeblood of the city. His off-season had been as busy as ever, moving several players and negotiating the contract to a new, mega-stadium that should arrive just in time for opening day 2021 when full PEBA play begins. All this in addition to brokering the deal that arguably saved the LRS.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been too shocked to hear that Kevin Vail looks at things differently than most.

For example:

“He made me raise my game,” Vail said when I asked him about his dealing with MSB. I expected a more pat answer, an answer that held a grudge, but instead I got this flavor of loss, almost bittersweet regret from him. “He was aggressive and creative, smart and engaging. I was excited to compete against him. I viewed his as a sort of protege.”

I made a point of not calling Charlie Cooper “Mr. Slimeball” from that point on, at least in this conversation.

We watched the game from his enclosed office building, eating lunch and then enjoying a slow desert. e checked his phone several times, and kept up on the events on the field and held this conversation all at the same time, never seeming to miss anything. At one point he stopped the discussion to wave an assistant over. “Tell him to get Sadahige out of there. The guy’s at almost 40 pitches. Too damned early for that.”

The problem it seems is that manager Yajirobei Takahashi is using bullpen ace Sadahige Kamida too much for his tastes.

“Do you have problems like that all the time?”

Vail smiled.

“Yaji is just yanking my chain.”

Takahashi has been with Shin Seiki for a long time, and was promoted to manager three seasons ago. He seems in no great danger of losing his job.

“Did Cooper ever say anything about where he was from? I’m looking for ways to find him. Anything you can remember might help.”

“Someplace in Pennsylvania. I know that much. But he was really young. Complained about his parents screwing him up and leaving town at some point. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if he was making that all up.”

“And given the recent past,” I added.

“Of course.”

“I thought he did a decent job by Seoul, really. When you look at it, that team might have been on the rise. But I should have known something was up with Kawaguchi and even Kure. Of course, the depth of the whole thing floored me when it came out. Especially the connection to the PEBA.”

“Charleston?”

He nodded. “That cost us a good GM.”

I knew he meant that as part of the negotiations between the PEBA and LRS, the PEBA had arranged to have Kuwanna general manager Mark Kierstead leave the LRS to take the Charleston club over.

“But it was also the moment I knew we needed to do something bigger to fix the boat.”

“So that’s when you pressed for the merger.”

“That’s when it was obvious it made sense.”

“Was Cooper that good? I mean, how did he avoid detection for so long, though?”

“Obviously he wasn’t good enough. We did eventually detect him, and really just at the nick of time. If his plans for the Winter Meetings had rolled through us, I doubt we could have survived. But it wasn’t because he was so good, It was because we were so trusting. We didn’t detect him because we never tried to detect him, we never considered the idea that he might be cheating at all. The LRS, and the PEBA for that matter, are such great league partly because there is so much trust amongst the GM’s that cheating wasn’t even on my radar. So you can argue that Charlie’s biggest success was was picking an environment where trust was high. We were vulnerable.”

“That’s gotta suck,” I said.

“Yeah, it does. But you move on, you know? I mean, other than that, it was basic petty cheating and not at all impressive. In the end, though, you have to realize that the LRS was at risk before Charlie came along. It’s important to point out that the LRS was fundamentally at risk before the scandal. We had too many teams under weak ownership. The only thing “Charlie” did was mask it over for a season while he did his thing. Our underlying weakness was another factor in what allowed him to do what he did.

“So, the scandal just you to deal with problems that were there all along”

“Yes.”

On the field, Shin Seiki reliever Takejiro Daikawa strikes out Kawaguchi’s Gregg Rodgers and the game is over.

Vail smiles. “Swinging K on a 1-2 count. Gotta love it.”

I end the conversation by asking him about the future.

He talks about growth, and about how the remaining teams are strong enough to compete on an international level. Given what I’ve seen out of two games, I’m not certain he’s right, but I’m also not certain he’s wrong. He talks about changes to the culture, how baseball came to be taken up so readily by the Japanese, who seem taken by its structure, precision, and ritualistic nature. “Can you imagine the Japanese playing American football?” he says as a throw-away, and he’s right that I cannot. He uses the word gaijin as a GM uses it, as a simple roster limitation and without the bitterness with which I’ve heard it used on the street. “I know people are worried about it,” he says. But change is coming everywhere, even Japan. And he believes it will all be for the best.

For the Eva’s of course, it should all work out.

They have the resources, and they have the fanbase that many in the PEBA would envy. For the rest, though?

Who can tell.

I leave the conversation that day feeling well-stuffed, and hopeful that Kevin Vail’s vision of the future is reasonably close to true.

When I get home, much later that night after a series of taxis and train switches, I settle into my seat and plug into some music, ready to veg out a bit, when my phone chimes.

I look to see who it is, and sit up.

It’s the Russians.