It is the world that is small.

(April 2020)

Diego Rúbio may well be the poster child for what baseball is on its way to becoming.

I probably hit on this thought because as I was coming to the ballpark today, I was thinking that I came to Japan partially because I wanted to put this whole expansion thing into context, I felt this need to understand what was happening to the game that I grew up with. Talking baseball, real baseball, with Yuni gave me a flavor of it. Going to the game gave me more.

The whole thing merger thing and scandal thing and our lack of a case, and the whole Charlie Cooper is Gone thing just felt willy-nilly and out of control to me. And worse, every new learning makes things more difficult to get.

Not easier.

As of today, everything I’ve seen and heard has done pretty much zilch to make that sense of topsy-tervy go away.

But I’m sitting at a ballpark where the Lupin Cliff Hangers will be hosting Edo, and I’m talking to Diego Rúbio about his life and the upcoming season. It’s a cool 60 degrees out here by the Ocean, but there is little wind today. He is sitting in the outfield grass, stretching. He’s 25 years old, and to be honest, he’s still wondering how he made it to Japan. Ten minutes from now he and the rest of the pitchers in camp will meet for their communal aerobic regimen, but right now he’s just warming up.

He was born in Juarez, Mexico, a city perhaps best known for it’s population of Uzi-toting drug lords. Somehow, his family made it to the US and he eventually found himself playing baseball for the Louisville Cardinals, striking out hitters with astounding regularity and making scouts pull muscles in their salivary glands.

Being left-handed and carrying around a fastball that tops out at over 100 MPH will do that for a guy.

The rest is legend, right?

First round choice of the Connecticut Nutmeggers, $2.1M (US) signing bonus, the ever elusive major league contract–a three year deal worth another two and a half mil. A year later, he’s the leagues #17 prospect, a can’t miss guy.

But Diego Rúbio knew something no one else did, and that was that his shoulder hurt in ways that it hadn’t hurt before, and it wasn’t a couple weeks later that he could no longer hide it. The Nutmeggers sat him down for the last four months of a season, but it didn’t help.

Waived by Connecticut, picked up by Canton.

He struggles, but that August he pitches a 4-hit shutout in the minor leagues. Even better, he feels no pain. Still, his overall numbers are not good.

Released by Canton.

“I thought that was it, you know?” Rúbio tells me as he twists his body around. “I was thinking about what to do? Maybe teach? I didn’t know. But I kept telling myself that at least my shoulder was finally back and healthy and that maybe the good Lord might show me a way.”

That way, it turned out, was a minor league contract offer from the Hyakujuu Shinkansen–which he signs November 3rd, 2019.

Two weeks later, the scandal breaks, and his new team was gone.

He just grins and shakes his head at the memory of it.

“My phone rang the day after the dust settled, though,” Rúbio said.

It was Ron Collins, GM of the Lupin Cliff Hangers, a young and upcoming team that is in desperate need of left-handed pitching. They wanted their doctors to check him over, and if they like what they see they plan to use a selection in the upcoming contraction draft on him if he was really healthy. This is the path he has taken to himself still in Japan and fighting for a position on the Cliff Hanger roster.

Baseball is a game of opportunity as much as anything, it’s a game of second chances and and a game where being in the right place at the right time is sometimes half the magic. This makes it like life, too, right?

“I don’t know, man,” Diego Rúbio responds when I ask him that. “I prepared before, too, you know? So it’s that and a lot more.”

“What more?” I asked.

He stands up and shakes out. In a moment he’s going to join the club for synchronized drills.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a game that makes it so easy to get down on yourself. I think you just have to find a way to keep yourself happy.”

I just nodded at the time, but as I write these notes, I see that this, too, serves to mold baseball into the metaphor for life that it is.

I ask him what he thinks of the uniform he’s wearing–Lupin’s outfits are notable even throughout Japan for their garish clashing of yellow on a pink and red background.

“I love them!”

He gives a big smile. The chime blows, and he waves goodbye as he trots to his session.

The “old” MLB helped make America a destination.

Young boys (and for all I know, young women) dreamed of playing in the big leagues, they imagined themselves in pinstripes or standing astride a mound with the legendary word “Dodgers” scripted in red across their chests. Yet the flow was always inward–young latinos and South Americans and Japanese would dream of hopping on a plane and coming the the States to make their fortunes in a game they loved.

It’s not the game that’s changing, though.

It’s the world.

This is what’s changing.

When you stand at a ballpark in Toyama prefecture, and the game is yet to start, and you can look out and see the blue edge of the sea of Japan, and when you stand there and feel the game coming here, feel the edge of anticipation on the auras of the fans that mill about eating their ballpark rice and the fried noodles with seaweed dip that are essentially the local equivalent of nachos, and when you realize that a young man from Mexico can ride a wave through a career that winds from Juarez to Louisville to Connecticut before landing in this land of Japanese opportunity with a team in Lupin that is riding it’s own crest of newfound optimism that is like a wish found in the middle of a wish … well … let’s just say it’s a powerful thing. It changes the way you think about things both big and small.

The game is big.

And it is the game that speaks to people everywhere in the same fashion. It’s a simple game, a game everyone can see themselves playing. Maybe something it shares with soccer–international football. I can’t see American football being successful across the globe. And I can’t see basketball doing it, either.

But Soccer has its world cup, and baseball has had it’s World Classic before this and is now readying to have a true World Championship.

When you’re standing here, seeing things in this light, it’s hard not to realize the facts of it all. And those facts are that yes, the game of baseball is bigger than you can even imagine.

It is the world that is small.

Diego Rúbio will pitch that day. He will throw two and a third innings, scoreless, striking out two hitters and walking two others. After the game his ERA stands at 2.84.

The season will start in four days.

There are 45 players left in camp, and the team will be deciding which 20 will be leaving the big-league club in the next day or two.

This too, is like life.