Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

On the dark side, tomorrow we take our first step into that gray new world known as post-Asashoryu sumo. Yokozuna Hakuho is the prohibitive favorite to take home the title in Osaka (has it really been a year since I was there in person for Day 8 last March, watching Asashoryu knock off Baruto in a fierce match?). Ozeki Kotooshu seems the only possible threat to Hakuho’s championship, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Kotooshu over the years, it’s that he shrinks like a banana souffle anytime he gets close to something good. Perhaps his recent marriage will change things, but my money’s on Hakuho (ho-hum: the subtle sound of a middle-aged man yawning).

Even darker, this is the week we learned the Minnesota Twins may have to live without relief ace, Joe Nathan. There are some viable replacement candidates already on the roster, including the marvelous Pat Neshek, back after an injury-related break of nearly two years, and Francisco Liriano has been tantalizingly good so far. But the loss of Nathan has Twins’ fans literally offering up parts of their own bodies in hopes of resuscitating Nathan’s pitching arm.

On the bright side, I’m taking Satoko to see Ray Davies in concert tonight at the Riviera. The last show we saw by him here in Chicago, a little more than a year ago, was transcendent, and reports from previous gigs on the current tour are quite positive. Here’s a little taste of what’s in store for me:

The New Year sumo tournament gets underway in Tokyo tomorrow. Yokozuna Hakuho is the hands down favorite to take home the big trophy. His closest rival, fellow yokozuna Asashoryu, has provided the usual quota of pre-tournament bizarre behavior, although he apparently looked pretty good at the public Yokozuna Deliberation Council exhibition a week or so ago (he also is said to have tired quickly, though). But on that day Hakuho won 27 of 29 matches, including both of his direct face-offs against Asashoryu.

Probably the biggest story going in to the basho is that, barring a miracle, this is almost certainly the last hurrah for the great Chiyotaikai. After two losing records in a row, he has lost his rank of ozeki. He can regain it with at least ten wins this time around, but that seems highly unlikely, and he’s promised to retire if he falls short. He’s always been a tsuppari-style fighter, battering his opponents with powerful arm thrusts, but in the last year or so his blows have lost their sting. According to reports from Japan, his training was going pretty well until about a week ago, when he injured his arm. It will also be interesting to see if ozeki Kotooshu or sekiwake Baruto are able to make their move up to the next level, but in both cases we’ve been waiting for that moment for some time now. I’m not holding my breath.

In the “think spring” category, the recent retirement of pitching great Randy Johnson has led to an interesting tribute over at The Hardball Times: a word cloud of the names of all the batters Johnson struck out over the years, with font size reflecting the number of times each batter has whiffed at Johnson’s pitches. And I leave with you some nice old video of Chiyotaikai in better days, knocking off Asashoryu in an exciting match to clinch the March 2003 tournament championship.

If you spend any length of time in Sendai, sooner or later you will hear the story: that there used to be a baseball stadium on Yagiyama where the city zoo now stands and that in the 1930s Babe Ruth hit a home run there. That all took place exactly 75 years ago this month, and baseball historian Robert Fitts has launched a terrific new blog allowing you to follow the travels of the major league all-star team that barnstormed across Japan in 1934. In fact, as of this morning’s entry, the team has just arrived in Sendai to thaw out after a frigid day game in Hakodate, Hokkaido.

Assuming all of my friends in Sendai over the years were telling the truth, tomorrow’s entry should include news of a home run belted by a certain member of the New York Yankees. And next week we’ll encounter one of the legendary moments of Japanese baseball history: 17-year-old Sawamura Eiji striking out Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmy Foxx consecutively.

Apologies for the dearth of postings here recently. I’ve been, uhm, busy. Looking back over the past several days now, on a lovely autumn Saturday morning, I see that it was a week in which evil flared up, but in which the power of music to tame wild demons again came to the rescue.

Evil: is there any other word for a World Series championship by the New York Yankees? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I’m supposed to be happy for Matsui Hideki being named series’ MVP title in what may be his last appearance with the team. That changes nothing: a Yankees’ championship is satanic, demonic, evil. If anyone doubted that the dark forces were at work, a mere twelve hours after New York knocked off the Phillies in the decisive game, their Asian counterparts on the nether side of the veil, the Tokyo Giants, hit two home runs in the bottom of the ninth inning to come back from a 2-1 deficit and defeat the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters in Game 5 of the Japan Series. These are the final days, I was sure. What more proof was required?

But music conquers all. It’s called catharsis, purification. It can handle even the Yankees. Thursday night, we went to our youngest’s eighth grade Fall Concert. She sang in the choir, which gave a lovely performance, including a terrific piece I’d not heard before, “Grumble Too Much” by Ruth Elaine Schram. The school band and school orchestra played as well. The highlight of the latter was Richard Meyer’s “Rosin Eating Zombies from Outer Space.” It’s a wonderful piece for a middle-school orchestra: watching the players grin in anticipation of what was coming next made my night. Here’s video of another middle-school ensemble playing the piece.

The next night we returned to the same venue (Mandel Hall) to witness a transcendent concert by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra with soprano Dawn Upshaw. All of the pieces performed had roots in folk musics from around the world. The evening opened with an eye-opening rendition of Gonzales Piazzola’s tango-inspired Fuga y Misterio. Upshaw then joined the ensemble for the world premiere of Alberto Iglesia In the Land of the Lemon Trees, a cycle of three songs. Upshaw was in marvelous voice for the piece, which featured striking interplay between guitar and orchestra. Iglesias came on stage at the conclusion to accept an enthusiastic ovation.

The second half of the evening was even better. Upshaw sang Osvaldo Golijov’s “Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra” like an angel, able to fill the darkness with light. The lullaby of the opening “Night of the Flying Horses,” with touches of klezmer music throughout, and Upshaw’s incredible voice on the closing piece, “How Slow the Wind,” left me with goosebumps. Then it was the orchestra’s turn to take over, with Steven Copes as the soloist for Prokofiev’s grand old (1935: the oldest work on the program) Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor. It’s one of my favorite works. The concerto dips its toes, then its foot, then its whole leg, into lively Russian folk music. Copes sawed away at his fiddle in the dramatic moments, and the orchestra played with a disciplined energy: astonishing.

And so once again light replaces darkness, music conquers noise, order tames chaos. Thanks to the ritual cleansing performed by the two concerts, no doubt, the Minnesota Twins have acquired a new shortstop, giving unexpected hope for 2010. Evil has been contained. To hell with the Yankees. Literally.

[UPDATE: John von Rhein, the Chicago Tribune's classical music critic, sings similar praises of last Friday's concert, calling Upshaw "a wonder at evoking moods and expressive nuances" and "absolutely compelling" and describing the Prokofiev as "dashing." Dashing, it certainly was. In the meanwhile, all hail Satan: in Japan, the Giants knocked off the Fighters in Game 6 of the Japan Series on Saturday night, delivering their 21st championship to the lord of darkness. All is vanity.]

And so, with yesterday’s disheartening loss to the Yankees, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome’s days as a ballpark have come to an end. Next season, the Twins move outdoors to their new home, Target Field. I didn’t get to pay a farewell visit this season to what’s been my baseball homepark for the past quarter century.

It’s a melancholic moment for me. I attended a game or two in the Dome’s first two seasons, 1982 and 1983, but it was in 1984 that I fell in love with that improbable ballpark. Those were the days of Puckett, Hrbek, Viola, Brunansky (and Faedo, Jimenez, Laudner….). I went to twenty or thirty games that year and had my heart broken when the team collapsed the last two weeks of the season, including a world historical 11-10 loss to the Cleveland Indians in a game that saw Minnesota with a 10-0 lead in the third inning.

I even tried to write a novel about those 1984 Twins. I tinkered away on it for years, and every once in a while I still go back to it and tinker some more. A few sections of it were published here and there over the years. In honor of the Metrodome’s last game, let me post one of those here. “Sister Carrie” originally appeared as a short story in Elysian Fields Quarterly back in 1998. I was a shy lad back then and so published it under a pen name, Kevin Michaels. As you’ll see, the story revolves around the quirks of the Metrodome–the crazy turf they used the first few years, the weird air pressure system that holds up the roof, etc. Oddly enough, Chicago plays a big role in the story as well. Enjoy:

When Steve pushed through the revolving doors and into the lobby of the Metrodome, he felt his ears pop. Carrie was already inside, standing in an open doorway across the concourse, her back to him. She was gazing down through the door at the green baseball field below, her hands gracefully folded together behind her. It was a sign that their argument had at last flickered out. Steve approached her cautiously. He looked over her shoulder at the players warming up down on the field below.

(Continue reading “Sister Carrie” here)

I got home last night a little after 7:00, just in time to tune in and watch the Twins pull ahead of the Yankees 3-1 in the top of the eighth inning. We held New York scoreless in the bottom of the frame, and we had Joe Nathan, our relief ace, coming in to pitch the ninth. Clearly, we were going to head back to the Metrodome with the divisional playoff series tied at one game apiece and with Minnesota enjoying home field advantage for the remaining three games. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything, it turns out. Nathan (who hasn’t been himself the last month or two) surrendered a two-run homer to A-Rod in the bottom of the ninth. Then, in extra innings, we loaded the bases with no outs in the top of the 11th but couldn’t score a single run (a blown foul-ball call by the umpires didn’t help), and then Mark Teixeira slammed a home run leading off the bottom of the 11th to close the deal for the Yankees. Ouch. That’s been the kind of season it’s been for a Minnesota Twins fan. Just when you think you’re down, suddenly you’re up–and as happened last night, unfortunately, vice versa.

To make matters worse, I woke up yesterday to the news that in Japan, my beloved Hanshin Tigers had just been knocked out of the Nippon Professional Baseball playoffs, as the Yakult Swallows edged past them to claim third place in the Central League and with it entry to the first round of the league playoffs. The sliver lining in that cloud is that the Rakuten Eagles from Sendai, my Pacific League favorites, have wrapped up second place and hence home-field advantage in the first round “Climax Series.”

Now all the Twins have to do is win three games in a row against the Yankees, who have crushed them all year long. Impossible. But given the logic of the 2009 season so far, this is right where things should start getting fun…. Twins Geek, one of the best bloggers following the team, summed up what it’s felt like to be a Twins fan lately: it’s like “Gulping Sports from a Firehouse,” he declared:

The taste was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. [...]

It’s affecting my relationships. I don’t have anything else to talk about with friends. My own kids are amused by me. My marriage would likely be tested if my wife wasn’t a huge Phillies fan. Being from Philly, she gets it. Most of that city is like this a half dozen times a year.

Thinking of Philly – that’s when I recognized the taste. Youth. This week tastes like youth. Balancing on a wave that is close to out of control. Not sleeping, combined with too much emotion. Periods of waiting punctuated by hours of excess. Connecting with strangers, hanging with friends, accepting opportunities, stretching oneself thin – this bittersweet taste is youth.

(Versea Bourdaghs, Yes, watercolor, 2007)

October 4, 2009. It’s an odd day for me, mixing together the melancholic, the aesthetic, and the euphoric. I arrived yesterday at sunset in Victoria, British Columbia, one of the loveliest cities on earth: the aesthetic. I had dinner with an old friend here last night, Indian food and good beer, all intersperesed with good conversation–even euphoric conversation. We talked about the Kinks, Imawano Kiyoshiro, Japanese Marxist philosophers, pragmatism, and barbecued ribs. He’s going to show me around town this afternoon: the harbor, the old British colonial buildings, the mountains. Tomorrow I’ll deliver a couple of public lectures at the University of Victoria.

My beloved Minnesota Twins play their last regularly scheduled game at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome this afternoon. Improbably, euphorically, they are tied with Detroit for first place in the American League Central going into the game. This comes after a season laced with disastrous failings and seemingly fatal setbacks. I wrote here a few weeks ago that hope had died for them, but they’ve taught me a lesson: hope never dies. I never did get back to the Metrodome this season, as I’d wanted. It’s an unaesthetic building, but one I will miss dearly. I’ve been to maybe seventy or eighty games there over the years, watched Puckett and Hrbek and Santana and Reardon and Morris and Mauer and Morneau and…. My euphoria contains a hint of melancholia.

The real melancholic source for the day comes from the calendar, though. One year ago today my mother died. Hard to believe. I know she wants me to remember the beauty and joy that were in her life. I’ll embroider my melancholia today with threads that are colored euphoric and aesthetic. Love you, Mom. (Go Twins….)

The first time it happened was shortly after we were married. Satoko and I had moved from Tokyo to Ithaca, New York, where I enrolled in the graduate program in Asian Literature. On her first visit to an American dentist, the doctor looked at Satoko’s teeth and ordered a whole range of procedures. That was fine, but then several years later, when we went back to Japan so I could conduct my dissertation research, she went to a Japanese dentist. That doctor took one look at her American dental work and ordered it all ripped out and replaced: it was substandard, he said, and used materials that were unsafe.

A year or two later we were back in the States and the same thing happened again. The American dentist pulled out all of the work done by his Japanese counterpart and replaced it. We realized, of course, that with dentistry, we needed to choose sides. We could go with American dentists, or we could go with Japanese dentists, but we couldn’t do both, unless we wanted to submit repeatedly to unnecessary and expensive dental work.

While we were in Japan that second time, we had a tuberculosis scare. Someone with whom we had indirect contact was suspected of having TB. It ultimately turned out to be a false alarm (the person in fact didn’t have the disease), but before we learned that, we followed Japanese public health protocol and received BCG vaccinations. In countries that have had widespread tuberculosis epidemics, BCG shots are used because they provide a certain degree of protection against TB. In countries without widespread TB, they don’t use BCG shots, because they are not 100% effective and because they make it hard to distinguish who has the disease. Recipients of the BCG shot will show a positive result when given a Mantoux test, even if they haven’t been exposed to TB.

All was well and fine until we returned to the U.S. and Walter enrolled in kindergarten. The Los Angeles public school system required a Mantoux test for his medical forms, and when he came back positive because of the BCG shot, they required that he take a year-long course of heavy duty antibiotics, even though his chest X-ray was clean and even after we explained about the BCG shot had received a couple of years earlier.

We again learned our lesson: you don’t want to get caught between conflicting public health systems. It seems now that the increasing number of Japanese pitchers coming to play professionally in the U.S. are learning the same hard lesson. According to this fascinating article at NPB Tracker, the different regimes for maintaining the health of a pitcher’s arm are increasingly coming into conflict.

In Japan, the idea is to build up strength. If a pitcher throws 200 pitches everyday during spring training, he will easily be able to handle 100 or more during each game. If he develops a sore arm mid-season, well, the answer is to work his way through it. At the annual Koshien high school tournament, for example, it’s not too uncommon to see a star pitcher throw 200 or even 300 pitches over the course of a couple days.

In the U.S., on the other hand, pitches are treated like a precious finite resource, to be hoarded up and doled out as sparingly as possible. 100 pitches a game is increasingly the standard limit, and any injury to the arm is treated with rest. Any manager who allows a young pitcher, in particular, to go much beyond a hundred pitches in a game can expect to be immediately subjected to charges of putting the team’s future at risk.

Japanese pitchers, accustomed to the more-is-better system of arm maintenance in Japan, come to the U.S. and find themselves confronted with a completely foreign system. Not surprisingly, given their training back home, they feel like they are not being allowed to take the proper steps to steel their pitching arms. This can lead to misunderstandings and clashes.

I think the truth is that one system works better for some players, the other system for others. What I’ve learned from personal experience, though, is that the worse possible situation is to try to satisfy the requirements of both systems. Chose one side and stick with it.

Through the end of July, the Minnesota Twins had been hanging in there. They’d kept their record right around .500, just a couple of games out of first place, and provided ample reason for hope. The team’s needs were relatively modest: a middle infielder, another solid reliever, perhaps a veteran starting pitcher. That last issue became more pressing recently when Kevin Slowey, our best starter, was injured and forced to undergo season-ending surgery. But the Twins had a rare core of three superstar players who right now are at the peak of their abilities–first baseman Justin Morneau, catcher Joe Mauer, and relief ace Joe Nathan. If the Twins could do something to close those three obvious gaps in the roster, they just might win their division this year.

Then again, those three needs were there at the beginning of the 2009 season, just as they were there at the end of last season. In other words, the team’s front office had managed to go nearly a year without addressing them. But through last weekend there was still reason for hope. The Twins’ management would see how close we were, right? They would find a way to fill those three needs.

The trading deadline arrived at 3:00 p.m. last Friday. By all accounts, the Twins’ front office tried, but in the end they were only able to close one deal: they brought in a veteran middle infielder, shortstop Orlando Cabrera, from the Oakland A’s, giving up a fairly good minor league prospect in return. As for pitching, while our competitors, the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox, managed to scratch up some excellent new arms, we came up with nothing–neither a starter nor a reliever.

On Friday evening, the Los Angeles Angels came into town and clobbered our pitchers, both starters and relievers, defeating us 11-5. On Saturday, they did it again, winning 11-6. Yesterday was worse, 13-4. There’s a simple rule of thumb in baseball: if you score four or more runs in a game, you’ll win more often than not. But it only works if you have at least average pitching. Which we do not. Just like at the end of last season, and at the beginning of this season.

So this was the weekend that hope died. Mark it on your calendars. It’s time for me to shop around for another team to root for, something to carry me through the remaining three months of this suddenly hopeless 2009 season. Any suggestions?

I spent this afternoon in Grant Park, taking in Booker T and the DBTs hour-long set at the Taste of Chicago. A soft rain fell throughout the show, literally dampening the crowd’s reaction, but it was still fun. 64-year-old Booker T. Jones looked quite dapper in a black suit and matching porkpie hat, and he spoke with his usual soft-voiced gracefulness. Of course, they played “Green Onions,” and Booker even sang on “Sittin’ on the Dock (Of the Bay).” Most of the show was devoted to songs from his new Potato Hole CD, including the title track, “Native New Yorker,” “Warped Sister,” and (the encore) his exhilarating instrumental take on “Hey Ya.”

No one can take the place of the MG’s (Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Al Jackson), but the DBTs (better known as the Drive-By Truckers) did a fine job supporting Booker. They shone especially brightly (despite the gray weather) on the old MG’s number that closed the regular set, “Time is Tight.” All in all, not a bad way to spend the 4th of July, even if Mother Nature wasn’t in a cooperative mood.