Japanese Baseball Fan Has Camera, and Memories

8/21/2014

Rui Ito throws out a runner at home; his father Yasuki Ito celebrates in the stands during playoff in Kanagawa Prefecture. Photo by Haruko Hasumi.

Haruko Hasumi loves baseball – Japanese baseball, American baseball. She flew from Tokyo to DFW in 1991 and witnessed the seventh and last no-hitter of Nolan Ryan’s career.

First time I met her, she was wearing her SWOBODA 4 Mets jersey outside the Tokyo Dome in 2000. She and the Swoboda family were in Queens for the final days of Shea Stadium in 2008. This year Hasumi began following another team – Nichidai-Fujisawa High School. She has been going to the same dentist, Yasuki Ito, for many years, and this spring his son Rui was a senior on the team.

“I heard that parents cheered for their children every game but they had no time taking photos,” she wrote in an e-mail. “That's why I thought of taking photos for them. At first I introduced myself to the parents, ‘Hi guys, I'm Dr. Ito's patient since 1990.’ That cracks them up.They call me ‘Ms. Patient.’”

Recently, Nichidai-Fujisawa was playing in the Kanagawa Prefecture playoff, the prelude to the famous Koshien national tournament. (Final Four and Super Bowl, wrapped into one.)

In the ninth inning, she caught Rui Ito throwing out a runner at home, and his father cheering in the stands.

But the team lost, which is clear from the mothers’ faces. The players bowed, everybody cheered – and the juniors had to carry the bags to the team bus.

Now Haruko will devote her energy to rooting for the Mets, from afar. And good luck with that.

The mothers, after the 10-8 loss to Atsugi. Photos by Haruko Hasumi.

Juniors carry the gear bags. Tanzawa Mountains in the background.

Alan Rubin link

8/21/2014 03:42:11 am

Another of your wonderful heartwarming human interest stories!

It seems that you have an inexhaustible pool of interesting friends and acquaintances, regardless of age.

8/24/2014 01:21:59 am

Ron Swoboda

8/26/2014 03:59:15 am

Hey George,
What a sweet tale of our friend Haruko.
Cheers,
Ron Swoboda

George Vecsey

8/26/2014 09:26:28 am

Ron, must be something about outfielders who make great plays.
Thanks for noticing...G

Peter Kennedy link

8/27/2014 01:48:17 am

George, thanks for a great story about Haruko Hasumi. Just getting to it now -- was on vac last week and mostly offline on the coast of Maine. I think our extended family was at that same game you were referring to in '08. So many happy-sad-hilarious Shea memories. The happiest ones, for this old guy, had to do with #4 and that most magic of seasons. I'll never forget, and I'll never stop believing. Rgds to all.

dev

8/28/2014 06:32:52 pm

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Qmobile 13 MP camera link

11/2/2014 01:37:15 am

Thanks i love the camera and memories you have shared

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Japanese Baseball Fan Has Camera, and Memories

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