No Baseball, No Olympics, Skipping the Cherry Blossoms

3/30/2020

Mets and Cubs are greeted before game in Tokyo Dome, 20 years ago.

Oh, my goodness, it was 20 years ago.
Today, the NYT reprinted an article I wrote 20 years ago today, on the Mets-Cubs league game in Tokyo.
It was a pleasant surprise to be back in the paper and be reminded of a great trip and how much I love visiting Japan.
This, at a time when there is much sadness at postponing the Tokyo Olympics to next year.
ごめんなさい
Gomen'nasai (I am sorry)

The article jumped out of the Monday sports section – about Benny Agbayani’s grand-slam, pinch-hit homer in the 11th inning that defeated the Cubs.
/www.nytimes.com/2000/03/31/sports/baseball-against-the-odds-agbayani-gets-mets-home-even.html?searchResultPosition=1
It was the end of a grand assignment – two Mets exhibitions around Tokyo, plus two official games, showing me how much the Japanese fans know about baseball, and America.
It kicked off so many memories:

---Japanese fans booing good-heartedly when activist Mets manager Bobby Valentine (with his love and knowledge of Japan) had Sammy Sosa walked intentionally with first base open.
“Japanese fans never boo the manager for this,” a Japanese reporter told me. “But they know it is normal in American baseball.” How cool – like young couples on Friday date night, going to TGIFriday’s glittering outlets all over Tokyo, for ribs and fries.

---Standing outside the Tokyo Dome that week, watching fans congregate and spotting a woman wearing a Mets uniform with Swoboda 4 on the back. Haruko told me, in quite good English, that she was a Mets fan – had seen a Nolan Ryan no-hitter in the States (for the Angels) and in fact had stayed with Ron and Cecilia Swoboda in New Orleans.

---The great Ernie Banks, retired by then, sidling up to me around the batting cage and repeating his iconic phrase: “Let’s play two.”

---How I spotted Masanori Murakami, the first Japanese national to play in the American majors – I covered that game, too, in 1964 – and re-introduced him to the Mets’ roving pitching coach, Alvin Jackson, who was his opponent in that epic debut. They laughed and shook hands and chatted, so comfortable with each other, as old players are. Alvin passed last year; I was so honored to have shared that moment with him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/31/sports/sports-of-the-times-murakami-will-always-be-first.html?searchResultPosition=1

My other memories of that trip are less baseball-centric:
---Zonked on jet lag, taking my wife on the Tokyo subway, telling her how easy it would be, and emerging in sunny Ueno Park for a nice stress-free walk (and subsequent first meal in a neighborhood)
---Being driven from bustling Tokyo to a famous shrine by our former Long Island neighbors, Fumio and Akie, the nicest couple. Originally from Osaka, Fumio did not know every inch of Tokyo – does anybody? – but he relied on a novelty GPS built into his dashboard, and he negotiated all the tight little turns and ramps to get us on a freeway to a leafy shrine.
--- Salarymen – and women – stopping to offer us directions when we appeared baffled by the odd numbering systems.
--- After the baseball work, visiting historic Kyoto, where a woman addressed my wife in French; she had lived in France and loved to use that language. My wife, who speaks some French, sat on a bench and they chatted for an hour, about La Belle France.
---And finally, since it was 20 years ago this week, having people in Kyoto apologize to us because the cherry blossoms were late.

In this grim spring, I think of all the places we cannot go, but when I think of baseball…and Japan….and friends….and spring...and having been privileged to go places and write stories, the day seems better.

Haruko sent me this photo the other day, as we lamented the disruption of baseball. She mentioned the "transient beauty" of cherry blossoms, and quickly added that she and her brother did not make the pilgrimage this year.

bruce

3/30/2020 11:40:26 am

george,

thanks for that.

i've retained enough kana to understand gomen nasai.

i'd forgotten about that visit by the major leagues..

valentine, if memory serves, had two runs as manager.

got screwed the first time by the higher ups who didn't want a foreigner running things--again as memory serves. he was very popular with fans and players.

unlike many he integrated himself into the country. used to see videos of him riding his bike....

as for your osakan friends....i didn't know until i moved to japan (sakai, osaka, nara) that there was a tokyo/osaka thing.

osakans, to tokyojin's ears--having a nasty accent and a rep for being very direct compared to theirs.

people from osaka considering tokyo's accent as rather feminine.

and, as you know, at this moment i'm supposed to be in japan--nara, its first capital to be exact--for my first stay in four years.

cancelled a month ago on because of the virus.

i'd planned it to coincide with sakura season. i loved wandering around ukimido in nara--japan's first capital--with my late wife mieko.

another excellent well written piece.

bruce

George Vecsey

3/30/2020 12:58:21 pm

Bruce, thanks, you often talk about Nara....we thought the second capitol was enchanting, too -- real geishas strolling along the river, the gardens everywhere. So much we never got to do.
Domo......GV

bruce

3/30/2020 01:16:26 pm

george,

mieko and i were literally on the border of kizugawa which is part of kyoto prefecture.

one side of the street was nara and other kyoto. the city was about 30 minutes by train.

kyoto is grander but i enjoyed nara more because the scale was smaller and more walkable. both have a lot of unesco sites. japanese are big on unesco.

mieko and i used to go to kyoto occasionally. she wanted to go for her 60th bday to specifically see maiko--apprentice geisha. many older women would rent geisha gear and walk around.

we both loved Kiyomizu-dera Temple. used to go just to hang it and the neighbourhood.

have you heard the story about stimson and kyoto during ww2?

bruce

Randolph

3/30/2020 05:13:46 pm

George,
What a pleasant surprise I had this morning down in old Virginia. I am lucky enough to be able to have the New York Times delivered to my home. (Yes I still believe in newspapers, made of real paper,that you can hold in your hand and read.)

“Hey it’s an article by George.”
It brightened my day. It made me laugh. It gave me hope for this “Big old goofy world.”

RF

PS The writer of the song, “Big old goofy world” is in critical condition, with Coronavirus, in a hospital in Nashville. Say a prayer or send out some positive thoughts for John Prine.

George Vecsey

3/30/2020 09:12:50 pm

Randy, thanks for noticing. I was proud somebody noticed.
It was a great assignment -- mixing sports with life in other societies.
I heard that John Prine is in bad shape. He did what for me is the definitive version of the song that normally -- not this year -- gets me, as a one-time resident of Kentucky, to stand up and sing on the first Saturday of May: "My Old Kentucky Home." Nice wistful banjo, not overly sentimental, just gritty reality, and of course the offensive lyrics have long since been scrubbed. Prine also wrote "Paradise," about the real town in western Kentucky that has been demolished by strip mining. My best to him and his....GV

Randolph

3/30/2020 09:21:51 pm

George,
It is so funny. Just like from childhood I always read the sports page first. Actually as a youngster the sports page was all I read. Yet these many years later I always separate the New York Times and of course read the sports page first.

Today when I saw, George Vecsey, I broke out into a big laugh and my wife said what is so funny. I told her that I was reading an article that was 20 years old and it brought me great joy. Of course she thought I was crazy, But we have been married so long that I had no desire to even explain.

It was a good article 20 years ago, but a better article now.
RF

Give my regards to Ms. Whipple.

George Vecsey

3/30/2020 09:30:22 pm

Randy, thanks, she read it and praised it, too. She was on that trip. I had been to Japan two years earlier for the winter Olympics and had spent two days in Tokyo on the way back. So I was confident she would love it. She spent a whole day at the Kabuki theatre -- historic and funy, like Wrigley or Fenway, I went for one act and loved it. She found an Italian restaurant and we ate there a time or two. And we were reunited with our old neighbors; the lady has a sweet face, like the mask of a Kind Lady in kabuki or Noh drama, They were pals on our block. So she has memories. We have been very lucky.
BTW, the news is full of Falwell the Lesser who ree-opened the school his dad built. People in Lynchburg area will get sick because of his Trumpian stupidity. His dad was craftier...had a sense of humor., I liked him. This guy is just cold, and dumb. Best to you two. GV

Michael

3/31/2020 10:04:31 am

Nice article George... Your domestic and international reporting are such fond memories. And was the "twenty years ago today" line a reference to Sgt. Pepper's?

George

3/31/2020 12:13:40 pm

Michael; nice. But no, I wasn’t consciously echoing the lads, although that intro is “in my ears and in my eyes,”’so to speak. GV

bruce

3/31/2020 12:20:02 pm

george,

be careful.

there might be a few(®).you're treading on.

imagine the people....

bruce

bruce

3/31/2020 12:28:36 pm

george,

my mistake...imagine ALL the people (®); but leaving out 'all' might save you a fortune.

you are, after all, in the #1 country in the world for litigation and numbers of lawyers.

be careful out there.

as an aside, 'mad men' paid $250,000 for john lennon's tomorrow never knows.

bruce

Ed Martin

3/31/2020 06:10:08 pm

What a pleasure. I get the NYT digital and have not gotten to sports, yet, but hope it made that edition.

Your story touched me, partly because a look away from the Virus and the “Curse” is so welcome. Friends on Facebook are sharing landscape, sea and other non-selfie pictures for that effect of
Good feeling.

Also Peggy and I love Japan in our two short visits, including Tokyo to Osakepa and return Bullet Train, and Yokohama baseball stadium, I though of Saddaharo Oh, but he probably pre-dated the current stadium.

Gardens, parks, Buddha’s, Shrines, nice people helping strangers, Arigato.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

No Baseball, No Olympics, Skipping the Cherry Blossoms

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