The Japanese are big big fans of baseball. The Hanshin Tigers, as previously reported, are the miracle team of this summer season, and the Tokyo kids just took the Little League World Series title down in Florida. As a basketball player who was raised on baseball in the Bronx, and because I’m interested in the psychology of sports (which is, among other things, the world’s best metaphor for the writing process) I wondered about that. They don’t have the heft for American football, but outside this country no one plays that anyway. Asians generally, except for people with Mongol blood, don’t have the height northern Europeans and west Africans have, for basketball, but all that means is they wouldn’t be able to compete internationally. There’s no reason not to play the game in schools and on the playground, for fun, and it has the advantage of allowing a lot of people to play with little equipment in a small space. But the Japanese don’t really go in for it, though the Chinese, who, Yao Ming not withstanding, are pretty much the same size, do. Soccer, known in the rest of the world as “football,” is enormously popular in Europe, Africa, and Central and South America, and growing in most of Asia, but again, the Japanese are lukewarm. Give them their basebaru. Why?

Now I have a theory. It seems to me the Japanese put a very high premium in their work lives and their arts on expertise and specialization. In both textiles and printmaking, for example, the art is divided into many small steps, and an artisan will take the product of one step (e.g., dyeing), perform his function (weaving) and pass the product on for the next step (pattern-cutting). The finished print or kimono is the product of many people, each working from a very deep understanding of a narrowly-defined task. Baseball, alone among modern team sports, fits this model exactly. There’s very little room in baseball to make it up as you go along. The other team sports depend on that, but in baseball, it’s all in the execution. Everyone on the field at any given moment has a well-defined function. The offense – the batter – waits for the defense – the pitcher – to execute as well as he can, and then tries to beat him by his own excellent execution. Then the defense – the fielders – try to beat the offense. Everyone knows what’s expected of him at every moment, and the question is, how expert are you at your job?