With red wristbands and a thick mane flowing out the back of his helmet, Nishioka was standing on second base in the eighth inning of a quarterfinal game against the United States in the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006.
Japan’s batter had just been hit by a pitch when time was called so the trainer could come out. Nishioka seized upon the lull to fulfill a dream. He stepped off the bag, walked over toward Derek Jeter and introduced himself.
Good read from Lefton and the Times about the Twins’ newest infielder, Japanese import Tsuyoshi Nishioka. Nishioka briefly used only one name — Pele-style — and had only “Tsuyoshi” on the team roster, which I imagine could not have gone over well with our hero.
Anyway, this article seems like as good a segue as I’m going to find to bring up something I’ve been thinking about in terms of Japanese baseball, and which I can’t find a whole lot about online.
Toward the end of the fall, as numbers started dwindling at our weekly pickup baseball game in Brooklyn, we found ourselves with only enough guys to field one team. We sought out competitors, and found a few rogue teams from other leagues that themselves weren’t yet ready to shelve their bats for the winter. We played against a team of Mexican dudes called the Aztecs from a Red Hook league, and then a couple of games against the Cubs from the New York City Metro Baseball League, a wood-bat league that plays in Central Park.
For our last game of the season, we played a group of Japanese guys that play in a Japanese league spanning the Tri-State area. Unlike the Cubs and the Aztecs, though, these guys used some different equipment than we did. Most notably: The nanshiki ball.
I can’t find much about the nanshiki ball online in English, but one of the guys told me it’s essentially the standard for every amateur-level league in Japan, Taiwan and Korea. It is slightly lighter than a regular baseball, and made of rubber. It has raised “seams,” but they’re the same color as the ball. The guy said it is used for safety, but also to save space — because the ball doesn’t travel as far, fields where it is used do not need to be as large as they would with a harder baseball.
Our pitchers were unwilling to use the nanshiki ball and theirs were unwilling to use our ball, so we agreed that they would use the nanshiki ball when they were in the field and we would use ours.
Because the ball compressed when it made contact with the bat, it was very difficult to drive. And since it was impossible to read the seams on pitches, it seemed to reward the slap hitters over the more powerful guys.
The opposing fielders, for their part, seemed way more eager than we were to use their bodies to knock the ball down, perhaps because the cost in pain is less (or perhaps because they were generally better fielders than us).
Anyway, I wonder if this in any affects the development of Asian players. I have no idea how long the nanshiki ball has been in use and at what levels exactly, so it could be that no current Major Leaguer has ever used the thing. But as younger Japanese players like Nishioka start switching leagues, it’s at least an interesting thing to consider, I think.
Tedquarters 