Everything They Had Page 9

  Smith was not in a good mood. His knee was hurting and he could not run full out. In addition, he was completely frustrated by his failure to see any fast balls. On this day, against the Hanshin Tigers, he had not seen a single one, and he had barely seen anything in the strike zone. Desperate to show these fans what he was capable of, he had swung hard anyway, raising two immense pop-ups and grounding out twice. He had also heard the Tigers’ manager yell to his pitcher to walk Smith-san and to give him nothing to hit.

  “I’m a fish out of water here,” Smith told a friend. “They pay me all this money to do a certain thing and it’s supposed to be something they love, and then they won’t let me do it. I just don’t know if I belong here.”

  He was facing this season with increasing melancholia. For although he had known that Japan would be different, he had not known, like many a gaijin (or foreigner) before him, that it would be this different, nor had he known that he might never again see a real fast ball.

  The confrontation of baseball was what Smith missed most, a power hitter against a power pitcher. For him, that was the real excitement of the game, a challenge of the most personal kind. But he had come to believe that the Japanese game, like the society itself, was designed to avoid challenge and confrontation. If there were a way of avoiding a confrontation, the Japanese would find it. In his case, it meant throwing him junk balls out of the strike zone. Dinky shit, he called it. If he walked, so be it. No one threw him fast balls; no one threw him anything out over the plate. They walked him consistently. In the first weeks of the season, he walked three times with the bases loaded, twice on four straight pitches. All of that took a great deal of pleasure out of his work, for Smith, a proud, outspoken player, found that he could not do what he was supposed to do. It was as if they were paying him a great deal of money but in the process stealing something even more precious from him.

  Often, now, he came to daydream about the past and, of all things, about confrontations with Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton and Seaver, power pitchers all, men whom other hitters often feared to face and men who had given Smith as good as he had given them. He even recalled now a game in which Ryan, by then with Houston, had disposed of him with three pitches, each seeming to come in a little faster and each rising a little higher in the strike zone. The Dead Red, players called it, meaning pure heat. The third pitch had been blindingly fast and Smith knew he had been beaten by a master. He had screamed in a kind of instinctive primal anguish, then had tipped his cap to Ryan, who had tipped his cap in turn. The Houston bench had seemed surprised, not understanding this was a personal thing, a war within a war, and that on this occasion Ryan had won.

  Batting against Carlton was equally challenging; he was so excellent and complete a player that he was known simply as Lefty, needing neither first name nor last. Carlton was simply the best pitcher in baseball right now, Smith believed, a man of supreme physical gifts and, perhaps more important, awesome mental ones. Lefty had an almost perfect harmony of mental and physical strength, Smith thought. His concentration was complete. That gave him a special spiritual toughness that was rare in any aspect of life, including baseball. Lefty, Smith believed, liked to control a weaker person and create a certain doubt in the hitter. The hitter came to bat knowing how strong Lefty was, and how smart, and knowing, too, that, unlike the hitter, Lefty knew exactly where the pitch would be. In most cases, that made for a mismatch, but Smith enjoyed the combat. He knew that when he beat Carlton, he had beaten the best.

  But Lefty was back in Philly and Ryan was in Houston, both of them caught up in their own competition for the all-time strike-out record. And Reggie Smith was in Tokyo, looking vainly for a fast ball.

  Earlier in the season, an opposing pitcher had mistakenly come into the strike zone with a nice fat pitch and Smith had hit a monstrous home run, and at the end of the inning, the Japanese pitcher, returning to the dugout virtually in tears, had to be consoled by his manager. It was very clear that the Japanese pitchers were under orders that this highly paid American should not demonstrate his power (and, thus, figuratively, American superiority) against them. So on this day, though it had been a big game—the hated Hanshin Tigers against the Giants, the huge stadium filled hours before the game—Smith’s frustration did not abate. He simply could not find a pitcher to challenge him, could not get a pitch to hit.

  “Small baseball,” he said, “they play small baseball.”

  He did not say this disparagingly but as a statement of fact. He was, in truth, on his best behavior here, accommodating to the Japanese press, careful and sensitive with his teammates, ready to give tips on hitting but careful, given the importance of the hierarchy in Japanese society, not to intrude on the territory of the hitting coaches, who were more numerous, more influential and more meddlesome here than in the United States. Jim Lefebvre, the former Dodger, had told mutual friends that Smith, who had a reputation for being at the very least blunt and outspoken (and, to some critics, a clubhouse lawyer), would not last four months here.

  He was trying to be a good ambassador, a good baseball player and a good teammate, but it was getting harder all the time. In his mind, he was cooperating, trying to do his best; but the entire nature of the Japanese game, of small baseball, was stacked against him.

  By small baseball, Smith meant a precise definition of the game. Small baseball was a game tailored to the needs, both physical and cultural, of the Japanese. Because the Japanese, by and large, did not have powerful throwing arms, they made the relays better than Americans, and they were very good at hitting the cutoff man. Because the society was oriented toward the group instead of toward the individual and because hierarchy prevailed, the manager and his strategy were far more important. There was much more playing for one run and, starting in the first inning, the infield always seemed to be drawn in, trying to cut off a run.

  All baseball leagues had different styles, Smith believed. The American League, in his early years, was a slow, almost stagnant league, modeled on the great Yankee teams of the Fifties. Its stars were largely power hitters, they were white and their teammates waited upon their mighty swings. They did not, in his opinion, play a hard-edged game of modern baseball in which speed and power were combined. The prototypical American League star during the era when Smith broke in was Harmon Killebrew, a kind, gentle player who generated offense only through his awesome swing. By contrast, the National League was the blacker league. Its tempo reflected speed combined with power and, Smith believed, with a certain barely disguised black rage.

  The typical National League player was Frank Robinson, who was intense about everything. Robinson helped transform the American League, Smith believed, when he was traded to the Orioles. He changed the Orioles, and as he changed them, the entire league began to change. There was something about Robinson—the ferocity with which he played the game and his attitude about winning—that was almost frightening. His was an unrelenting presence, and teammates and opponents alike feared to cross him. Once, when Smith was a young player with the Red Sox, he had watched Robinson run out a ground ball and, noticing the man’s odd, almost spindly legs, had made a smart remark, “Pump those wheels.” It was the way that black players often teased one another in those days. They were brothers, after all. But Robinson, enraged by the remark, had gone past the Boston bench on his way back to the dugout and had pointed a finger at Smith and said, “You don’t know me that god-damn well.” Later, after the game, Robinson came and told him that next time the teams played, maybe they could go to dinner. But there was no doubt of the warning that had been issued or of the man’s transcending hardness.

  To Smith, the National League was about power, complete power, the power to hit for distance and to run with speed. It was also about territory, each man’s success—indeed, his edge—came at the expense of someone else, and it seemed to Smith that those edges, no matter how small, were more reluctantly conceded in the National than in the American League. It was a game far more exciting t
han the American League version, constantly pitting power against power.

  The Japanese game, by contrast, seemed to avoid power, to avoid the confrontation between hitter and pitcher. Much of the game, Smith believed, was not so much assertive strategy and tactics as it was an attempt to avoid making mistakes or taking responsibility. It was a cautious game and it probably suited their physical and psychic needs, but it did not suit him. It was therefore small.

  Sometimes, now, Smith wondered whether or not he had made the right decision in signing. Two years earlier, when he was a free agent, the Yankees had made a handsome offer, something well over $1,000,000 for three years. Although that would only have made him one of about five first basemen and seven designated hitters on the team, he had been tempted by the deal. There was, after all, enough doubt about his physical condition, particularly about his arm, to limit his bargaining power. But there was something about the negotiations, a certain imperiousness to the Yankee bargaining style, that put him off—that, plus George Steinbrenner’s reputation for paying athletes well and then believing he was entitled to play with them.

  In that sense, Smith thought, the modern owner was not unlike the modern fan; there was more psychic tension than ever before between him and the star player. The relationship was not as it had been in his early days on the Red Sox, a shared relationship between star and owner, but, rather, a new, instant relationship in which the owner shared the spotlight in the moment of signing and felt freer than ever to attack the star. If the star failed, it was not the owner’s fault, for he could show how much he had paid; he remained a good owner who had hired a bad player.

  In the end, Smith signed with the San Francisco Giants for the 1982 season and enjoyed a surprisingly good year, with 18 home runs and 56 R.B.I.s in some 350 at bats. After the season, he began negotiating with the Giants with marginal success, but they had their eyes on Steve Garvey. And when it became clear that the American Giants would pay Garvey more than three times as much as Smith, he began to take the Japanese Giants more seriously.

  In the beginning, he was amused by the cultural differences when the Yomiuri representatives came to him and asked if he wanted to sign with them. He responded in the good American tradition by asking how much they were willing to pay. They, in turn, said, “Tell us whether or not you’ll sign and then we’ll tell you how much we’ll pay.” He responded that he wanted a close idea of their offer before he committed himself. They replied that they could not make him such an offer, because if they made it and he turned it down, they would lose face. “Man, I’m not ready for Japan yet,” he told them. Then they began to negotiate in earnest.

  Soon one of the Giants’ negotiators told him they wanted him to have a very good year, to hit perhaps .270 with 20 home runs, but not to have a better year than their own stars, particularly Tatsunori Hara, their talented young third baseman, who had hit 33 home runs the previous season. “That’s really weird,” Smith had said. He enjoyed the negotiations, however. They went on for some three months and, as they got more and more serious, Smith noticed a certain cultural progression, most apparent in the ascending level of sophistication of the clothes worn by emissaries of the Giants. The sports clothes quickly gave way to suits. Then the suits got progressively darker, the shirts whiter and crisper, the ties more subdued. At the higher levels, the men began to wear leather watch straps. When he finally got to meet Toru Shoriki, the owner of the team, Smith was waiting in a lounge having a drink; suddenly, a Giants executive materialized out of nowhere and, without even asking, snatched the drink away. “You should not be drinking when Shoriki-san comes in,” he said. Just then, Shoriki himself walked in, an elegant man in a beautiful, understated black suit and the most subtle white shirt Smith had ever seen. “That’s the boss,” he decided.

  Now he was sitting around having a postgame drink with a man named Robert Whiting. Whiting, a young American who had gone to college in Japan, stayed around after graduation and, because, of his special interest in both Japanese culture and American baseball, ended up writing a book about Japanese baseball called The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, one of the best of all books on modern Japan. In it, Whiting details the hard times Japanese baseball has often inflicted upon its American participants, the gaijins, and the equally hard time the gaijins have inflicted on the Japanese—times so hard that some Americans have in recent years come to be known as Pepitones (a derogatory name in honor of the former Yankee first baseman Joe Pepitone, who took so much money, caused so many problems and played so few games that he became the dubious standard against which other ballplayers were measured). One of the high points of the Whiting book is a description of the 1965 season, in which Daryl Spencer, once a San Francisco Giant, was making a run for the Japanese Pacific League home-run title and virtually every opposing pitcher in the league began to walk him on four pitches. All of this, Whiting was now telling Smith, was a reflection of the schizophrenic Japanese relationship with the Western world. They wanted to be like the West—were, in fact, the world’s foremost imitators of Western customs—and they wanted just as badly to be left completely alone, unblemished by foreign influence. So, Whiting said, they know they need the gaijins and want them, on occasion, to do well, but they do not want them to do too well. Of course, the gaijins are also very handy in case a team begins to do poorly. They can always be blamed. That, he noted, might become Smith’s role if things did not go well this year.

  Indeed, the real belief of the people who run Japanese baseball is that as long as there are gaijin players, Japanese baseball cannot really be considered first class. The current commissioner has asked all clubs to be rid of their Americans in five years.

  “Last year,” said Whiting, “Tony Solaita, the former Yankee and Toronto Blue Jay, had a great year. Everything went right. Led the league in home runs and R.B.I.s. Led the league in game-winning hits. In the second half of the season, he got 14 of his 17 game-winning hits.” Whiting paused. “He finished a distant third in the M.V.P. voting. His manager told all the writers to vote for one of the other guys. So I told Solaita what happened and he was really pissed and he called the manager, who said, ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t know you wanted it. Besides, you weren’t here.’ Solaita had a hard year. He was in the race for the home-run title, and the Japanese are still sensitive about that title, because it means power, and they’re more touchy about power than about average. So in the last part of the season, the opposing pitchers started walking him all the time. He got desperate and asked his manager to argue with the umpires, and the manager did. Then he asked if Solaita wanted him to walk the other home-run hitter. Solaita said, ‘No, it’s unprofessional.’ But in the last appearance of the last game, he took himself out.”

  Smith listened carefully as Whiting spoke. He had been warned.

  A day later, Smith was frustrated even further. Sliding into third base, he hurt his knee badly. It would be at least a month before he could run hard again. If he were lucky, he would be able to pinch-hit in about two weeks. It would be even harder now to perform here the way he wanted.

  A career for an athlete was an elusive thing, he thought. Only when it was virtually over, when the physical powers were diminishing, was it possible to have any genuine insight into what made a career—not a season but a complete career, the signature of a man. He saw himself now as a contemporary not so much of certain teammates from the Red Sox or Cardinals or Dodgers but, rather, of a handful of players who had entered the major leagues in one era, the mid-Sixties, and lasted through an entirely different one, the early Eighties. The first era had been harder, the game was tougher, the pay was smaller and a rookie was always a threat to a teammate’s job. Smith himself had been paid $6500 in his rookie season. It was a world without guarantees. The players were forced to be much tougher, both mentally and physically (particularly, he believed, the black players, who had all spent time in vicious little Southern towns and who later, in the bigs, faced a more subtle kind of racism, an attitude tha
t allowed a black player to be accepted as long as he was unquestioning of authority and was not different and did not complain. As long, in Reggie Smith’s view, as he remained as white as he could be).

  That era had gradually come to an end in the late Seventies with the advent of free agency. By the early Eighties, even mediocre players were signing huge contracts with so many built-in guarantees that the pressure on players to maximize their talents had eased. Only in exceptional cases, he believed, did pride goad a young player into higher levels of excellence. Hunger, he was convinced, had diminished.

  He remembered, now, with almost astonishing clarity, the beginning of his own career—not just the hard times in Wytheville, Virginia, where he had encountered a racial prejudice unlike any he had known before, but far more clearly the time when he showed up at Red Sox spring-training camp in Scottsdale in 1964. He had been a rookie, and rookies were still almost subhuman in those days, referred to by the veterans as “Bush,” existing to be seen but not heard. If, in conversation, a rookie volunteered some experience of his—a minor-league moment, of course—the veterans would say, “Yeah, Bush, you hit .300 in Appalachia. We all hit .300 back there.”

  Spring training with the Red Sox had been almost as much dream as reality. There had been Ted Williams prowling the field, his intensity and instinct for confrontation not dimmed by three years of retirement. It was amazing, Smith thought, that the man had been away from the game all those years and was still stalking pitchers. He noticed that wherever Williams went, the Boston players began almost unconsciously to edge away, particularly the pitchers. Williams liked to taunt pitchers; it was a challenge he carried over from his days as a hitter. Pitchers, he said, “couldn’t goddamn help themselves. They’re just dumb by breed.”