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A little harmless over-writing from Ms. Olson maybe.
<blockquote>'Wa' Reigns Supreme at WBC
Posted Mar 24th 2009 4:21AM by Lisa Olson (RSS feed)
Filed Under: MLB, FanHouse Exclusive
<img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/lisa-olson.fanhouse.com/media/2009/03/japan_celebration_2.jpg">
LOS ANGELES -- It's all about the Wa, the forfeiture of self for the unity and harmony of the greater good, or team. You could sense Wa all around Monday night, as Japan and South Korea engaged in one of the finest back-to-basics baseball games you might ever see.
Wa was there in the sacrifice flies bringing home runners, in beautifully positioned bunts, in terrific pitching duels that caused 54,846 fans at Dodger Stadium to stand and sing for 10 fantastic innings. Fittingly, the World Baseball Classic final lasted a perfect four hours, ending with Japan beating Korea, 5-3, for the championship.
Make that the world championship, for only the most xenophobic would consider Team Japan not worthy. Team Samurai defended its WBC title from 2006, thanks to Ichiro Suzuki's finely placed single that sliced Korea's gut and scored two runs in the top of the 10th. But really, as often happens in Japanese baseball, the beauty was carved out in Ichiro's eight-pitch at-bat against reliever Chang Yong Lim, with two outs, with runners on second and third, with millions upon millions of fans in the Far East holding their breath.
"Today we were able to greet the day, and the fact that we were able to remain one of the best two was within myself, wonderful," said Japan's manager Tatsunori Hara, long after his team offered gracious bows to their longtime rivals and paraded around Dodger Stadium with the Rising Sun flag and shared the trophy with fans who didn't want to leave.
<img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/lisa-olson.fanhouse.com/media/2009/03/japan_1.jpg" align="right">Here, baseball purists, was the game at its prime, extra innings packed with smallball, dazzling defense, daring baserunning. It was a test of which country best mastered the fundamentals, a passion play leading up to the ninth inning when Yu Darvish, the closer who one night earlier finished off Team USA, erratically sandwiched two walks inside a pair of nasty strikeouts. But like nearly every young child who learned to play baseball in Asia, Korea's Bum Ho Lee has the patience of a nun, and he waited for the right pitch to slap through the hole at short, tying the game, 3-3. The Dodger Stadium scoreboard came alive with pictures of crowds packed tight into Seoul's Jamsil Stadium, partying hard 6,000 miles away.
And then Darvish returned for the 10th, Hara taking a risk that highlighted the terrible importance of this game, and Darvish made sure Ichiro's efforts weren't wasted. After a leadoff walk, Darvish cooly retired the side. Pandemonium in Dodger Stadium, delirium in the streets of Tokyo.
That, baseball lovers, is why the Classic matters.
"Well, in the bullpen, the pitcher who was the best is the one I picked," said Hara, making his decision sound so easy, so enlightened. And of Ichiro's epic, game-winning at-bat, Hara admitted, "it's an image that will forever be imprinted in my mind."
Ichiro insisted he was in a far more rocky zone while wiggling at the plate. "I really wish I could be in the state of Zen but ... I kept thinking of all these things that I shouldn't think about," he said. "But I was able to hit, so I felt like maybe I surpassed something myself."
One night earlier, Japan blew away Team USA, 9-4, in the semifinals, a loss that flushed out another round of snide remarks by Americans who can't see beyond their own belts, who are stunned, absolutely stunned, that other nations play a better, smarter brand of baseball than the country which invented it. How could this happen?
Really, the answer is quite obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to the sport's expansion across the past decade. Teams from Asia and elsewhere have this odd habit of racing down the line as soon as the ball is put into play, of circling the bases following home runs like they'll never again hit a ball so far, of treating strike outs as a curse that shames the entire group.
"Little things," Jeter, captain of Team USA, was saying late Sunday night, in the gloom of Dodger Stadium. "Somewhere along the way Americans lost the idea of practicing and teaching fundamentals. We need to figure out how to get back to that."
The contrast first struck Jeter in 2004, when the New York Yankees traveled to Japan for Opening Day, with a series against Tampa Bay. I covered the Yankees on that journey (and was with the New York Mets when they ushered in the 2000 season in Tokyo). Each trip included exhibition games against Japanese teams, providing ample opportunities to observe the militaristic manner in which the Japanese prepared.
The sport was first introduced to the Japanese masses in 1878, by a Boston engineer who had his players run the bases in geta, or wooden sandals. It was a painful exercise, designed to build or break the spirit (typical masochistic Red Sox fan, even then). Modern pre-game warmups are still a blend of martial arts and worker bee ethos, the players fielding more ground balls and pop ups than some Little League teams do in a year.
The fierce dedication trickles down to school children, many who routinely train for six hours a day. Little Leaguers are taught defensive skills and the art of playing catch long before they master hitting; Americans do it in reverse. And if those children lose a big game, they scoop up the infield dirt, pack it in plastic bags and display it prominently at home, a reminder of lessons to be learned.
The South Koreans are similarly nurtured, before facing one more obstacle: a mandatory stint in the military. That's one of the major hurdles MLB teams have to navigate before more Koreans land on this side of the pond.
Jung-Keun Bong, Korea's starting pitcher Monday, cut a rare path across baseball's landscape, spending time with the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds before returning to Korea to finish his career. He pitched splendidly in the title game, but Japanese starter Hisaski Iwakuma was even better, and after Michihiro Ogasawara's third-inning RBI single gave Japan a 1-0 lead, Bong was removed in the fifth, with no outs and runners on the corners.
A few hours earlier, manager Hara had predicted the championship would "feel like it's the game of the century." That's how fierce the Korea-Japan rivalry is, far more intense than Yankees-Red Sox, gloriously existing without the ESPN hoopla.
How many tens of millions of office workers choked on their mid-morning coffee Tuesday when Hyun Wook Jong came in for Bong and promptly blew away the side, the inning ending with Ogasawara striking out and Norichika Aoki, so firefly quick, caught stealing?
Shin-Soo Choo, one of four Koreans in the major leagues, tied the game, 1-1, in the bottom of the fifth with a leadoff home run, spinning Dodger Stadium into a sweet cacophony of bands and whistles and dancing children and national chants and controlled madness.
That's the other thing about international baseball. Fans enjoy games without worrying about foul-mouthed thugs destroying the experience. If Koreans and Japanese can share a stadium peacefully, without fights in the stands and curse words polluting the air, perhaps there is hope for us still.
<img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/lisa-olson.fanhouse.com/media/2009/03/japan_team.jpg">
No doubt, the WBC has inspired its share of positive moments: competitive, entertaining games, good sportsmanship, lessons for the Americans. There are plans to expand the tournament in 2013 beyond the scope of this year's carnival, which featured 16 teams playing 38 games across seven cities, from Tokyo to L.A. Paul Archey, senior VP of MLB International and architect of the WBC, stood near the Dodger dugout before Monday's game and said the idea is to keep dreaming big, beyond borders.
"We like March as a time to do this tournament," Archey said, reminding reporters that MLB owners approved the timing, the travel and other inconveniences that have prompted American players and fans to either whine or yawn. Archey wouldn't rule out the possibility of the semifinals and final being played in Tokyo, where TV ratings and attendance are Super Bowl-sized. (Total attendance for this year's WBC was 801,408, and if organizers counted fans who attended Team Japan's practices, the number would have cleared 1 million.)
Yes, it appears Team USA will again be handicapped next time around, by the format and, if lessons aren't learned, by their own style of play. Appearances by A.J. Burnett, CC Sabathia and Joba Chamberlain -- just three of the American pitchers who couldn't be bothered, though there were others -- might have saved Team USA from being knocked around by Japan's line drives in Sunday's semifinal.
It may be too late for the US to ever retrieve a version of Wa. Generations have passed, glorifying power hitters over basic fundamentals. "Little things," as Jeter said, though he knows the cultural divide cuts much deeper.
Ichiro and fellow major leaguer Daisuke Matsuzaka joined Team Japan for training in early February, enduring two-a-days when they could have been sipping Mai Tais on the beach. It was all for the Wa, group harmony over self. Ichiro's bat scored the winning run, Dice-K's arm was a perfect 3-0 and earned him tournament MVP honors.
So offer a tip of the Kabuto, helmet of the samurai, toward Team Japan, world champions who can teach us a thing or three.</blockquote>
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