Sadaharu Oh: Samurai, Capitalist

 

Sadaharu Oh’s autobiography is an enjoyable read, remarkable for its eloquence and candor.  He details his struggles with racism, having a Taiwanese father in post-war Japan, as well as his conflict with that very same father over his love of baseball.  In Chapter 4, he also establishes himself as a free-market capitalist who isn’t interested in money, and touches on the age-old dilemma: is parity the same as fairness, or is the amateur draft, as Buzzie Bavasi once called it, “a form of socialism”?  Oh (with David Falkner) writes:

In those days there was no draft system.  Thank God.  If there had been such a system, I never would have fulfilled my dreams.  I can look back on it no and feel this sense of tremendous blessing – one that includes the sense that I am somehow a person from another age – but I feel anger for what was ultimately surrendered.

The draft system, this peculiar lottery of talent that is supposed to give all teams an equal opportunity to stock their rosters, is one of the most unfortunate changes to affect modern professional baseball in Japan.

Imagine a young amateur player, as I once was, looking forward to playing professionally.  In the heart of that young person, if he has passionately followed baseball from his boyhood, is loyalty and longing. … What does it mean when that youngster , if he is good enough to be a professional, has no say whatsoever in what team he plays for?  What does it mean when the fans of a team see their management unable to choose players whose loyalties have led them to the team in the first place?  The answer in both cases is a tremendous loss in the charm of baseball itself.

I can almost hear the objections now.  That’s fine if you belong to the Tokyo Giants, but what about all the other teams?  Most boys in Japan grow up rooting for the Giants; everyone wants to play for them.  You can’t have nine hundred players on one team and one on the other.  And let’s not forget money.  The strongest team has the strongest bankroll, and don’t you think a boy’s loyalties for, say, the team from Hiroshima might be changed when he is confronted with a far bigger offer from the Giants?

What’s so wrong about a professional league where interest is built up around everyone else trying to beat the one big team?  This kind of competition is genuine and very healthy.  The joy of beating Goliath is unsurpassable, and such victories as these become lasting in memory.  In our culture, the leading samurai warrior held his position only as long as he could hold off the inevitable challenges that came his way.  When he lost, not only was his life at stake but his deepest self-respect as well.  And for the new champion there was a sense of accomplishment and transformation that was not about money.  The charm of baseball involves a world in which the outcome of games is only one of many parts.

(Sadaharu Oh, Vintage, 1985.)

The best part of Oh’s argument is the plainness of it: you don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about in sports bars, you want the Yankees in your division.  You need the Yankees in your division.

Essentially, Oh envisions the concept of rivalry in which one team serves as the rival for every other team in the league.  He uses the term “Goliath” to describe his Giants, but the joy of beating said Goliath is only unsurpassable if one manages to beat Goliath: the Giants won nine consecutive championships, running from 1965-1973.  The latter-day Yankees provide a similar service to the major leagues, donating their money so that other teams can feel good about beating them.  In some other sport, the city of Miami provided a similar charity this past year, I am told.  Of course, before the draft, Goliath was beating the spread with regularity, and he still does fairly well for himself.

Oh’s dilemma comes down to the basic conflict between the individual and society.  In order to join into a community, to sign the social contract, we have to abandon a few of our individual freedoms.  What’s strange is that one of Oh’s inalienable rights, the right to play for whatever team one wants, would also allow any player to veto any trade.  Oh never had to suffer the indignity of being traded, so one has to wonder if it even entered his mind.  Instead, he sees his own utility in harmony with that of his team (and what’s good for the Tokyo Giants is good for the league, of course), and yet the American baseballer Jim Bouton, fifteen years earlier, came away with a somewhat different impression.

Despite Oh’s harkening for the nebulous concept of “charm”, baseball is healthier with competitive balance; if we don’t quite have it in the major leagues now, at least David is allowed to grab a couple of rocks and a sling before the season starts.  But while this is true in the grand scheme of things, each player and each team is actively working against this aim by single-mindedly collecting as many championships and honors as he can muster.  This is capitalism at its finest: selfishness, with moderate regulation.  We can only hope that Sadaharu Oh could find a way to be the elading samurai, regardless of the cap he wore.