Town Team

COLUMN ONE
For the Love of the Game
In Cascade, Iowa, the semipro ballclub fits the town like a well-worn glove. This year’s edition was 64-1, but box scores don’t tell the real story.
By Terry McDermott
Times Staff Writer

September 18, 2004

CASCADE, Iowa — The road slips between soft hills striped by cornfields as neat as cemeteries and not much noisier, rolling 20 and 30 miles at a stretch into the deep green August quiet without a town in sight.

The government men in Des Moines, in what is regarded here as not-so-perfect wisdom, have decided commerce would be better served if the steady stream of long-haul Peterbilts and Kenworths didn’t have to downshift, much less stop, when they lumbered through here en route to bigger, more important places. U.S. 151, which used to ramble through a half-dozen small towns on its eastern Iowa stretch, has been rerouted to avoid them all so effectively that you can’t even tell the towns are there.

When the bypasses opened over the last year, even locals sometimes had a hard time finding their own towns. It’s as if they’d been not just bypassed but erased.

Maybe they were — or this one, anyway — because something happened in Cascade this summer that, had it happened in some better-known place — Keokuk, say, or Los Angeles — it would by now have been emblazoned across the heavens:

The local baseball team, the Cascade Reds, has just finished its season with a 64-1 record. The loss, which occurred in a tournament in July, was by the score of 1-0.

This is baseball, a sport in which the very best teams often lose four of every 10 games; a sport in which so much depends on luck, where the routine out, blessed by a pebble, becomes a bad-hop game-winning hit, where the umpire who had seen better nights could not see the play at third.

The Reds won 25 games before a loss, then the next 39 without another. They won wild slugfests, precise pitchers’ duels. They won with a dominating lineup and with banged-up substitutes.

They won despite the fact that some of these boys of summer haven’t been boys for a great many seasons of any temperature. The ace pitcher is 38. So’s the third baseman. The team’s spiritual leader, a slap-and-dash pinch-hitter, part-time first baseman and all-around in-your-face hard-case manager, is two decades past that age and in any event, this spring, in his first visit to a doctor in 35 years, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and missed the season.

There were other health issues beyond the usual sore arms and pulled hamstrings: the big slugger got hit by a car while riding a bicycle, not a very sluggerly choice of transport; the pitching ace caught a bat in the sternum before the season started, hit so hard he couldn’t talk for minutes, or even breathe for a while; and the team’s fastest base runner suffered some sort of mysterious, unnoticed injury to a knee, so serious that by the end of the season he was being pinch-run for by a man 15 years older. Asked by the bat boy what had happened, he could offer nothing more definitive than the sad explanation: “I’m not fast anymore.”

Add to this the normal human afflictions — broken bones and love affairs, the car battery inexplicably gone dead, a shift change at the lumber yard, a National Guard call-up — and, finally, factoring in the always present danger that what one player referred to as the post-game “beer medicine” might be over-prescribed, it’s a wonder how the Reds, who have a core of 12 players, even managed to field a team 65 nights much less win on 64 of them.

If you doubt the general seriousness of purpose of this type of baseball, ask anybody who has ever stood in to hit against the Reds’ longtime pitching ace, Yipe Weber, what a happy experience that was. Weber’s career-long habit of unsettling opposing batters with high fastballs somewhere in the region between their chins and their mortal souls has earned him respect from teammates and a reputation among opposing fans as a headhunter.

Ask Yipe himself and he’ll say he very seldom hits anyone above the neck. He has better control than that, he said, plus he’s not that fast anymore. He is nonetheless direct, he said.

“If I get a guy, 0-2, I’d rather throw a fastball up under his chin and see if he swings at that than throw the change-up to fool him.”

Yipe’s aggressive demeanor is not a late-career affectation. He has been a tough out since anyone can remember. Marty Sutherland, the Reds’ second baseman, grew up next door to Yipe, albeit a generation later. When Yipe would come home from college for the summer, Sutherland would bug him to come out and play a two-man pitching-hitting game popular in Cascade. Remember, this was a first-grader calling a 20-year-old. Yipe described the results:

“I was undefeated. I’d just go over there and beat the crap out of him. No way I was gonna lose to a 6-year-old.”

Was Marty any good at 6?

“I don’t know,” Yipe said, “but he sure had a temper.”

Cascade

For most of its mile-long length, Cascade is just a couple of blocks wide. You can look down almost any side street and see cornfields and pastures. Businesses have started to relocate out by the four-lane interchange, leaving behind still more empty storefronts on 1st Avenue, the main street that winds through downtown, over the bridge on the north fork of the Maquoketa River, up Town Hill and east out toward Dubuque.

If the bypass was supposed to be a death knell, it’s but one in a long series. These little farm towns in the rolling hills of eastern Iowa have been busy dying for decades: The great 19th century rural-to-urban migrations, cyclical economic-driven brain drains, farm consolidation, the warm glow of the Sun Belt. These were all at one time or another supposed to kill off these little towns. Yet, they’re still here. More than that, some have inexplicably thrived.

Cascade has become a small manufacturing center. A local man built from nothing a company that now employs 150 people making precision machined parts for an impressive list of international clients. Several other smaller machine shops have opened. A third-generation local lumber yard has been reinvented as a maker of wooden and steel trusses that are shipped all over the region. This once modest business selling hammers, nails, 2-by-4s, sheets of plywood and paint now sprawls across both sides of the old highway and keeps three shifts of workers employed, including several Red players.

As a group, this year’s Reds are mostly clean-cut and fit the way athletes of the weight-room era usually are. Advances in fitness training have contributed to longer playing careers, giving the Reds a bigger talent pool to draw from, but as much as anything, the rise of a local, non-farm economy explains the building of the baseball team. Almost all the players have local jobs, many supporting families, which would not have been possible in the past. Many, if not all of them, would have left town to find work.

In an era when amateurism is defined by Olympic performers with seven-figure incomes, when top professional athletes routinely make more money in a year than everybody in this town will make in a decade, when fame and glory and infinite riches are not enough to satisfy the slightest ego on the worst team in the major leagues, the Reds have run through a season and over all opposition as if it meant something, when in fact it meant little to anybody but themselves.

The Reds play what is known nationally as semipro baseball, which means you are allowed to be paid to play and teams in the past have often hired expensive pitchers or a big-time hitter for important games. These Reds never pay anyone. In eastern Iowa, they don’t even refer to the game as semipro. They call it town-team baseball, the town being the essential demographic unit of the state.

Iowa is the most settled place of any size on Earth. There is not a single acre of wilderness in the entire state and a remarkable 89% of its land is under active cultivation; even given its modest size, in most years more land is harvested here than in any other state. It is almost literally a farm state.

That said, even a place with lots of farms does not necessarily have all that many farmers. Contemporary agriculture is so efficient that it doesn’t take many people to do it. Its ability to feed people has very much outstripped its ability to feed farmers.

As a result, Iowa, according to census data, has more people with master’s degrees than tractors and very few — about 6% — of its 2.9 million people actually live on farms. Neither do they live in cities. By coastal standards, there are no truly big cities — Des Moines, the capital, has less than a quarter-million people, and only one other city has even half that amount. But there are hundreds of little towns, spread more or less evenly, like frosting across a single-layer cake, covering the place end-to-end with not many swirls or dips.

Until the post-World War II dominion of electronic mass media, these little towns inhabited their own worlds and were as close to self-sufficient as you could get and still claim to belong to 20th century America. Some towns were little more than a church, a crossroads and a filling station. Most were more substantial, with local schools, newspapers, libraries, grocers and granaries. Cascade, with a dam on the Maquoketa River, had its own electric power plant, telephone company, even at one time its own opera house.

All the towns, no matter their size, had baseball teams. Many of these clubs started around the turn of the last century, often mowing pastures into playing fields. Some of the old fields are still in use. One, in the hamlet of Pleasant Grove, has a creek around the outfield instead of a fence, giving the baseball term “diving catch” an almost literal meaning. Other fields were so topographically challenged that when the catcher crouched behind home plate he’d lose sight of his outfielders.

High tide of the town-team era was just after WW II when returning veterans pumped up rosters of local powerhouses across the state. The Reds flourished in this era. The 1946 team won 28 games in a row, finally losing only when they challenged Davenport, a genuine professional team from the old Three I league.

The next year the ball club for the first time sponsored its own summer tournament. Other towns in the area did the same and these tournaments have become the focus of the contemporary teams.

There is a nowhere-in-the-whole-wide-world-you’d-rather-be quality to a steam-bath mid-summer’s night doubleheader late in the tournament.

The Team

What makes town-team ball unique is the blend of players. The Reds have often had a local high school player or two, and maybe a couple of college kids home for summer break, but their rosters have mainly consisted of local men, out of or never in college.

The younger players on this year’s team marvel at Yipe Weber’s conditioning and more at his extraordinary competitiveness. He is, several said, the kind of guy you would hate if he played against you. They’re right. Opposing fans react almost viscerally when he struts out on to the field, a sturdy man with thick, pitchers’ legs, chest stuck out, preening like a 4-H rooster.

Paul Sherman, an opposing manager, said it was this attitude as much as their skills that made the Reds special. “They bring intensity every night for nine innings,” he said.

Yipe credits the attitude to the erstwhile current Red manager, Loras Simon, who has missed managing this season because of the aforementioned tumor.

Simon comes from a family of six boys and five girls and at one time or another all the boys but one have managed the Reds. Simon has for the last five years, the best run in the team’s history.

He’ll turn 59 next month and until this year had not missed a season — and rarely a game — since Little League.

“I think I had one or two Ripken streaks in there,” Simon said, referring to Cal Ripken Jr., the major leaguer who played more consecutive games than anyone in baseball history. “I was never hurt. Never.”

Simon thinks this is the best semipro team he’s ever seen. That said, he also thinks they could get better. The core of the team’s best players is in its mid-20s and should improve. The foundation of the team’s success has been superb pitching and defense, the latter anchored by two of Simon’s nephews.

“We went 56-6 last year and I wasn’t happy,” he said. “People were talking about how well they’d done and I said, ‘No, folks, you should never lose six games.’ “

Some opponents have taken to calling the Reds the Yankees of the Prairie League, but their dominance is newly found. Up until 1988, they had lost their own tournament 28 straight times. Just last season, when they won more than 50 games for the fourth straight year, the team from Farley beat them four of six times.

Simon missed the team’s lone loss this season, but has an opinion on it: “No doubt I would have complained. I would have. They should not have lost that game. We simply have more talent than anyone around us. We have the best team by a wide margin.”

The Reds this year played in eight tournaments, winning seven. They also played in two leagues — one for teams whose fields all had lights and another for teams who largely did not. They won both.

“The season starts May 1 and runs through mid- or early September,” said Simon. “That’s about 120 days. You’re playing basically half of them.”

It’s a long run that requires a level of commitment few could make.

The key, Simon said, is simple: “You’ve got to be careful of women.”

Or, as he also said, to have found the right one.

Legion Field

Legion Field, the Reds’ home park, is one of the best in the area, with a manicured diamond, sturdy bleachers, an electronic scoreboard, a concession stand for food and another for beer. The field is owned by the local American Legion post and the Legion has installed a World War I cannon off the right field line, next to the dance hall and a Vietnam-era howitzer out by the parking lot.

The most distinctive characteristic of the field is what locals call the Green Monster — an abandoned drive-in movie screen that has been set up beyond center field as a hitter’s backdrop and sun block. The screen solved a problem that had plagued the club since daylight savings time was adopted in the 1960s. The field is oriented east to west in such a way that the sun sets directly over the centerfield fence, blinding the hitters — not to mention the catcher, the umpire and a good portion of the crowd.

At first, to block the sun a row of quick-growing poplar trees was planted beyond the fence, but they didn’t grow fast or thick enough. The team next tried a huge tarp that would be unrolled and hoisted up on telephone polls, but the tarp wasn’t sturdy enough to withstand high winds and became a maintenance nightmare. The movie screen saved the day.

The field is at the northern edge of town on the farthest reach of the flood plain of the Maquoketa River. You can sit in the stands and before dark, look out over the outfield fences and see black-dirt bottom land roll away to the horizon.

For the longest time, you didn’t have to get out of your car to watch a game. There was no fence along the foul lines, just a row of sawed-off fence posts. Families would drive their cars nearly up onto the outfield and watch.

On the stillest nights of summer, you didn’t even need to come to the park. The public address announcer could be heard all the way across the river to the western side of town. You could swat fireflies, sip lemonade and track a game’s progress without ever leaving your lawn.

At the field now, the players are separated but not hidden from the fans by a tall cyclone fence. Friends and family toss ice-cold water bottles over the fence between innings. They also toss, sometimes less helpfully, advice.

During a Prairie League Championship playoff game against Farley, with the score 1-1 in the fourth inning, a Farley runner, out by a mile at second base, was inexplicably called safe by the umpire, eventually allowing a run to score. At the end of the inning, as the infielder, Adam McDermott, returned to the Red bench, someone in the grandstand, shouted: “Didn’t you tag him?”

Adam, who at 18 was the youngest player on this year’s team, was in the course of a splendid run of games in which he had become the main offensive spark; he also pitched and played a credible second base. He didn’t even have to look up to identify the critical inquisitor, his father, Tom.

For the most part, the communion between players and fans is supportive. Everybody knows everybody, often on both teams, and there is a constant interplay between fans and players.

Yipe Weber was pitching this game a mere two days after pitching a complete game. Even someone as relentlessly dogged as Yipe could be expected to fade over the course of that much pitching. Between innings, concerned fans asked him how he was holding up, if his arm was tiring, how long he could go.

“Long as I need to,” he said.

He admitted later he was breathing fumes for the last couple of innings, but his teammates had purchased him a longer lease on life by opening up a good lead, allowing him to coast home to the victory, by his estimate the 254th of his career.

Maybe we should pause here to explain the name Yipe, which is pronounced to rhyme with pipe and is so much in the long tradition of local nicknames that no one even bothers to ask where it came from. Yipe said, “It’s one of those Cascade names.”

He’s not wrong. The town for whatever reason — boredom? long winters? — has had a whole zoo full of Squirrels, Rabbits, Moose, Gophers and generations of Toads. Plus, there was this somewhat odd habit of calling guys with normal names by some other normal name, so that a Loras would become a George or a Kevin a Cletus.

There were Bubbas and Curlys and Barrells, a Squinkus and at least one Booger. There were three brothers named Ditter, Snatch and Walleye and another pair called Dirt and Scurvy.

Just in Yipe’s own family there were a Tuba and a Snottsy. Yipe himself was originally (well, originally he was called Pat, but who even remembers that?) called Hippie, which was intended ironically because he wore his hair short, and which became Yippie because that was so much cooler, which became Yip because, well, Yip was sort of a nickname for Yippie, but which in any event became Yipe because, well, who knows? It was, you know, one of the those Cascade nicknames.

For Free

Visitors to the Midwest often describe the region as one giant flat plain where the fields form checkerboards. This isn’t that.

The patchwork of fields here in eastern Iowa is a crazy quilt of rectangles, triangles, circles, oblongs, long swooping curves and blobs — almost every shape but a square, following the land’s soft swells, bound by limestone gravel roads, crooked rivers and stands of maples, hickories, black walnuts and oaks. It’s gorgeous country and I don’t get back as much as I should.

When I do, people ask:

“Which one are you?”

Mac’s boy, I say, the oldest.

“Umm. Yeah. Uh-huh.”

I left town in 1968 and Mac’s been gone for good since 1986 and still that’s all the information people need to file you in the proper drawer.

“And where are you now?” they ask, as if I had been a particularly hard one to track. They would ask what I was doing in Cascade.

“A story on the Reds,” I’d say.

“I’d heard that,” one man said. “Just wanted to get it from the horse’s mouth.”

This was in August. When I asked what people thought of the team’s phenomenal year, the conversation would proceed along these lines:

“What’s that record again?”

“Fifty-nine and one.”

Pause.

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Yup. Amazing.”

Pause. Long pause

“Another beer?”

Which is to say, the Reds have not exactly burned up the town this summer.

Cascade is and has been a baseball town. Banners strung along Main Street sport a sort of informal city coat of arms. Beneath the banal motto, “A place we call home,” are depictions of three things — a bridge, a pair of cornstalks and a baseball.

But as in many small towns, the focus of local sports fans is the high school teams, which get prominent play at cafe counters and in the local newspaper, the Pioneer. The Reds are typically relegated to the inside sports pages and didn’t make an appearance on the first sports page until halfway through the season, and then it was in a story about the two-week-long, 16-team local tournament. When the tournament ended, the Red coverage went back inside. Most of the Reds played for the high school team at one time (many of them played for the Reds and the high school in the same season), so they understand the bias even if they don’t now appreciate it.

Even among themselves, they said, they didn’t talk all that much about the phenomenal success of the season as it unspooled. Appreciation or lack of it has very little to do with the reasons the men play.

“It’s not just us. Semipro baseball kinda slips under the radar,” said Sutherland, the regular second baseman.

“Hey, you get to play for free. They give you a shirt,” said Dave Swanson, an outfielder. “Let’s go play.”

The simple fact is the players get nothing out of this. There is no World Series down the road, no homecoming parades, not even much praise. To put it another way, they get everything there is to get out of every game. They play for the simple pleasure of playing.

Sutherland, the guy who as a 6-year-old used to bug Yipe Weber to come out and play, now has the pleasure of living next door to one of Yipe’s young nephews. Guess who’s always bugging Marty to come out and play?

US & Them — Baseball And The End Of Life As We Know It
Terry McDermott

Pacific Magazine Sunday, April 05, 1992

The summer after my younger daughter was born I spent Sunday afternoons at the ballpark. I sat in the left-field bleachers. My daughter, in a basket on the bench seat, slept beside me.
Phil Bradley, the Mariner left fielder, slept in front. Bradley stood, slumped up, if that’s possible, weight all on his left foot, gloved left hand on left hip, a stream of sunflower-seed shells spewing from his mouth to the torn, faded, plastic turf with which King County had defiled the baseball field, all in all a perfect picture of boredom and, had I realized it at the time, the decline of America.
Neither my daughter nor the ballplayer was unduly disturbed by the rare shout echoing through the great, empty space of the Kingdome. Some of the shouts were my own, mainly directed at Bradley, who was the Mariners’ best and simultaneously worst player.
Yer a bum, Bradley! I’d shout.
Sunflower seeds would fly.
Act like you care, I’d holler.
More seeds.
Last year, I sat in far better seats behind first base in beautiful downtown Hiroshima, where the homestanding Fighting Carp were already in trouble in the bottom of the first. The visiting Yomiuri Giants had runners at the corners with one out and the cleanup hitter coming to the plate. The crowd, which had barely had time to slurp a bowl of noodles, was being rallied by a rough-hewn, already drunken cheerleader who made it his personal mission to convince me that America had no monopoly on idiocy, when up to the plate slouched – Could it be? Could it not be? Who else ever walked with such studied disdain for his surroundings? – my ol’ buddy Bradley.
In Hiroshima? Could I travel 8,000 miles and still be faced with the spectacle of Phil Bradley slouching around a baseball field? What was my least favorite ballplayer, possibly of all time, doing here? What, for that matter, was I doing here?
At home in Seattle, the Mariners had awakened from their lifelong lethargy and, led by the wondrous deeds of young Ken Griffey Jr., in whom the baseball gods bubbled, were challenging for the league lead. I was in Japan listening to Japanese tell me they were fed up listening to Americans tell them how to behave. Complaining about American complaints had become so common – and this was months before President Bush vomited on the prime minister – a word, kenbei, meaning contempt for America, had been coined to describe it.
Bradley was not helping the American side of the argument any. He looked to be his same surly self. In the way these things have gone, I’m sure the Japanese thought him lazy.
He is not. He just acts that way. He is instead a bright, stubborn, fiercely independent man who resents authority and shows it in his every molecular twitch. He is, in other words, much like me and many other Americans. This is perhaps why I dislike him.
I want my illusions preserved, my diamond unblemished, my baseball perfect. I resent its imitations of life.
Bradley, you’re still a bum! I hollered.
Dick Williams wants you! I shouted, knowing the enmity between Bradley and this past, autocratic Mariner manager. My voice, flat, rude and foreign, cut through the Japanese night.
Bradley, at the plate, shuddered reflexively and spit seeds.

I interviewed an eminent economist the other day, and he wanted to know: “Is this going to be a serious article or just a Sunday entertainment?”
Well, it’s about baseball, so I guess it must be pretty serious, but we could lighten it up a little. Here’s Fritz Hollings for the entertainment.
Hollings, a U.S. senator from South Carolina who is generally regarded as a serious politician, toured a ball-bearing factory last month and afterward told the workers: “You should draw a mushroom cloud and put underneath it, `Made in America by lazy and illiterate Americans and tested in Japan.’ ”
Hollings said he intended the remark as a joke. Pretty funny, huh?
Bradley took a strike. Bradley always took a strike.
“C’mon, swing the bat,” I yelled.
Bradley spit seeds and took another strike. The Carps’ drunken cheerleader blew a whistle in my ear and boozy breath in my face. He shouted something incomprehensible and motioned at Bradley.
Bradley’s a bum, I said.
Bum? he asked.
Lazy, illiterate, lacks a work ethic, I said. No, I didn’t really say that. Yoshio Sakurauchi, the speaker of the lower house of the Japanese parliament, said it recently, and he was talking about American workers, not baseball players.
“Every so often a Japanese politician says something like this,” said James Nunn, director of Washington state’s office in Tokyo. “Up until now those things were said and not reported. It wouldn’t go outside the room, much less outside the country.”
Now these remarks are not only reported, but people take them seriously. They are amplified, sometimes beyond recognition. It was to this insult that Hollings was retaliating with his atomic-bomb joke.
The relationship between the U.S. and Japan is arguably the most important on the globe. Each is the other’s largest overseas trading partner. Together, the two countries account for a third of the world’s economic activity. Nominally, we’re allies.
So why would a Japanese politician say Americans are lazy? Why would an American politician joke about dropping atomic bombs? Why does Lee Iacocca complain about “the insidious Japanese economic and political power in the United States?” Why do Japanese farmers say U.S. efforts to export rice to Japan are a plot to poison the populace?
Why do we keep saying these things about each other? What’s going on here? What is it with us and them?
When Nintendo responded favorably to a request from local politicians to help buy the Seattle Mariners, why did Major League Baseball’s august leaders act as if they’d been sucker-punched with a 38-ounce Louisville Slugger?
Once upon a time, we Americans had the world to ourselves, or at least the top of it. Indolence, events, accident and the sheer anarchy of the American system, which economists insist on calling market discipline, conspired to bring us back down into the world.
“There’s an underlying attitude that the United States has a special role to play in the world,” says Richard Kirkendall, a professor of American history at the University of Washington.
“The United States is a nation that is a city on the hill. It should be an example to the rest of the world.
“There has been the persistent notion that the experiment is being threatened – by the Irish immigrants in the 1850s, the southern Europeans in the 1890s, the communists after World War I, even by the Masons.
“That element of fear appears over and over again. Here the special situation is that we feel in some ways we are slipping in the world. Some intellectuals think we’re experiencing major decline. The decline is mainly economic, and it is mainly expressed in our relationship with Japan.”
The baseball owners who questioned the Mariner sale to Nintendo, in this interpretation, fall in a long tradition going back to the nativist Know-Nothings of the mid-19th century. There’s a widespread fear now that the United States is descending in the world. The baseball owners are simply trying to save us from falling further.
“I think it is deeper than the recession,” Kirkendall says. “The recession is a motivating force and important one, but I think for some time there’s been a sense that things aren’t right.”

One of the top exports of Denmark is Lego blocks. Danes are good at Legos so you don’t have to make your own and are probably damned glad of it.
There aren’t a lot of trade wars over Legos. There might be over other things.
Think of nations as individuals. How much more productive can a person be because she is able to learn a particular skill, say, welding? What if the welder also had to be a plumber and a carpenter and a farmer?
“We trade because there are huge advantages to specialization,” says Phil Brock, a UW economist. “Nobody doubts that specialization should occur. The debates are over who should make what.”
In classical economic theory, nations specialize in that which they are good at, and they are good at things at which they have some natural advantage. Economists call this a country’s comparative advantage. Aluminum, for example, is made in the Pacific Northwest because electric power – provided by Columbia River dams – is cheap and plentiful. That power is the region’s chief comparative advantage.
Kozo Yamamura, chairman of the Japan studies program at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the UW, says comparative advantage traditionally has been thought of as the result of some physical endowment. A nation was good at making something because it possessed particular skills or resources.
This might have been true in the era of smokestack industries, but in the modern high-technology era, comparative advantage can be created, Yamamura says. Most countries try to do this to some degree.
Japan, notably, created advantages for itself by protecting fledgling industries from outside competition until they were able to compete. Having built those industries and succeeded as an export economy, Japan has now dismantled many of the barriers that protected them while they grew, and now can claim with some legitimacy to promote free trade.
No one is a stronger believer in free markets than those who dominate them. It was no accident that free-trade theory evolved in Great Britain in the 18th century, when Britain was strong, and no accident that it has been promoted most fervently by the United States after World War II, and no accident still that the Japanese now complain about growing protectionist sentiment.
Absolute free trade exists only as an increasingly vulnerable theoretical model, Yamamura says, but there are degrees of managed trade. As Japan manages less, pressure builds in the United States to manage more. Conflict results, and it centers on the U.S. trade deficit with Japan. The U.S. blames it on Japan. Japan blames it on the U.S.
How serious is that deficit? If the United States did not forbid by law the export of Alaskan oil, the logical market for it would be Japan. Sale of that oil to Japan would all by itself cut the deficit by more than a third. By doing nothing more than changing a single law to reflect market reality, we could eliminate a substantial portion of the deficit.
Would America’s economic standing in the world be any different? No. We would have to import from somewhere else the oil we would then be selling to Japan. Some West Coast refining jobs would move East, but the country’s economic strength or lack thereof would not be affected. For this reason, among others, most economists think the idea of fixating on trade balances between any two countries is distracting at best, intellectually debilitating at worst.
What does matter to many economists, politicians and others is the composition of trade and a country’s total balance of trade with all countries.
The total balance of trade matters over time because it measures the difference between how much we spend and how much we produce. If we buy more than we produce, as the United States has done for more than a decade, then we must borrow money to pay for it, which we have done in prodigious amounts.
Looked at this way, the trade deficit is more of a result than a cause, says Brock, the UW economist. Much of our borrowed money has come from Japan, which throughout the 1980s invested huge sums in the United States.
So what, some economists say. They love to save. We love to spend. It’s a match made in heaven. Or, at worst, purgatory.
The composition – what goods and services we buy and sell – matters because it is a reflection of what work we do, of what we are paid for that work, in sum, of how we live. It is the composition of trade people are bothered by when they complain “we don’t make anything anymore.”

U.S. manufacturing jobs have been declining almost since World War II. In 1950, 34 percent of the work force was in manufacturing. In 1990, 17 percent of the work force was in manufacturing. The job losses were caused in part by cheaper labor costs overseas, but also by increasing productivity here at home. While manufacturing jobs declined, manufacturing output increased.
Contrary to what is normally imagined, manufacturing occupies a slightly greater portion of the national economy now than it did 30 years ago. Whatever the statistics, the decline in the actual number of “real jobs” coincided with the relative decline of the U.S. in the world economy.
The Mariner ownership tangle marched headfirst into this mess. Bashing Japan is almost a free shot for politicians; could we really have expected the bunch of car dealers, beer salesmen and real-estate hucksters who own baseball teams to act any better? There is a peculiarity that many people acquire along with great wealth: the notion that since the business of America is business, by excelling at business they’ve excelled at being Americans. And as great Americans, they bear a sort of modern variety of the White Man’s Burden. They must preserve and protect the country.
The common reaction here in the Northwest to the desire of Major League Baseball to protect us from the Japanese was outrage. They just don’t get it, we said. Out here, we have a special relationship with Japan.
Are we more enlightened? I doubt it. More desperate? Certainly, but also more accustomed to importing and exporting all kinds of things, including ideas and money. We have made a civic virtue out of our financial necessity. We’ve always been able spenders of other people’s money. The Northwest has been a net importer of capital since European settlement. The money used to come from back East. Now it comes from the Far East. Like everything else in the Northwest, once it gets here it’s green and it spends just fine.
So what’s the problem?
“Foreign investments, wherever they’re from, are usually received well locally,” says Charles Morrison, a specialist in U.S.-Japan relations at the East-West Center in Honolulu. “But the same people who welcome such investment to their area worry about it when it occurs elsewhere. The farther away people are from the benefits, the more they object.
“That normal opposition is augmented by the particular industry – what could be more quintessentially American than a baseball team? – and the more general fear that there is something wrong with America, that we’re selling off our institutions.”
Should we be afraid that the Japanese will come to own us? That they are “buying up America?” I don’t know. We practically begged them to in the mid-’80s. The combination of a devalued dollar, superheated Japanese real estate and stock markets, and low Japanese interest rates practically turned Japan into a money machine. They had it. We needed it. They spent it.
Should we be surprised at that? People here flocked to Frederick & Nelson’s close-out sale to buy much of the same stuff they had been refusing to buy for years, thereby creating the need for the close-out sale in the first place. They thought they saw bargains. They bought. Imagine an entire country at 50 percent off, which is about what the United States was after the dollar lost more than half of its value against the yen in international exchanges.
And if you’re worried about the Japanese having too much money, baseball is a perfect business in which to lose a lot of it. Herbert Stein, chairman of the council of economic advisers under President Nixon, says we should feel empathy for the Japanese, not envy.
“People are worried that the Japanese are buying up America. That’s silly, if for no other reason than that a lot of the investments they have made have not been profitable. A lot of this stuff hasn’t worked out,” Stein says. “They’re the ones who got screwed.”
“There are no nations,” Ned Beatty told Peter Finch in the 1976 movie “Network.” “There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There is no Third World. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and intertwining, interacting multi-variant, multi-national dominion of dollars … There is no America. There is no democracy. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies.
“The world is a college of corporations inexorably determined by the inevitable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been ever since man crawled out of the slime.”
It seems sometimes that the Beatty character had it right.
The forces of commerce and popular culture are indeed bringing us if not together, then at least into a coincidence of desires that political scientist Benjamin Barber recently labeled “McWorld.” The argument is made that our economies and tastes are so intertwined that it is increasingly hard to tell us from them.
Examples of this cross-cultural ferment are everywhere. Across town later that night in Hiroshima, I went into a bar called the Shanghai Renaissance. No one in the place, named for a Chinese city and a European intellectual movement, sitting beside a river that not 50 years earlier boiled over its banks from the heat of an American atomic bomb, no one spoke English, but they played old American movies and new American jazz. “The Wizard of Oz” was playing, soundlessly, on a large-screen television. The bartender substituted a Wynton Marsalis CD for the Harold Arlen movie score, leaving Dorothy and Toto to run rootlessly across the landscape, the low, slow jazz giving a melancholy edge to their anxiety.
Oh, Toto, I thought, we surely aren’t in Kansas anymore. What kind of world is this slouching toward Hiroshima to be born? Like me and Phil Bradley, in this new world we are plagued with company, if not necessarily companionship.
We can’t get away from each other. That does not mean we are the same.
Akira Ishikawa, a Japanese lumberman, once told me Americans completely misunderstand Japan.
“It’s like hail out of a blue sky,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.” The same could be said of Japanese understanding of Americans.
In many respects the U.S. and Japan are reverse images of each other. The flaws of one are the merits of the other. Japan emphasizes the group, the U.S. the individual. Their strength is cohesion, ours liberty. They promote production. We promote consumption. Even when we do the same things, we do them differently.
For example, baseball in Japan is a peculiar station-to-station, hedgerow-to-hedgerow struggle, where the cleanup hitter, normally the most powerful batter on the team, is as apt to move runners along by bunting as he is to swing for the fences. It is a strategy that would provoke howls of protest from a typical American manager, who would rather let the hitter swing away in hopes that he might hit the big hit.
We score in bunches. The Japanese are satisfied to put lone runs up one at a time. It is possible – in fact, almost unavoidable – to make too much of this, but this is how Toyota would play baseball. In business terms, think of it as a willingness to sacrifice immediate profits for market share.
We want to rack up the big numbers right away. Toyota (or Nissan, Honda, Sony, Matsushita, ad infinitum) would be content to scratch out a run here and a run there until eventually it had amassed an unassailable lead.
Economics is ultimately depressing. That’s why we have philosophy, religion and baseball.
Bradley swung. He bounced a single up the middle, driving in the run. He rounded first and came back to the bag, peering into the stands. It’s nice in these troubled times to have something to cling to, I thought.
Yer a bum! I yelled.
Seeds flew.