Baseball And The End Of Life As We Know It
Pacific Magazine Sunday, April 05, 1992
Terry McDermott
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.