Baseballhead:
Looking to the East

Michael Cox

The party's over. The ticker tape has fallen on the Yankees -- again. Steinbrenner has received a Bud Selig hug that was a little too friendly -- again. I have vowed to not mention the fact that the anticlimactic nature of the entire World Series placed it on an artistic par with Porky's 3, or that Porky's 3 would likely have earned a better TV rating. Nor will I mention the fact that FOX has got to reassess their wall-to-wall audio and visual attack before people will find it safe to watch again.

In any case, today 30 ballparks lay empty and the players all have phoned in their tee times -- okay, maybe not all the players. After all, we can still look forward to the 2000 All-Star Series, the biennial classic featuring the Major Leagues' best facing the cream of the Japanese crop.

Now, if you read this column on even a semi-regular basis, you may realize that it features a healthy dollop of sarcasm (in fact, a dollop healthy enough to have fed Mr. Creosote from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life). However, as it pertains to the All-Star Series, I truly love the idea of a MLB vs. Nippon Professional Baseball competition, even if it's only an exhibition (can't someone out there at least offer a trophy?).

There are only two problems: Little to no U.S. TV coverage, and little to no attendance this year by the Major Leagues' upper echelon of stars. If they were to be forced to play in street clothes, you'd have a trifecta.

These two negatives go hand in hand -- when you've got no Griffey, no Rodriguez (Alex or Ivan), no Sosa, no McGwire, not even a freakin' Clemens, you can't expect Fox Sports Net to pre-empt Xtreme Sports Bloopers IX: Skaters get Crotched.

But wait, you say, Barry Bonds is going to make the trip! And Randy Johnson! And so is certain Rookie of the Year Kazuhiro Sasaki, and Richest Man in Baseball ™ Carlos Delgado!

To that I say that aside from Johnson, many Americans couldn't give a rat's ass about these guys. Bonds has been branded "surly" by the media to the point where people don't see that he's the greatest player currently in the game, Sasaki is a rookie (over here), and Delgado plays in Canada. The stats might be there, but the Q-ratings aren't.

That's a shame, because this series deserves to be much more popular. Think what you will about the caliber of NPB yakyu (the term for Japan's brand of baseball, not for baseball itself), but watching Japanese ball is a thing of beauty. Fans will fill the Tokyo Dome and the other domed parks in this series, but few Stateside will even know they're playing.

In fact, with the World Series over and not even any new Darryl Strawberry drug busts to write about, every U.S. baseball site (except ours) completely ignored the Japan Series. In fact, click the "Japan Series" link on mlb.com, and you get a six-month-old report on the Cubs-Mets season kickoff. Come to think of it, the MLB home page still features an embarrassing Subway Series logo with the score, "Yankees 4, Mets 7." These bozos now want to run all the team sites as well?

In case you hadn't been reading here, the 2000 Japan Series was a much-anticipated battle between the 1999 champion Fukuoka Daiei Hawks and the Yankees of Japan, the Yomiuri Giants. The team's managers, Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima respectively, are legends in Japan dating back to their glory days as Giants teammates. Surely you at least recognize Oh, who holds the professional baseball career home run record?

After going down two games to none, the Giants roared back to win the next four games for their first title in six years, the 19th in their history. You wouldn't have found this information on ESPN.com, Sportsline or pretty much anywhere but Strikethree.com, so please patronize the fine advertisers who make our coverage possible! Love our advertisers! Be our advertisers! Never forsake them for other sites' advertisers, for they are the beautiful ones, the golden childr--

Er, I digress. What I really want is to get to see the All-Star Series on TV at a time other than 3 am on eight consecutive Wednesdays beginning a week after it's over.

Come to think of it, why don't they play half the games over here? Don't you think fans in a few of the warmer-weather cities would pay to see this? MLB's publicity machine gets people to pay $50 a seat for a home run derby and crappy celebrity "challenge" prior to the Midsummer Classic, so why can't they induce folks to cough up $10 apiece for a U.S. vs. Japan tilt? Play one at SkyDome, one at either Enron or the Ballpark in Arlington, one at the BOB and one at Dodger Stadium before heading to Tokyo and points East. Prime time games for Fox Sports Net, or better still, ESPN.

Sell some crappy MLB-designed All-Star Series shirts (as opposed to crappy counterfeit shirts) on the Web, and award some kind of meaningful prize to the eventual winners. Of course, the current eight-game format would have to be changed to a nine-game series, but I'd accept that. Is all this really so hard?

I suspect the problem lies in Bud Selig's total unwillingness to recognize that a vast world of baseball lies outside MLB's door. People might take to the Japanese players and start buying Orix Blue Wave merchandise rather than Brewers gear! Soon we may be a nation swathed in the colors of the Yokohama BayStars, knowing better than to laugh when Bob Costas refers to Nippon Ham's baseball team, the Fighters, as the "Ham Fighters!" Oh, the horror!

Speaking of which, I want to pick up an Ichiro Suzuki jersey before he goes to the highest MLB bidder. Where will he end up when he makes that jump to MLB? That's an interesting question, and not necessarily entirely within his control. The process is two-part: Bid and pay the Blue Wave for the right to negotiate, then try to make a deal with Ichiro.

Now, the process itself may frighten curious teams away -- the bidding process (called "posting") is blind. However, remember that these are not MLB rules we're talking about here, or even U.S. trade law. A "ballpark" might be established by as little as phoning the head of the parent company and asking, and the amount needed
to win might be determined by waiting until the other bids are in, then going to dinner with the president of the Orix Co.

Not to say that's for sure, but we are talking about a country where landlords demand a bribe before they'll let you rent.

Then, however, it's up to the winning bidder to make a deal with Ichiro, who may have ideas of his own on where he ends up. He may demand a short-term deal with the high bidder and quickly move to a city he'd rather play in, like Seattle (with friend Sasaki). What if there's no deal? We're not sure, but it's possible that the Orix Co. could pocket two bidders' money before the deal is done.

Let's just hope it doesn't catch on here -- the Royals wouldn't have enough players left to field a team.

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