David Jett Explains Baseball
No crying, please.
Last night I had my tv set to TNT, not for any March Madness nonsense, but for AEW Collision (rasslin’!) which was airing directly after the Gonzaga/Houston game. As the game ended with a Houston victory, Gonzaga player Khalif Battle was emotional and crying over their elimination from the tournament. Khalif was walking off the court with his jersey pulled over his face like he was trying to escape an apartment fire. And all I was thinking about was the quote from A League of Their Own when Tom Hank’s Jimmy Dugan said “Are you crying? Are you crying? ARE YOU CRYING? There’s no crying! THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!” And this is one of the many reasons that baseball will always be superior to basketball. Fight me on this. I’ll go through you like drunken New Yorkers chasing a Red Sox fan through the streets of the Bronx, Warriors style.
There are many great baseball films: Moneyball, Major League, The Natural, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams. But A League of Their Own may be the greatest baseball movie of all time simply due to its showcasing the wacky parade of characters that comprise professional baseball.
“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
Last week I watched the opening two games of the baseball season. The LA Dodgers took on the Chicago Cubs (full disclosure: I was born in Chicago) in the Tokyo Dome in front of 45,000 ravenous Japanese baseball fans. Over the past couple of decades, baseball has become very popular in Japan and American baseball players, even the lesser-known ones, are treated like superstars. Mexico and Cuba were once the pipeline for non-American baseball players, but the popularity of baseball in Japan has grown to the point that all 30 MLB teams have had at least one Japanese player on their roster. At the Tokyo Dome games, the Japanese players for the Dodgers and the Cubs were clean shaven and looked like they could be executives at a Fortune 500 company, while the American players all had bad beards and looked like they just came from doing tequila shots at a hooker’s trailer in Florida.
So I’m watching the first game, and as a new batter is coming to the plate, I notice something peculiar in the stands. There’s a diminutive young Japanese woman going up and down the aisle steps…and get this…she’s got a fucking pony keg strapped to her back! The pony keg is almost as big as she is. She’s slogging this thing all around, selling draft beer to spectators. My first thought was “oh, my, this poor little girl is having to drag this thing around like it’s some kind of Greek mythology punishment!” Turns out it’s a thing there. It wasn’t like “oh, not enough big men showed up to work so strap this pony keg to Fumiko and she can do it.” No, they are specifically young women. The are called biiru no uriko, which roughly translates to “beer girls.” Most of the time they work for the beer companies and not the stadium. Some beer companies require them to adhere to certain beauty standards and don’t allow them to work past the age of 25, like they were in a 90’s boy band. But they are a big deal, as you would imagine, and fans regularly get their pictures taken with them. They sometimes get on their knees to serve the beer. It’s kind of a genius move.
During these two games, Japanese fans got to see their countrymen Shota Imanga pitching for the Cubs and charismatic Shohei Ohtani at the bat for the Dodgers. Shohei Ohtani reminded me a lot of New Japan/AEW wresting great Kazuchika Okada. They look like they could be brothers. Now, before you say “you’re probably one of those idiots who think all Japanese people look alike,” let me assure you that I’ve watched a ton of New Japan Pro Wrestling (a lot of it broadcast from the Tokyo Dome) and I am familiar with Tanahashi, Naito, Takeshita, Ishii, Sanada, Suzuki and more. Ohtani doesn’t look like any of them. Just Okada.
Speaking of Minoru Suzuki, one of his nicknames is The Murder Grandpa. Here’s a pic of him. He’s getting older and he absolutely looks like he would murder you.
Another interesting cultural thing: in Japan, when athletes are announced, the order of their names is reversed. For example, if Suzuki was wrestling in the US, he would be introduced as Minoru Suzuki. In Japan, it’s surname first, as in Suzuki Minoru. So from now on, I want to be known as Jett David, like I’m a robot friend of Ultraman.
I kind of got off topic there, but it ties right back into baseball. One of the things I like about baseball is the pacing. Some people find it boring, but if you know the strategies and techniques, it’s actually fascinating. I’m not hear to convince anyone to watch, or to even explain the rules, but I would find a no-hitter game as exciting as one with multiple home runs. The pacing also allows for the television announcers to pontificate on the backgrounds of the players or to go entirely off topic, much like this article.
You might here announcers say stuff like this:
Bradey coming up to bat. Bradey comes from a long line of spot welders in Minnesota, but he decided to take up baseball and was ostracized by the family for a while there. But the kid hung in and now his family weld metal baseballs to their mailboxes to honor him. Swing and a miss. His wife comes from Canada, and during her college days, spent 3 months in a Korean prison for randomly kissing other people’s dogs. Strike one!
Pete Crow-Armstrong, known as PCA, is an outfielder for the Cubs. He’s a superstar in Japan less for his playing and more for his hair. With his helmet on, he looks like that kid from the movie Powder. With the helmet off, he has short blonde hair with stars dyed in, and he looks like Eminem was called up from the farm team.
His mother is actress Ashley Crow, who was a regular on the tv show Heroes and played the cheating wife at the beginning of the movie Minority Report. His father is actor Matthew John Armstong who has been in one episode of almost every tv show since the year 2000. He was in 8 episodes of Heroes, which is where I’m assuming he met Ashley. “Save the cheerleader, save the world. Also, hook up and give birth to a kid who will one day look like a Temu rapper and become a celebrity in Japan cause hair.”
The opportunity for announcers to ramble at length about the most random stuff, like I did above, has given rise to many celebrity announcers such as Harry Caray and Bob Uecker.
The seemingly perpetually drunk Cubs announcer Harry Caray became famous during the early days of cable when superstation WGN broadcast Cubs games nationwide. A second round of celebrity came with Will Ferrell’s impression of him on Saturday Night Live. I listened to a lot of Harry Caray, and as impossible as it may seem, Will’s impression was not that exaggerated.
Bob Uecker, a former baseball player, was the play-by-play man for the Milwaukee Brewers. I never saw a lot of Brewers games, so I knew Bob primarily from his hilarious appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and later on David Letterman. He was a regular guest and was in character much of the time. The character was an average player (which he was) who thought he was one of the greats. If Will Ferrell had done an impression of Bob, I imagine it wouldn’t be far off from his character in Anchorman. The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald was friends with Uecker and often told incredibly funny stories involving him. Here is one of my favorites:
Rounding third back to A League of Their Own and the no crying scene…only a movie like this and a game like baseball can give you a quote like this, which is what made Evelyn cry in the first place.
Jimmy Dugan: Evelyn, could you come here, you got a second? Which team do you play for?
Evelyn Gardner: Well, I'm a Peach.
Jimmy Dugan: Well I was just wonderin' why you would throw home when we got a two-run lead. You let the tying run get on second base and we lost the lead because of you. Start using your head. That's the lump that's three feet above your ass.
Throw in some chaw and dick scratching, and folks, that’s baseball.
BONUS CONTENT! Here’s a video about the Japanese beer girls.