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ITAMI, Japan - Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankees' $155 million import, grew up in a nation where joining a baseball team was like entering a religious order. The field was hallowed ground, the equipment sacred gear. Coaches were obeyed with bowed heads.
A baseball-centered life required absolute devotion to the team. Practice made perfect, so the young athletes trained year round with seldom a day off, their after-school drills commonly lasting seven hours. Pitchers sometimes threw 300 times in a single day; hitters took 1,000 swings. And then the team finished its work by picking up stray baseballs and raking the dirt to cleanse it of cleat marks.
Tanaka's success or failure will be among the biggest story lines of the baseball season that begins in earnest Sunday night, but the fuller narrative is about the step-by-step making of a 25-year-old pitcher and the impassioned approach of the Japanese toward America's national pastime.
Tanaka comes from Itami, near Osaka, in western Japan. But he chose to play baseball at a high school in the nation's far north, 900 miles away. The field froze during the winter months, and suffering the numbing cold was among the ordeals meant to build an athlete's stalwart character. The boys stamped on the persisting snow, attempting to level the slippery surface for a truer roll of ground balls.
A tall teenager, growing his way toward a husky 6 feet 2 inches, Tanaka had close-cropped hair and a wide, expressive smile. He attended special classes for athletes and lived in a dormitory with 40 teammates. Gatekeepers enforced a curfew and strict rules: no smoking, no drinking, no mah-jongg. Baseball provided its own family. Tanaka rarely went home.
'I lived so far away,' he said with a shrug in a recent dugout interview.
He seemed to his friends like two people in one: shy and good-natured off the field, yet so fierce and determined while on it that he could appear possessed. He roared as he threw a pitch. He pumped his fist after striking someone out. He scolded teammates for sloppy play.
Every young ballplayer shared a dream, to compete in the national high school tournament, known to most as the Koshien, an event in Japan as compelling as March Madness, as consequential as the World Series. Each August, 49 regional champions vie in the single-elimination tourney. Each game is nationally televised. The best players are plucked from obscurity and elevated to celebrity, as famous as any movie star.
The Koshien dates to 1915, and the 2006 tournament stands out as a classic. Two exhausted pitchers - Tanaka and another phenom, Yuki Saito - carried their teams to the final in an epic display of grit.
Emerging from the north, Komazawa Daigaku-fuzoku Tomakomai High School had breezed through seven regional qualifying games with Tanaka throwing every pitch. He allowed only two runs, befuddling hitters with fastballs and sliders. The team then proceeded to the venerated 48,000-seat Koshien Stadium, built in 1924 as the tournament's great cathedral. Brass bands and organized cheering sections awaited.
Tomakomai, the champion in 2004 and 2005, was going for a three-peat, something achieved only once. With Tanaka on the mound, the team was surely a favorite. But just as the tournament was beginning, the big-shouldered pitcher became ill with a stomach virus. It enfeebled him with fever, diarrhea and vomiting. The team doctor fed him fluids through an IV, but day after day, Tanaka had difficulty recovering his strength.
He nevertheless pitched Tomakomai to a 5-3 victory in the first of the six games the team played. His coach, Yoshifumi Kouda, then gave the ball to someone else in Game 2, risking everything by trying to rest his pitcher. The team fell behind by 7-1, and Tanaka was finally brought in during the third inning. Tomakomai rallied to win, 10-9.
Downcast players routinely wept after a defeat, winners and losers leaving with a handful of dirt scooped from the field as a keepsake. The crowds, on the other hand, grew only more excited as the relentless winnowing went on. A showdown was shaping up with the two best pitchers - Tanaka and Saito - as combatants.
In the two previous years, the Koshien crowds were drawn to Tomakomai, an underdog squad that had somehow beaten better-known teams despite the so-called snow handicap that limited its training.
But this time, the entire country seemed infatuated with Saito, who played for Waseda Jitsugyo High School in Tokyo. He had the fetching face of a heartthrob. With the temperature on the field sometimes climbing above 100 degrees, Saito had the habit of pulling a folded blue hankie from his pocket to pat the sweat off his face. He was affectionately nicknamed the Handkerchief Prince.
Kouda, the Tomakomai coach, said, 'We were almost cast into the role of villains.'
Feeling sickly, Tanaka had yet to be his sharpest in four games over 10 days while pitching a taxing 32 2/3 innings. The night before the final, Kouda asked his ace if he wanted to start the game, and Tanaka begged off.
'If possible, I want to pitch later,' the coach recalled him saying.
Kouda complied with his tired pitcher's wishes but did not allow him to rest too long. Tanaka entered the scoreless game with one out in the third inning. Both he and Saito threw masterly. Tomakomai took a 1-0 lead in the top of the eighth, but Waseda tied it up in the bottom of the inning. The two pitchers, like weary but indomitable warriors, kept the score at 1-1 through 15 innings, when the game was declared a tie. The teams would need to return to the precipice in a second championship game the next day.
Saito had thrown 178 pitches during the tie, Tanaka 165, a punishing workload that an American orthopedist might have likened to child abuse. But they both were obliged to pitch again with no rest. Saito started; Tanaka came in during the first inning with his team trailing, 1-0. Neither pitcher was as sharp as the day before, but their perseverance seemed to epitomize the fighting spirit of the Koshien. Waseda took a 4-1 lead into the top of the ninth, but Tomakomai rallied with a two-run homer.
Saito was obviously exhausted, the fatigue following him like a shadow as he stalked about the mound. Yet he continued to summon strength from somewhere deep within. He managed to get two outs, and the radar gun still timed his fastball at 91 miles per hour. But he needed to get past one more batter: his rival, Tanaka, one of Tomakomai's best hitters, who had a .345 average during the tournament.
Saito had already thrown 941 pitches in less than two weeks. Tanaka, who had thrown 742, took several practice swings, slicing into the empty air. He did not even look at Saito before entering the batter's box. The television cameras feasted on the tension, zooming in on one boy's face, and then the other's.
The Handkerchief Prince hunched his shoulders and went into his windup.
It was, Tanaka's coach said, Nihon no bi, a beautiful Japanese moment.
'Always Intensity'
Japan once had a popular comic book series called Kyojin no Hoshi, Star of the Giants. It was later adapted for television, movies and a video game. The stories were of a young boy who wanted to be a baseball great. He was relentlessly, even cruelly, pushed toward that goal by his father, who put his son through an onerous regimen of training. The show 'was grounded in the harsh work ethic that Japan embraced' as it 'clawed its way up from the ashes' of World War II, wrote Robert Whiting, author of several books about baseball in Japan. The All-Star Ichiro Suzuki, now with the Yankees, had such a father. So did many boys.
Masahiro Tanaka did not. His father, a far more restrained man who worked for a camera manufacturer, was a baseball fan but had not played the game much. He was satisfied to entrust his son to coaches.
The younger Tanaka's introduction to organized baseball was almost happenstance. He was in the first grade, playing with his younger brother near Itami Koyanosato Elementary School. Baseball practice was going on, and Tanaka stopped to watch his schoolmates. The coach, Mitsutaka Yamasaki, asked him if he wanted to hit, and the boy looked agile as he swung the bat. Tanaka's mother listened as the coach praised her son, and the family decided baseball might be a good way for Masahiro to make friends.
Yamasaki was extremely fortunate that year. He is 68 now and still coaching at the school, but he considers three boys from that single first grade class to be the best ballplayers he ever had. The most athletic, Hayato Sakamoto, played shortstop; the biggest, Yoshitaka Nago, pitched; Tanaka, who had the strongest arm, was deployed at catcher, the position he played until he was a teenager.
When the boys were in fourth grade, the coach had a change of heart. Nago's mother was much shorter than Tanaka's, and Yamasaki surmised that his catcher would end up the bigger player and thus the one who ought to pitch.
'I called in both sets of parents and told them I wanted to reverse the two,' Yamasaki recalled. 'Nago's father said, 'Every boy's dream is to bat cleanup and be a pitcher, so please don't destroy our dream.' Tanaka's father was very quiet and did not object. So we left it as it was.'
Baseball required extraordinary commitment from even the youngest boys. It was intended to be an athlete's one and only sport, the marker of his identity. Practice lasted from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. Traditional values were stressed. The worst thing a player could do was show disrespect; boys had to bow and take off their hats when greeting an adult. On the field, they were expected to focus without wavering. When a boy made an error, he was ignored instead of berated. He then had to beg for the ball to be hit his way again.
'Tanaka was an A-plus, baseball-oriented boy,' the coach said. 'He maintained his fighting spirit: never any nonsense, always intensity.'
When the three stars were in the sixth grade, Nago was injured falling from a tree. The coach again wanted to move Tanaka to the mound. 'But I had no one else who could catch,' he said. So the third boy, Sakamato, was asked to pitch. (He is now an all-star shortstop for the Yomiuri Giants, the country's most successful team.)
That year, each student wrote a short biographical essay for the school's graduation album. Tanaka's was simply titled 'Baseball.' It spoke entirely of home runs hit, runners thrown out, tournaments won.
His goal in life, he wrote, was 'to become a professional baseball player to become famous.'
From Catcher to Pitcher
In Japan, most elementary and middle schools used smaller rubberized baseballs, so adolescents most serious about the game joined youth clubs where the ball was regulation cowhide. Tanaka chose the Takarazuka Boys team, which practiced on an insufficiently lit field near his home. Its coach was Koji Okumura, a short, nimble man of some modest renown. In 1994, he had been Suzuki's personal batting practice pitcher.
Okumura did not start evening practices until 5:30 because some players lived an hour's bicycle ride from the field. Weekend workouts began at 8 a.m. and concluded at 4 p.m. Every conceivable play - when to run, where to throw, how to pivot - was repeated so often that proper technique was meant to become automatic like a reflex. Hitters often took 500 swings at practice, but Okumura did not favor nagekomi sessions, a tradition in which pitchers tried to strengthen their arms by throwing hundreds of pitches at a time.
The coach said he vividly recalled Tanaka's first practice. The 13-year-old somehow forgot to bring his baseball glove and was tearful with shame. 'I told him, 'O.K., do what you can,' ' the coach said.
The club had nearly 100 players, and the youngest were unlikely to challenge the 14- and 15-year-olds for a starting spot. Tanaka practiced with the reserves. But then, a year later, Okumura took greater notice of the eighth grader's potential. Tanaka was developing into an impressive hitter and an absolutely terrific catcher, able to pick off runners without even standing to throw. His arm was so remarkably strong and accurate that the coach proposed an experiment: Let us see if you can also pitch.
'I had never done it before, but I always thought pitching was very cool,' Tanaka said.
Okumura began using Tanaka as a pitcher in some games and a catcher in others. Either way, the boy's strong bat made him an important part of the lineup. When Tanaka entered the ninth grade, Okumura named him team captain.
By then, he was already so effective a pitcher that the catcher's mitt was set aside. Being captain suited his temperament.
'Off the field, Masahiro was always laughing at other people's jokes, but on the field he was different, ready to shout at you for any slacking off,' said Takuhei Kiriyama, the team's second baseman and now one of its assistants. 'To be honest, we all feared him.'
In Japan, high schools recruit the best young players with many of the same sweet-talking courtship rituals employed by American colleges. Tanaka could have won a scholarship to several schools, but he was encouraged to look elsewhere by Okumura, who said he had seen Tomakomai play in the Koshien and admired the way the team was coached. At the time, the school had yet to become a baseball powerhouse. It was better known for hockey and speedskating.
Tomakomai, located near Sapporo, the site of the 1972 Winter Olympics, did not actively recruit players from outside Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four major islands. When Tanaka and his coach visited the school, it was not just to look around campus but to prove that the hard-throwing 15-year-old was worthy of a scholarship. A tryout was held, and for Kouda, the high school coach, it was as if someone had unexpectedly shown up at his door with a precious gift.
'Tanaka was tall for a Japanese, and I could tell he was in the middle of a growth spurt and he'd get even bigger,' he said.
The teenager did not throw particularly hard that day. 'But his slider had such a wicked spin,' Kouda said. 'And his curveball, what can I say? It just dipped perfectly.'
A Sting of Dishonor
By tradition, athletes in Japan are supposed to observe the social pecking order of senpai-kohai relationships: A younger player, a kohai, is expected to do chores for an older player, including laundry. In turn, the older player, the senpai, offers his guidance.
Coach Kouda was unconventional in this regard. He required younger athletes to be respectful but not in any way servile. Like Okumura, he also did not force his pitchers to throw marathon nagekomi sessions, thinking they were a strain on young joints. That said, he was hardly a proponent of the maximum pitch counts common in the United States. He merely wanted his pitchers to save their strength for the games.
Tomakomai had an indoor training center, but Kouda preferred to hold practices outdoors, even if it meant skidding around in shin-deep snow. Ballplayers put on several undershirts beneath their jerseys; they wore gloves inside their mitts. 'It was really, really cold out there,' Tanaka said.
Practices usually began at 1:30 p.m., when classes ended, and lasted until 9. Athletes were given a short meal break, eating rice either flavored with egg or a mix of dried fish and seaweed. Schoolwork was only a footnote to sports.
'We never studied,' said Yuya Hayashi, one of Tanaka's teammates and the captain of the 2005 team. 'Practices eased up during exams, but we used the extra time to relax and sleep. It was a baseball life. There wasn't time for much else except maybe video games.'
Coach Kouda, who also taught social studies, considered Tanaka 'not too bad a student,' better than the many who rebooted their circuitry by napping in class. 'He didn't sleep; he took notes,' the coach said. 'Most other players tried to sleep in class, and I'd get complaints from their teachers. I never got one for Masahiro.'
Tanaka may have shown enormous potential during his tryout, but when he arrived as a 10th grader, he was told there was more need for him behind home plate. The pitching rotation was already set, and in the summer, Tomakomai won its first Koshien title. Tanaka was not on the tournament roster.
The next year, the coach offered him a choice, pitch or catch, and Tanaka chose the former. At the time, he was thought to have the third-best arm on the staff, but as months passed, he improved so much he was routinely called upon during the late innings of important games.
'You could throw him into the fire, and he would always come out unscathed,' Kouda said.
Tanaka started only one of the team's five games during the 2005 Koshien as the team repeated as national champion. But by then, he was clearly the team's ace. He pitched in three other games, totaling 38 strikeouts in 25 2/3 innings and becoming a high school hero featured in national fan magazines.
Tomakomai was a media darling, and that only made things worse when reporters found out the school had been disgraced. On the night of graduation, in March 2006, several baseball players - all of them departing seniors - were seen drinking and smoking at a restaurant. They were under age.
In Japan, the group bears responsibility for individual indiscretions. Coach Kouda resigned, and the team withdrew from an important tournament. The guilty graduates, having caused such shame, fell to their knees, touching their foreheads to the floor and begging forgiveness from their teammates.
Players like Tanaka, uninvolved in the episode, nevertheless felt the sting of dishonor. He told a reporter he thought about giving up baseball.
The Handkerchief Prince
The news media moved on to other scandals, and Kouda was reinstated. But memories of the incident may have been another reason so much of the crowd favored Waseda Jitsugyo and its Handkerchief Prince in the classic 2006 Koshien, which occurred five months later.
In the bottom of the ninth of the final game, with the three-peat at stake and Saito pitching to Tanaka, the climactic at-bat was ordained to become something memorable. Many fans can still recount the exact sequence of balls and strikes. The YouTube video has been viewed more than 1.3 million times.
■ First pitch: outside slider, fouled back.
■ Second pitch: slider, swing and a miss.
■ Third pitch: slider, hit foul off home plate.
■ Fourth pitch: 91-m.p.h. fastball high and away. Ball one.
■ Fifth pitch: high slider, fouled back.
■ Sixth pitch: slider, grounded foul.
■ Seventh pitch: 90-m.p.h. fastball, outside corner, swing and a miss. Strike three. Game over.
Tanaka stared into the heavens as the Waseda team flooded the mound amid the enshrining decibels of the crowd. He did not weep. In fact, after the game, he said he was proud of the at-bat. He had taken aggressive swings but was simply overmatched. He courteously praised the Handkerchief Prince.
What soon bothered him, though, was the persistent coupling of his name and Saito's.
'How do you feel about him?' Tanaka was asked month after month. 'Honestly, I don't feel much about Saito anymore,' he would answer. Even after Tanaka became a professional, his teammates wanted entree into his memories: Hey, tell us about you and Saito.
After the Koshien tournament, the two pitchers were chosen for an all-star team that played five games in the United States. The young players referred to each other by nicknames. Ma-kun was something Tanaka was called as a child. Ma was short for Masahiro; kun was a term of endearment. Saito was similarly called Yu-chan. These nicknames were widely adopted by the public, and Ma-kun is now interchangeable in Japan with Masahiro Tanaka.
However closely paired, the two young ballplayers ascended on different trajectories. Saito went from Waseda Jitsugyo to prestigious Waseda University, where he had an outstanding collegiate career as a pitcher. He turned pro in 2011, but after moderate success, he was hit by the thunderbolt of injury. Shoulder pain made it impossible for him to pitch last year, and he is now attempting a comeback.
Tanaka turned pro immediately. He was still remembered as the young fellow who faced Saito in the 2006 Koshien. But he was also so much more, a big star, compared now to Japanese stars such as Yu Darvish and Daisuke Matsuzaka. That was Tanaka glancing down from the billboards, and him yet again and again in the TV commercials, selling Mitsuya Cider and Oronamin C, a carbonated nutrition drink. Ma-kun was the one enjoying Kirin beer with the song 'Volare' playing in the background.
A Mystical Force
Most Japanese baseball teams are named after corporate owners or sponsors. Each year, Nippon Professional Baseball conducts an amateur draft, and more than one ball club often selects an outstanding prospect. Four chose the 18-year-old Tanaka, and the Rakuten Golden Eagles, based in the city of Sendai and owned by an Internet marketing company, won a special drawing to claim him. The team sorely needed a boost. It had existed for only two years, finishing last both times.
Reporters asked Tanaka how he felt about joining the league's most woeful franchise. He answered with requisite politeness: 'I've always had the mind-set of having to prove something. In my high school, it was about winning championships. I am joining a team that will have to prove itself.'
His father, Hiroshi Tanaka, who is rarely quoted, wished his son well at the time, though he suggested perhaps Ma-kun should have considered college: 'He has been playing baseball all his life, and that's all he knows. If he quits baseball at age 20, there'll be nothing else he can do.'
Rakuten's manager was the plain-spoken Katsuya Nomura, already in his 70s and one of Japan's greatest catchers. He had watched Tanaka's duel with Saito and thought he was getting the better of the two. 'I knew big-league hitters would not like that slider,' he said.
Tanaka finished his first season with an 11-7 record and a 3.82 earned run average, good enough to be the Pacific League's rookie of the year.
His teammates were impressed with the teenager's swift adjustment to the pro game. Just as much, they appreciated his manners. He had received nearly $1 million as a signing bonus but was still a properly deferential kohai, sitting in the back of the team bus, unloading the luggage, raking the bullpen after practice.
'I asked him to pick up my laundry, and he did it,' said Takeshi Yamasaki, who was Rakuten's slugging first baseman. 'Tanaka was humble. He came from a good environment, good parents, good schools.'
Like other young players, most of them on the Rakuten farm team, Tanaka was obliged to live in the team dormitory until he turned 20. In this way, a team maximized dedication to the game and minimized predilections toward wild oats. Curfew was at 11 p.m. No girls were allowed in the rooms.
'I don't think the restrictions mattered so much to Tanaka,' said Marty Kuehnert, an American who had been the team's first general manager. 'He was used to being told what to do from morning till night.'
Overcoming Injuries
Tanaka's rookie year, impressive as it was, was no cause for somersaults. That same year, Darvish, 20, had gone 15-5 for the Nippon Ham Fighters with a 1.82 E.R.A.
Tanaka and Nomura, his manager, discussed how Tanaka might improve during the off-season and concluded he needed to work on velocity. 'That was a mistake,' said Nomura, who is now a baseball commentator. 'Pitching is more about command than speed. Tanaka focused on his velocity, and his form went askew.'
Tanaka endured shoulder inflammation, requiring medical treatment and then a short stint rehabilitating in the minors. He also missed time while playing for Japan at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. His record in his second big-league Japanese season was a respectable 9-7, but once again, the numbers were modest compared with the 16-4 of Darvish, his elder, his senpai, on the Japanese national team.
Since then, Tanaka's shoulder strain has occasionally recurred; back problems have troubled him as well. Pain forced him to miss occasional starts. For the most part, however, he has been healthy, taking the mound once a week, which is the Japanese routine, and piling up the innings.
Tanaka resisted the tradition of strenuous nagekomi sessions, the approach favored by Rakuten's old-school pitching coach, Yoshinori Sato.
'There is a way of thinking that an arm contains only a certain amount of pitches,' Sato wrote in a 2010 book. 'That's a negative way of thinking brought about by the American major leagues. You don't get hurt by nagekomi; you only get hurt by throwing improperly.'
Darrell Rasner, a former Yankees pitcher, was Tanaka's teammate. 'Over there, in spring training you'd see guys throwing 100 or 120 pitches a day in the bullpen,' he said. 'But Tanaka didn't do that. He knew how to get himself ready. And he knew you didn't have to put your arm through that.'
On the other hand, Tanaka expected to finish each game he started no matter how many pitches that took.
'He never wanted to come out, even if he was getting hit hard, which wasn't often,' said Marty Brown, who was Rakuten's manager in 2010. 'He's not the type to back off from anything.'
In fact, if the young pitcher had a major weakness, it was exactly that: He challenged every hitter, no matter how strong the bat, no matter how precarious the situation.
'Tanaka could be prideful,' Brown said. 'He didn't want to pitch around anyone. I told him veteran guys have to be smarter than that.'
Tanaka was certainly a craftier pitcher in 2011. He finished 19-5 with a 1.27 E.R.A., edging Darvish to win the Eiji Sawamura Award, Japan's equivalent of the Cy Young Award. Now a bona fide superstar, he was 22 years old.
Marriage to a Pop Idol
Tanaka was rich and famous and good-looking, so inevitably, he was asked about women and marriage. He answered these inquiries with bashful smiles and evasions.
In January 2010, Tanaka appeared on an amusing TV show called 'The Professional Baseball All-Stars Sports Festival.' Participants competed in oddball games before a studio audience. One host of the show was the minor celebrity Mai Satoda, who had a beautiful smile and by then a flagging career.
While still in high school, she had successfully tried out to be a so-called pop idol in the singing group Country Musume, or Country Girls. The vocal act was a creation of the promoter Yoshitake Tanaka - no relation to Masahiro. He said he found Satoda to be endearing and energetic if 'somewhat ditsy.'
The Country Girls, scantily dressed and singing numbers like 'Sexy Baby,' never became one of Japan's leading pop idol acts. With her career in need of a restorative jolt, Satoda received just such a lift by becoming an o-baka tarrento, literally a stupid talent.
She appeared occasionally on the TV quiz show 'Hexagon II Quiz Parade,' and audiences found her clueless answers to be immensely entertaining:
Q: Which country is the largest in North and South America?
A: Africa
Q: The Earth is a planet. The moon is a satellite. What is the sun?
A: Jupiter
Satoda's ignorance, whether real or a pose, was definitely a crowd pleaser, thrusting her to the center of an o-baka craze. So-called stupid girls were seen by some as nonthreatening and adorable. Satoda became a more frequent contestant on the show. Her celebrity peaked in 2007, diluted by ever more quiz show performers teeming with their own o-baka talent.
Satoda was 25 when she met Tanaka on the 'Sports Festival' show. He had recently turned 21. On Nov. 15, 2010, the couple revealed their relationship on their individual blogs. His announcement was a bit indirect: 'Good morning. It is cloudy in Sendai and a little chilly. You might know the news. I have been going out with Mai Satoda, the talent.'
The couple married in 2012. Satoda's public persona has since become a common one among the wives of Japanese athletes: the loving and supportive homemaker. The tasty, nutritious meals she prepares are the preoccupation of her blogs: chicken in a balsamic sauce, sea urchin cream pasta, pumpkin soup.
Ma-Kun Turns Out the Lights
For years, Tanaka discreetly avoided talk of pitching in the United States. Then, at a news conference in December 2012, he said he had informed Rakuten of his wish to play in America after the 2013 season.
On one hand, the timing was peculiar. His 2012 numbers - a 10-4 record and a 1.87 E.R.A. - were down from the year before. On the other hand, he measured himself by the yardstick of Darvish, and his senpai had successfully completed his first season with the Texas Rangers.
Money talks, and people usually listen. The Rangers had won a wild bidding war for the mere right to negotiate with Darvish, paying his team, the Fighters, a posting price of $51.7 million. They then signed the pitcher to a six-year deal worth $60 million. Darvish's annual salary was about two and a half times what Tanaka was then making.
How much would Ma-kun be worth? Two elements were at play. The posting arrangement between Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball was to be revised, portending a time when more money might go to a player and less to the team he left behind. Then there was the matter of Tanaka's performance in the coming season. How much could he make major league teams drool?
Tanaka's 2013 season turned out to be amazing, as enticing a come-on as reasonably imaginable. He was 24-0 and had a 1.27 E.R.A. Rasner, who was Rakuten's closer, time and again watched Tanaka from the bullpen as he toyed with a hitter's timing, varying tempos. He said, 'It was like he was playing a Nintendo game, pressing this button and that, the ball doing exactly what he wanted it to do.'
Rakuten won the league championship in a best-of-seven series against the Yomiuri Giants.
Tanaka was the losing pitcher in Game 6, throwing 160 pitches in defeat. But with Rakuten ahead, 3-0, in the seventh and final game, the Eagles' manager, Senichi Hoshino, announced a popular pitching change for the ninth inning. 'Tanaka!' he shouted, informing the umpire at the top of his lungs.
The crowd erupted as Ma-kun walked toward the mound. People well knew it was probably the last time they would see him pitch in Japan. And with the fans on their feet, with horns sounding and banners waving, they erupted even louder when the game ended perfectly with a final strikeout.
It was, once again, Nihon no bi, a beautiful Japanese moment.
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