But it’s not just mannerisms. It’s also the play on the field. The Japanese players play crisply. Every action has a snap to it—swinging the bat, scooping up grounders in the infield, throwing the ball, and getting into position for a cutoff throw.
Intense practices—professional teams work intensely into the night during spring training, while their American counterparts often work just a few hours before heading off to play golf—are designed as much to train the mind as the body. “These drills are primarily mental,” one Japanese journalist wrote. “Yes, they do wear a player out, but that is necessary in order to develop his spirit. Athletics are essentially an act of will. You can always do more than you think you are capable of. It is our philosophy that only by pushing a player to his limits can he discover and develop the power to surpass them, and that is what these drills accomplish.”
The best place to see Japan’s discipline is on the mound.
It doesn’t matter who’s pitching. It could be Takuya Sakamoto, the starter who allowed just two hits in a 3–0 win against Saudi Arabia in the first game of pool play. It could be Yusuke Taira, who allowed Curaçao just three hits in Japan’s 9–0 victory in the next game. It could be Shuhei Iwata or Yuki Mizuma, who pitched less effectively but still won, 7–4, over the powerful team from Valencia, Venezuela. Or try Tomokazu Kaise, who pitched a hitless inning to close out Sakamoto’s one-hit 11–0 victory over Canada in the first game after pool play.
No matter who took the mound for Japan, it was Hideo Nomo who was really pitching.
Nomo was the Japanese pioneer in the major leagues when he joined the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1995. In eleven seasons, Nomo won 123 games, including a no-hitter with the Boston Red Sox.
Little Leaguers all over Japan imitate Nomo’s distinctive motion, which produces the sharpest curveballs in Williamsport and keeps the hitters off balance.
Sakamoto—or Taira or Iwata or Mizuma or Kaise—begins with a soft step toward the pitching runner. Carefully bending his back leg, he kicks out his front foot as if he was gently kicking a can, and then turns his foot up and away from the plate. As he draws his right arm back, he hesitates before bringing his whole body forward. There’s a moment when his body actually stops, in the middle of his motion. In practices, some pitching coaches have their pitchers stop at that point to make sure they maintain their balance. But the Japanese pitchers freeze themselves mid-motion every pitch. After the momentary pause, they whip the pitching arm forward from a three-quarters motion.
The motion helps to produce some of the best fastballs anywhere in the World Series—and the most wicked curveballs of all.
Other pitchers throw the curveball with some wariness. Most curveballs in Little League are really slower fastballs coming at a different speed with a different spin. Coaches teach their kids the “Little League curve,” a twelve-to-six-o’clock delivery that produces some spin but mostly slows the ball down. It’s a lollipop curve, a rainbow curve.
But the Japanese curve is a sharp snap. Move around the stands among the other coaches and baseball lifers, and the snap of the Japanese deuce produces gasps. Did he really do that? Yes, and it’s the kind of pitching that allows an average of just one earned run every game.
Baseball is different for Curaçao. The old saying about Caribbean baseball is that you can’t walk off the island. Young players are eager to show some muscle when they get up to the plate, do something flashy that catches the eye of coaches and (some day) scouts.
The Caribbean game begins with the players’ sinewy strength. These elastic bodies stretch into motion, rearing back to pitch or leaning back to swing the bat. Even the fielders have an elastic quality, as they range into the hole for a ground ball or extend their glove hand to throw a ball across the diamond.
The Caribbean game grows out of the ground. The rock-strewn infields and the grassy outfields (occasionally populated by goats on lunch break) make fielding a random activity. The randomness of the bouncing ball gives Caribbean players unmatchable reflexes on grounders. The unevenness of the ground everywhere—the infield and the outfield—provides the feet extra sensitivity to what lies beneath. The feet are the most sensitive part of the body, but affluent Westerners lose the feel for the ground because the ground is usually so smooth and their shoes are equipped with high-tech shock absorbers. But when you have to lope over thick and thin grass and pebbles, the field a random pattern of soft and hard spots, you develop an ability to read wherever you run.
But as important as these topographic conditions, Curaçao’s Little League programs are built on the dictatorial discipline of the managers. Figures like Frank Curiel and Vernon Isabella demand, and get, strict obedience.
European school traditions affect everything in Curaçao, from career tracks to sports. The Dutch schools are hierarchical. The teacher demands, and gets, absolute obedience. Kids wear uniforms to schools everywhere. No T-shirts and jeans. And they’re subject to rigorous curriculum and tough tests. Kids take oral exams, administered off the school site to prevent favoritism.
That strictness gets carried over to the ballfields. When Vernon Isabella manages his team—whether it’s the Refineria Isla or the Pabou League all-stars—he demands total control. He tells the kids that their only job is to win. And when their attention wanders, he scolds them. If they crumble a little, that’s too bad. They need to learn how to be tough.
Randy Wiel, a basketball coach who was once one of Curaçao’s best athletes, says he was watching the Little League games on ESPN and was intrigued—but not surprised—by what manager Vernon Isabella told his kids on the field. Because ESPN and ABC miked the managers, Wiel heard a lot that non-Papiamentu speakers like me missed. “He was telling his pitcher, ‘Are you going to pitch, or should I get someone else in here?’” Wiel says.
Vernon Isabella is no Tommy Lasorda.
I asked Isabella about his determination to win every single game and he smiled and raised his arm. “You play to win,” he said through an interpreter. “That’s why we’re here. The children need to know that.”
Curaçao’s greatest test in Williamsport came in the international championship game against Japan. As far as Vernon Isabella was concerned, only Jurickson Profar could guarantee that the Caribbean team advance to the final against the winner of the California-Hawaii game.
Sure enough, Profar carried the team. He pitched a complete-game shutout—a two-hitter, in fact—and scored a run in Curaçao’s 2–0 win. His only flaw was walking six batters, but that was more a sign of his respect for Japan than of any control problems.
The respect for the Japan team—especially shortstop Yuki Mizuma— was ever visible.
In the first inning, with a runner on third base, Curaçao intentionally walked Mizuma. Vernon Isabella asked the umpire if he could just send the hitter to first base without throwing any pitches, but the answer was no, you gotta throw the ball four times.
“It doesn’t matter what inning it is—you still have to make the big decision,” Isabella told me later. “The first inning could make the difference for the whole game. You don’t like the team to be down. I’d rather put the pressure on the other team. Make them hit the ball. Make them score the run without their best hitter. If you play against strong teams, you can’t let them have the advantage. You’ve got to keep them close.”
Curaçao took a 2–0 lead in the first inning on singles by Profar and Liberia.
Play at the plate.
In the third, with a runner on first, Curaçao intentionally walked Mizuma again. Fans filled Lamade Stadium with boos. Who does this guy think he is? Imagine! Walking a kid two times in one game! Why can’t he just let the kids play?
“My philosophy is that we’re up 2–0, and this guy comes up with a guy at second base; with one swing the guy can tie it up,” Isabella said, before noting that he pitched to Mizuma in the fifth inning. “That last time, the bases were empty. If he hits a home run, you’re still winning. So you have to face him like a man.”
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bsp; Face him like a man when it’s not too dangerous. Otherwise, avoid him.
That’s how Isabella manages all his games—whether it’s a singleelimination game in Williamsport or a scrimmage on dusty Frank Curiel Field in Willemstad. When I was in Curaçao, I watched one game in which Isabella pulled a pitcher in the second inning with the score 2–1. The game didn’t count for anything, and the move backfired—the other team hit the ball harder against the new pitcher. But Isabella was there to win—more important, to teach his players to play to win, no matter what.
Isabella’s field strategy could be drawn from On War, Baron von Clauswitz’s classic study of military strategy and tactics:
Use your best against the best. Avoid the battles you cannot afford to lose. Hit the other side at its weakest links. Survive first, then fight the next battle with whatever weapons are left.
What can someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, a country now on the ash heap of history, teach you about baseball?
A lot, actually—maybe even more than you can learn from someone from the Americas or Japan, where baseball has been suffused into the culture for more than a century.
I first approached Alexey Erofeev, the manager of the Little Leaguers from Moscow, because he seemed such an anomaly. Here’s a guy who teaches baseball in a place where the ground is frozen like stone from October to May—and where Cold War rhetoric once marginalized the game as a bourgeois, individualist, and exploitive opiate.
Erofeev is a thin man with thinning silver hair. When you think of Russians on the world stage, think Putin, not Yeltsin. He discusses baseball with the discipline of a KGB agent in a spy thriller. But he’s a lot nicer.
When Erofeev thinks about how to teach baseball to Russian kids, he thinks of lapta. In lapta, one of the games Erofeev played as a child, a striker stands at one base and hits a ball tossed by a teammate. When the striker hits the ball, he runs toward the other base (called the kon) and back. Fielders chase down the ball. Fielders get the runner out by hitting him with the ball, which is softer than a baseball.
Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, claimed that baseball evolved out of lapta when Russian émigrés moved to the American west in the mid-1700s. Whatever the value of Trotsky’s thesis, the larger truth is that history is full of games with bats and balls—cricket, rounders, pesäpallo, stool-ball. “People have always played these games,” John Gilmore, an American businessman who has made it a mission to promote baseball in Russia, told me. “Look at the hieroglyphics and you see the caveman with sticks and rocks.” Baseball emerged from a primordial soup of stick games. Sorry, Abner Doubleday fans.
Baseball as we know it in Russia came when the Olympics approved baseball on a trial basis in 1984. Soon, countries with no tradition of baseball put together instructional programs so they could field a team. The Soviet Baseball Federation came into being in 1986 and, with the help of their Cuban comrades, quickly established a presence at two of the country’s thirty-eight sports academies. By 1990, the Russians competed in the Goodwill Games, and in 1992 Olympic baseball began.
Little League chartered its first program in Russia in 1991. By 2005, seven Little League teams involving 105 players competed in Little League and Junior League, the programs for players aged eleven to fourteen.
When I talked with Erofeev, he volunteered right away that he didn’t think his Little League team had much of a chance in Williamsport. But even though he would love to win a game, that’s not what mattered to him. What mattered was taking home lessons on how the real stars play baseball.
Sure enough, Russia went 0–3 in the tournament. Guam beat Russia 6–2. Then Mexico beat Russia, 7–0. And then Canada beat Russia, 2–1.
But the Moscow kids didn’t look bad. The pitchers threw well, usually keeping the team in the game. The infielders performed well, too, showing they could turn a double play. Sometimes, nervousness led to some errors—but not often. The hitters struggled, but they had some good at-bats against intimidating pitchers.
Even though baseball remains a minor sport in Russia, Vikto Elkin and his teammates from Moscow’s Brateevo Little League showed good fundamental skills in Williamsport.
Moscow’s biggest problem in Williamsport was the curveball—the fact that they don’t throw it and the fact that they can’t hit it.
Erofeev does not let his pitchers even tinker with the curveball because he believes the medical research that warns against it. Other managers in Williamsport acknowledged the dangers of the curve…but just as quickly added that the need to win trumped those concerns. But Erofeev is an absolutist.
Not letting his pitchers throw the curveball can make them better pitchers, Erofeev insisted. “We can get hitters out with fastballs and changeups if we do it right,” he told me. “So we just have to do better. Sometimes, when you’re not allowed to do something, you learn how to do the other things better.”
Erofeev thinks he can teach his pitchers to throw three fastballs instead of one, and two good changeups. That should be enough. They’ll be smarter pitchers and enjoy the bonus of not wrecking their arms.
At the same time, Erofeev accepts the reality that other teams use the curve. “We need to learn how to hit curveballs,” he says. “We can hit fastballs, and we have the patience to hit changeups. But the curveball is new to us.”
Hitting a curveball is really no different than any other athletic feat, he says.
“It’s all about quick thinking leading to quick actions,” he said. “The mental aspect is more important than the physical right now. A good player thinks anywhere, on the field, in the dugout, at bat. If you think, you win. We need to get so that the players automatically move, they have instincts for everything that happens in a game.”
Even hitting the deuce. If you understand it, if you see it in your mind’s eye, you can learn how to hit any curveball. Can it be any harder than hitting a blistering-fast hockey puck while flying on the ice before a goon body-checks you while skating at top speed? No, Erofeev says.
Erofeev took up baseball when knee injuries forced him off the hockey rink. His command of a hockey stick instantly carried over to command of a baseball bat. He played outfield and shortstop for the Moscow Red Devils, one of the ten teams created immediately after the decision to bring baseball to the Olympics. The Red Devils won the championship eight times.
Sports are sports, Erofeev told me. Athletes thrive when they apply the skills and mental training from one sport to another.
“Hockey and baseball are team sports,” he said. “In both games, it’s very important to have good, quick thinking. To develop physical condition, I bring from hockey different running exercises. To make quick movements and good reactions, and concentration, it’s very important to have different exercises. When they grow, kids are interested in different exercises. They run races. There is no hard and stupid work. Only games, games, games. Both hockey and baseball use stick and balls. Two teams in a small diamond and one team with four players. Like passing the puck in ‘Ducks.’”
It’s a challenge teaching baseball in a place with no real baseball tradition and only about three or four months of real baseball weather. Baseball in Russia is played under primitive conditions. There are only a couple baseball diamonds in Moscow. Most games and practices take place at soccer fields, with a short left field and a deep right field—“just like your Fenway Park,” Erofeev says. But the fields are about as wellgroomed as Willie Nelson. And the Russians have little equipment. The players share gloves; helmets and catching gear are scarce, and coaches use their own money to buy balls. One of the benefits of winning a trip to Williamsport is getting free bats and other supplies to bring home.
But to Erofeev, limitations also offer potential advantages. Over the winter, Moscow’s Little Leaguers play sports requiring quick reactions and good hand-eye coordination.
“We play other games for physical reaction time and endurance. Different sports help to develop all the qualities needed for baseball.
When we started, we had awful physical condition. Now, there’s no need to develop condition. Now, it’s very much a problem to teach them how to stay strong and get quick, quick, quick.”
Darren Van Tassell, the technical commissioner of the International Baseball Association, was one of the first Americans to travel to the Soviet Union to teach baseball. He agrees with Erofeev’s approach.
Building skills, one by one, is an approach often lost on coaches and players in countries with baseball traditions—like the U.S. When you’re watching baseball on cable TV all the time, the tendency is to want to act like a major leaguer rather than learn the game’s fundamentals.
“There’s nothing natural about being an athlete,” Van Tassell told me. “It requires lots of work and repetition. The saying is that ‘practice makes perfect,’ but that’s not right. It’s ‘perfect practice that makes perfect’ or ‘practice makes permanent.’ If you teach the wrong way, you can make a player bad for a long time.…To get good production, there are physical things you do with the body—hands out fielding ground balls, waiting for a pitch, moving to the right and to the left. The way you hit the ball hard—that comes from good mechanics, and that’s what practice is all about.”
That’s the plan, Erofeev says—do all the little things right, and avoid dangerous temptations like the curveball.
“We care about the long term,” he says. “We want to make players for your major leagues. That means we have to do little things right now. Being here is not about winning. It’s about learning.”
Foreigners appreciate American baseball for its verve and power. But they’re often puzzled about why the Americans don’t have a more disciplined approach.
When I asked Vernon Isabella who the best teams were in the Little League World Series, he mentioned Curaçao, Japan, Venezuela, and Guam. I asked him about Hawaii and California, but he waved me away. “Yeah, they’re good,” he says. “But not as good as they should be.”
Little League, Big Dreams Page 26