So, I’ve decided in order to practice my Japanese, I wouldn’t follow the World Series through American websites, but solely through Japanese ones (as of today). I have a teacher at my school that loves to talk to me about baseball so I’ve gone out and learned how to say most things about baseball in Japanese so I can actually read and understand the articles (mostly).

It’s got me really wondering how Japanese feel about the fact that we call it the “World” Series despite the fact that only one team outside of the US is eligable to play in it. Last year I turned on the TV in late November to see David Ortiz playing in a game. I was quite sruprised to see him playing with an assortment of all-stars from different teams. I was also surprised to see that they were playing here in Japan against Japanese all-stars. After some serious digging on the mlb.com website (it wasn’t on the front page, or anywhere near the front page despite the fact that I was watching a game whilst searching), I found that it’s a bi-annual seires that’s been going on since 1986. Japan has only taken one series (1990) but it hasn’t always been a blow out for the US. See this site:here and this one for an interesting history of US-Japan baseball relations (scroll to the bottom to read about the 1990 series the US lost).

Now that I’ve bashed America about it’s baseball arrogence, let’s turn to Japan. I don’t know if you can call it arrogence or just nationalism, but the coverage of the Leauge Series is, well to put it nicely, non-existent. Today the White Sox and Angels played their first game and the coverage of it on Yahoo! Japan is about three paragraphs long. The White socks have a Japanese player on their team, Iguchi (I forget his first name and can’t read names for crap). I know in detail about how he did. I know he went 1 for 4 with a single in the third. I can also tell you exactly how he got out in those other three at bats. After that, some guy named Anderson hit some home runs and the Angles won or something, but hey! Taguchi’s Cardnals start their games tomorrow!

Here is a translation of the Yahoo! article:

[Chicago, October 11th] The America Professional League League Championship Series (best of seven) on the 11th the American League (White Sox vs Angels) had it’s first game. The Angels held on for a 3-2 win in the opener.
Infielder Iguchi of the White Sox (batting second, playing second) in the third inning of the opening game had a single to short center and was 1 for 4 in the game. In the first inning he flew out to first, flew out to left in the 5th and flew out to short in the 8th.
The Angels took a 3 run lead in the early innings off Anderson’s homerun and such. In each the third and fourth innings the White Soxs scored runs off Kreede’s homeruns and stuff. However hampered by the Angels’ relief pitching and defense, they couldn’t get one more run.
The National League series is the Cardinals, the team Taguchi is affiliated with, versus the Astros and starts on the 12th in St Louis.

Two things don’t get translated over. One is the cute way the teams are refered to after the first paragraph. The first time the teams are said, the full name is written out. Every other time it’s the first letter of the team plus the Japanese word for Army, so the Angels turn into the A-army and the White Sox turn into the Ho-army (going by the way “white” is writen in Japanese ho-wa-i-to). The other thing is, the way the last paragraph is writtenin Japanese, it makes Taguchi the more important part. I couldn’t cary it over to English without making it too alien to be understood (ie some bablefish translation). Taguchi, while having contributed a lot, is actually a bench player for the Cardinals.

Brian Schuch