A Yank In Japan

The low point in the life of Joe Stanka came when he chalked up an earned run average of nine, pitching in Class D ball down in Oklahoma, and got optioned to the Duncan Utts. Joe remembers the ERA with a kind of wry pride because he looked up the pitching records the next year to see if there was anybody in the whole of organized baseball who had topped (or bottomed) him for that season. He found that he ranked 26th from the bottom among the 3,500-odd pitchers in the minor leagues. As for what happened with the Duncan Utts, he says, "How can you win with a name like that? The guy who owned the club was Otto Utts. He thought the team should be named after himself. The night games were murder. Seven light poles, each with a 300-or 400-watt bulb. We had to wade through grass."

The lights are fine where Joe is playing now, and his earned run average has been highly satisfactory. He often pitches before giant crowds in beautiful major league parks. A national television figure, he is one of the best known of Americans to millions of baseball fans, a target for autograph hounds, a man so famous that on one occasion when he stopped in a furniture factory on some personal business he was recognized by the workmen and production stopped dead. He was a hero of last year's pennant race, pitching in four games in the big series, and has become one of the best-paid ballplayers in the country. The only trouble is the country is Japan.

Most Americans never heard of Joe Stanka. He is considered the best of the 20 Americans who are playing in the two Japanese major leagues: the Pacific and the Central. The 12 teams in these two leagues last year drew 8,718,000 enthusiasts to their games, a few thousand short of the total National League attendance in the U.S. Joe's team is the pennant-winning and perennially popular Nankai Hawks of Osaka, in the Pacific League. He lives with his wife Jean and their three children in a hillside house at the foot of Mount Rokko, just above Kobe and close to Osaka. Three of the six Pacific League teams are located in the Osaka-Kobe area, where some 6 million Japanese are concentrated. It is a 50-minute trip from Joe's home to Namba Stadium, the Hawks' ball park, and about an hour to the stadiums of the other two Pacific League teams in. the area, so Joe travels to most of the games each season merely by taking the subway or a short train ride. He is a 220-pound, 6-foot 5-inch athlete with a friendly pink face, sandy hair, clear blue eyes and an air of cool, quiet authority, all of which makes him an extremely conspicuous gaijin, or foreigner, among the baseball fanatics who are his fellow subway passengers.

In the clubhouse, where the other members of the Hawks treat him with friendly deference and consideration and the Hawks' road secretary, who speaks English, acts as interpreter, Joe Stanka is also an extremely conspicuous ballplayer. He towers so far over the rest of the team that he sometimes looks as though he had been optioned to the Little League. And on the field, when the Hawks arc playing the Hankyu Braves or the Nishitetsu Lions, Joe would be exceptional among Japanese pitchers even if he weren't so tall. Japanese pitching runs to sidearm and submarine work. This makes Joe's full overhand delivery, coming from such a height, all the more difficult for the Japanese batter and, incidentally, makes him seem even more than ever a gaijin to the fans. Tourists who drift into a baseball game at Namba Stadium in Osaka these days are startled to seethe mighty frame and beaming Occidental face of Joe Stanka rising above his Japanese teammates—though Japanese ballplayers are generally 5 feet 10 or so, tall by Oriental standards.

Americans, however, rarely see Joe Stanka pitch, and few of them—outside of Oklahoma—have ever heard of him. If they have, they think of him as a big fish in a small pond. But for a baseball player, what a pond Japan has become! "I know we drew 250,000 to 500,000 people in the street," Casey Stengel told an enthralled Senate hearing a few years back, describing a Yankee postseason trip to Japan, ' "in which they stood in front of the automobiles, not on the sidewalks." Japan is, in every respect, a baseball-mad country. Little kids play baseball—yakyu—in the rice fields. Workers keep their baseball mitts in their lockers and bolt their lunch in order to get in enough time for ketchibaru. American baseball expressions have been adopted intact (except for a brief chauvinistic period during the war, when Japanese substitutes were used), but Japanese pronunciation gives them a flavor of their own. "Pray borru!" the umpire shouts, and the broadcasters start jabbering about striku! Safu! outu! and homu run! White-jacketed vendors hustle about the stands selling softo drinku, Pepusi-Coru, icu creamu and cold hot dogs, not to mention peanuts, popcorn and the local equivalent of Cracker Jack. Almost every Japanese factory has its own baseball team. No geisha party seems complete without a bit of foolishness known as the baseball dance. In the springtime people by the thousands pay money to watch the intrasquad games of their favorite teams. The season opens early in April, and tens of thousands of fanatically loyal followers of the Flyers, Hawks, Giants, Tigers, Buffaloes, Dragons, Swallows, Whales and Carps fill the parks day after day until the season ends in October, and the Japan Series, between the pennant winners of the Central and the Pacific leagues, settles the championship of Japan. The work pace
of the nation slows to a shuffle as television and radio carry the games to the most remote rice hamlet and fishing village. College baseball, played in both the spring and fall seasons, draws crowds up to 60,000, gets full radio-television coverage and raises so much national blood pressure that it can only be compared to big-time college football in the U.S.

The full impact of Japan's total fascination with baseball was brought home to one American observer a couple of weeks ago when he and his wife took a cruise through Japan's beautiful Inland Sea. The ship was a luxury liner, and the cruise was the classic scenic voyage of Japan, through the famous 310-mile-long sea, past thousands of pine-studded islands rising from the salty mists like paintings on ancient Japanese scrolls. Traditionally passengers are supposed to watch the whirlpools go by, admire the white beaches and the lovely landscapes of the Inland Sea National Park, and savor the warm spring days when the apricots and azaleas and cherry trees are in bloom. And so the foreign passengers did. Most of the Japanese, however, were staring at a baseball game on the steamer's television set or avidly listening to the broadcast of the same game that was carried over the ship's loudspeaker system. The American asked a fellow passenger which big league teams were playing. "This isn't a big league game," the Japanese said indulgently. "This is a high school game."

How does Joe Stanka fit into this scene of national yakyu madness, and what has made him a Japanese hero? He had never been abroad before he landed at the Osaka airport a little over two years ago, and he spoke no Japanese whatever. He had grown up in a succession of small Oklahoma towns, the son of a railroad repairman, and in his high school days there was certainly no television coverage when one Oklahoma high school baseball team played another. Joe only dabbled in baseball in those days, and when he went to Oklahoma A&M on a scholarship he played basketball. He married at 17, dropped out of college and started to work on the railroad. The only baseball he played was a little semipro ball on the side, and though he was talented enough to come to the notice of the Dodgers' scouting system, nothing came of it then. It wasn't until two years later, in 1950, that baseball began to look like a better way of life to Joe. There was a railroad strike, he wasn't earning any money, and a baby was on its way. So he went into minor league ball, pitching for Ponca City in the K-O-M (Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri League) for $150 a month.

His memories are of bouncing around the country on buses and local trains, putting up at gloomy hotels, eating at greasy spoons and losing. After his deplorable start with Ponca City and his appalling record with the Duncan Utts, the Duncan team folded, the franchise was shifted to Shawnee, and Joe went to the new club in the last month of the season. There he won one and lost eight. He also delivered 10 wild pitches in his brief stay with Shawnee, walked 69 men, gave up 11 home runs and hit three batters. His earned run average wasn't exactly nine—it was 8.72—but for a long time Joe was under the discouraging impression that it was the highest in organized baseball. (A mysterious figure named Bryant of Hazard, Kentucky, in the Mountain States League, had the highest ERA that year: 14.79.)

During the winters Joe worked in an Oklahoma furniture store. In his second season he was back with Ponca City. He won 16, lost five, struck out 132 men and helped his team win the pennant. At Pueblo he won seven and lost 11. With Cedar Rapids the following season he won 12, lost eight, struck out 155 batters and turned in an earned run average of 2.35, best in the league. Wally Moon, Jim Lemon, Woodie Held and Jim Gentile were among the sluggers in the league that Joe pitched in; they were sharpening their fangs on aspiring minor league pitchers. With Macon, Joe won 16 and lost five, his earned run average of 2.99 just a shade higher than that of Luis Arroyo.

Joe's performance in Macon led to a trial with Los Angeles in the Pacific Coast League. It was a disaster. Joe pitched four innings and gave up four runs, achieving once again an earned run average of nine. But at Des Moines (Class A) he won 17 and lost nine—which resulted in his being yoyoed to Sacramento in the Coast League again.