Everything They Had (14 page)

The Cardinals were an organization in transition, and Smith enjoyed playing there but eventually got into a contract hassle with Augie Busch and, to his delight, was traded to the Dodgers. He was pleased to be going back to California, which was his home, and delighted to be playing for the Dodgers. They were, he thought, just one player—and a certain amount of toughness—away from being a great team. He was fascinated by the Dodgers as an organization; it did all the little things well: It scouted the minor leagues carefully; it taught fundamentals; and it looked for the type of player who would fit in with the new clean-cut, California Dodger tradition, which was, of course, different from the older, flintier Brooklyn one, for the tradition must fit the locale. Dodger Blue—the idea that they were not only cleaner but somehow spiritually superior to other baseball players—sold well. The seats were always filled and the teams were good, albeit not quite good enough. They lacked the inherent meanness of some of their opponents. Tommy Lasorda was a good front for it all, a man of the organization who not only articulated the team's myth but propagated it himself. Walking Eagle, some of the older players called him, meaning that he was so full of shit he could not fly. It was a handsome new media team for the brave new media world.

Smith was always amused by the idea of Dodger Blue and Dodger harmony; in its own way, it was one of the most divided teams he had ever known, as much wrought with truly petty jealousies as any team could be. Still, he admired the organization, the sheer professionalism of it on every level. He knew that Al Campanis had understood free agency before any other general manager in baseball and had signed all of his relatively young players to what seemed like generous long-term contracts. Generous they were the day they were signed; but within a few years, $300,000 a year was what utility players were being paid. As the contracts were about to run out in the past year or two, Smith had tried to warn his friends on the team that the Dodgers would not re-sign them, that they would turn to the younger players they had been stockpiling in the minors. But none of them really believed him. They were
Dodgers
, men of the organization; Walking Eagle was their buddy and they had been good to the organization, and they were now sure that it, in turn, would reward them. Smith was right, of course, and the Dodgers did not even try to sign Steve Garvey when he became a free agent. Soon Ron Cey and Davey Lopes were also gone, as was Reggie Smith.

It was a tough, well-run organization, Smith understood, a place absolutely without illusion or loyalty.

A month after he twisted his knee, it was still giving him a lot of pain. He was pinch-hitting now, which meant that instead of seeing bad pitches four or five times a game, he was seeing them only once. And that meant he was pressing even more.

The Japanese press was beginning to needle him. There were references to him as “the million-dollar pinch hitter.” It was too bad, one sportswriter noted, that his body was so old, because he was certainly trying hard. “But, fortunately, our young Japanese players are so good that we do not need Smith-
san
.”

“It's getting harder and harder for me,” he was saying as he got ready to go to the ball park in Osaka. “I can't show what I can do. I keep wondering why they brought me here. Why did they want me so badly? If they want their Japanese counterparts to be bigger stars, then OK, but I could have stayed in America. I pop up now and they spend half the paper writing about it, discussing it, analyzing my swing.” He paused. “You know, one of the reasons they told me they signed me was that they wanted to measure their best against genuine American stars. But then they back away from it. Sometimes I think the most paralyzing thing in this game—probably in this country—is the fear of failure. They would rather not try at all than try and fail. But to be an
athlete
, I mean a real athlete, you have to have the courage to try, which means the courage to fail.” He shook his head.

Hector Cruz, one of the three Cruz brothers and Smith's one
gaijin
teammate, met him in the lobby. They got into a cab and headed for the ball park. “Reggie,” said Cruz, “you are the best I've ever seen at getting around in Japan. You never get lost. You just get in a cab and they look at you and take you to the ball park. Maybe it's the haircut.”

Cruz was having an even harder time than Smith. Part of it was language. Smith spoke English and, thus, the interpreter could readily connect him to the team. But Hector spoke Spanglish, and on the way from his native Spanish to their Japanese a great deal got lost. Then there was the cultural difference exhibited in style, attitude and body language. The Japanese were formal, disciplined; indeed, tight. Their body language was unbelievably formal. Even the baseball players seemed as if they should be wearing blue suits. Cruz, by contrast, was loose. Everything about him was loose—his body movement, his attitude. Japan was not easy for Hector, nor, for that matter, for his brother Tommy, who had played the year before for the Nippon Ham Fighters. The time a batting coach tried to correct Tommy's swing, he simply looked at him, dropped his bat on the plate and left the ball park. On another occasion, there was some difference of opinion on whether or not the team was going to pay Tommy Cruz's utility bill, as his contract promised. He showed up for a game one night quite angry because the bill had not been taken care of. He would not, he insisted, play in the 6:00
P.M.
game unless it was done. No one took him very seriously. At 5:45, he returned to the clubhouse, dressed and left the ball park. They caught up with him outside the park and persuaded him to come back. But Japan had not been easy on the Cruz family, nor had the Cruz family been easy on Japan. Hector had been injured early in the season, but now he was ready to play. The team was winning, however, so there was no need to replace a Japanese player with a
gaijin
.

Smith and Cruz arrived at the ball park already dressed; the facilities were too primitive to shower there. There were still more than three hours to kill before the game. The Japanese sportswriters filled the Giants' dugout, so Smith and Cruz sprinted to the outfield. The sportswriters were eager to talk with an American colleague about visiting baseball teams of the past, particularly the old Yankees.

“We were very excited when Mr. Yogi was going to come here,” one of the sportswriters was saying, “because we heard a great deal about Mr. Yogi and how funny he was. But then he came here and we did not think he was very funny. We wanted him to say funny things, but mostly he told us to get out of his way. We do not think Mr. Yogi liked Japanese people.”

Another sportswriter mentioned Mickey Mantle. “Mantle-
san
,” he said, “liked the Ginza very much, we think. He and Mr. Billy Martin went to the Ginza and they stayed in Ginza all night, and the next day, Mantle-
san
struck out three times. A real Ginza swing.”

At the ball park, Smith and Cruz seemed distinctly apart from their teammates. They stayed, after all, at different hotels and they did different pregame drills. The Japanese were deadly serious about their practices; they ran hard and exercised hard, and a good practice was considered important, a sign that a player was ready to have a good game. The
gaijin
s didn't work that way; by nature, they coasted through practice, assuming that what they were capable of doing was a given. It was part of the sticking point between the
gaijin
s and the Japanese. The far larger roles of the manager and the coaches in the Japanese game irritated Smith. There were 13 coaches on the Giants and 14 on the Hanshin Tigers. To his mind, that was far too much meddling.

That evening during batting practice, for instance, an American player named Steve Stroughter was getting instruction from a Tiger coach. “Look at that!” Smith said. “Just look at that. That batting coach is full of shit. Doesn't know a damn thing about what he's saying, but he's going to tinker anyway. The kid has been swinging that way all his life, but he's going to play with him anyway. Just a coach anxious to screw someone up.” He checked the coach's number. “Hey, Ichi,” he called to the team interpreter, Ichiro Tanuma, “who's number 84?”

“Katsura Yokomizo,” said Tanuma.

“He ever play Japanese baseball?” Smith asked. The distaste was palpable.

“He played outfield for Hiroshima,” Tanuma answered.

“Sure he did,” Smith said. “A great star there.”

It was not a good game for Smith. In the fourth inning, with the bases loaded and one out, he was sent up to pinch-hit. He grabbed a bat, but first he told Sadaharu Oh, now a Giant coach, that it was too early in the game to use him. “It is never too early to hit a home run,” Oh said.

The first pitch caught Smith by surprise. He had been expecting the Hanshin pitcher to waste two or three and, instead, it was the best pitch he had seen in two weeks, right over the plate. He hit a soft pop-up to shortstop. He was not pleased with himself. The game, which did not have a lot of hits, took more than four hours and ended with Yomiuri's winning 5–4. To the Americans, the Japanese game seemed interminable; by contrast, the Japanese do not like telecasts of American games, which they find far too short.

Smith had hoped to be playing regularly by early June, but when he finally tried, his knee buckled completely. He would be a pinch hitter, it appeared, for quite a while, if not the entire season. Now the Japanese press was riding him hard. One paper thought he did not smile enough. Another quoted the Giants' general manager about how fortunate it was that Smith had only a one-year contract.

“That's mild,” Bob Whiting remarked, like a veteran family counselor, involuntarily expert at watching the breakup of Japanese-American baseball marriages. “It won't get really good for another two weeks,” he said. Two weeks later to the day, Whiting phoned. “It's begun,” he said. “You have to know how to look for it. The tip-off came all last week. The camera on the televised games kept showing Smith and Cruz in the dugout. No one ever said anything, but the implication was always that they weren't paying attention and that they didn't care about the team. What they really feel is that Smith should be more contrite, that his face and manner should show more obligation—that he should be more Japanese. So today it's finally hit one of the tabloids.”

“FIRE SMITH” was the headline. “The Japanese have a
gaijin
complex,” the story said, “and it is being taken advantage of. The
gaijins
come here and don't do anything and Japan has become the laughingstock of the world because of it. What is a powerful economic giant like Japan doing hiring someone like Reggie Smith? We're one of the seven advanced nations of the world. Occasionally, he'll come to bat and get a hit as a pinch hitter and management will say thank you, and he'll answer with a superior smile. ‘I'm a major-leaguer.'”

Only if the Giants fired Smith and sent him home to America, the paper said, would the rest of the world respect Japan.

By late June, after a month of that sort of thing, Smith would sometimes wait in the locker room for more than an hour after the game, until everyone else was gone. This particular night, the Giants had taken an early lead, and so he did not even have to pinch-hit, and now, as he got on the subway with some friends, he said, “You know, it looks like baseball, it smells like baseball, but it isn't baseball at all.”

Slowly, he began to heal. In July, he returned to the line-up full-time. He was pressing, and he struck out often and complained angrily about what he called the
gaijin
strike zone, a pitcher's delight. In Hiroshima, after being called out on strikes, he smashed up a couple of lockers. The Japanese were not amused. Nor was he; he was convinced that the Giant coaches not only did not back him up but rooted against him. Then, a little later, Oh benched him because he was “too nervous.” The Japanese press loved it. It looked more and more as if he would not last the season.

Shortly after that, he tried to reverse the tide of his fortunes by having a “backward day,” putting his entire uniform on backward, from underwear to shoes. The Giant players loved it, but the coaches were angry. He thought he was mocking himself, but they thought he was mocking something almost sacred. Japanese baseball. They ordered him to go in and change for batting practice. He refused. “I'll take batting practice in my mind,” he said. Perhaps the Zen b.p. helped, for he hit a home run and a double that night. But overall, things were not going well for him, nor for the Giants, who were in the process of blowing a ten-game lead to the Hiroshima Carp.

A few days later, he was involved in a major incident in a game against the Carp. The Hiroshima bench began to get on him in a way that he could only partly understand: “
Gaijin, gaijin!
” they shouted, and then added some incomprehensible words in Japanese. Of the words in Japanese, he imagined the worst. To him, that was insulting. In his mind, they were all double-A ballplayers. Double-A players did not have the right to ride someone from the bigs. He started yelling “Fuck you” at them. The Carp pitcher retaliated with a brush-back pitch. The umpire did nothing. The Carp pitcher threw another. Smith used his bat to flip some dirt in the catcher's face. “If you want to fight,” the umpire said, pointing his finger at Smith, “do it outside the stadium.”

“If I wanted to fight,” Smith answered, “he'd be lying on his ass on the ground right now.”

The next night, before the game, he went over to the Carp bench and told them in a very cool and lightly ominous way to lay off the razzing and lay off the bean balls. Otherwise, he would protect himself. He suddenly looked very much bigger than they did. Late in the game, with two men on, the Carp catcher called for a brush-back pitch: the pitcher refused and threw it on the outside corner. Smith reached out and hit a three-run homer that won the game and also ended a run the Carp had been making at the pennant.