The Arm (23 page)

For years, Japanese players refused to acknowledge surgery as an option. There was no fixing what was broken, because those who abide by yakyu aren't supposed to break. Masaharu Mitsui, a pitcher for the Lotte Orions and in 1974 the Rookie of the Year in Japan's Pacific League, ignored the stigma and asked Jobe to save his career with a UCL transplant in 1979. Choji Murata, the pitcher who vowed to let his arm fall off, relented after two years and became the second Japanese player to undergo Tommy John
surgery. Daisuke Araki's place in history is a bit more notorious: he was the first Japanese player with two UCL reconstructions, after the first snapped when he tried to return too quickly.

Araki spent six disappointing seasons with the Yakult Swallows before he agreed on surgery in 1988. Between the two procedures, Araki missed nearly four years. He returned in 1992, threw 201 innings over the next five years, and retired at thirty-two. His relationship with Koshien is complicated. He sees the fame, the riches, the legacy, and the opportunity Koshien gives to players from more than four thousand high schools around the country to partake of the same.

Then you look at his elbow. And Matsuzaka's, with its Tommy John scar from when he was thirty. And Tanaka's, with his UCL partially torn and Tommy John inevitable. And Saito's, he of the 948 pitches, with damage in his shoulder threatening to end his career at twenty-seven. And Araki wonders: How can he be loyal to this? How can he reconcile what he loves with a trail of broken elbows?

“We're in a good direction,” Araki said. “Generations change. So many high school managers are protecting the pitcher's body and elbow and they worry about them. And having many Japanese baseball players go to the US makes us change. We watch MLB and we get information on pitch counts.”

I asked for his favorite Koshien performance, figuring he would name himself. He didn't. “Daisuke against PL,” Araki said. He meant Matsuzaka's seventeen-inning, 250-pitch game against PL Gakuen, a powerhouse high school. “I want to protect the Koshien kids,” Araki said, “but in this game I completely concentrated on the game. And that's the Koshien character.”

The Japanese deify Koshien. Every year, Araki, now a TV commentator, goes back. In the summer of 2014, he was excited to watch one player: Tomohiro Anraku. There was one problem: Anraku and Saibi didn't make it to Koshien.

“His fastball,” Araki said, “is not fast enough anymore.”

T
HE NUMBER 772 MEANT NOTHING
to the woman sitting amid a crowd of parents at the Saibi High School practice. Long ago, she learned, the only numbers that matter at Koshien flash on the scoreboard. Everything else is immaterial.

“I'm so proud of my son,” Yukari Anraku told me, happily recounting how her boy became another kaibutsu. She and Koichi Anraku met at Koshien. They were college students and baseball fans who happened to work at the same concession stand. They fell in love at a baseball tournament and passed it on to their precocious boy. At three, Tomohiro started training to be a pitcher. Every day, he went to a nearby park, where Koichi made him throw strikes, even when he cried because he couldn't. On weekends, practices stretched to three hours. His parents massaged him afterward. “It just seemed like a regular practice between father and son,” Tomohiro said, allowing that “it might be too much for a two- or three-year old.”

They threw and threw and threw because, in Japanese baseball, “proper” pitching mechanics are paramount. The typical Japanese delivery is slow and methodical, with a gradual arm lift, a hands-above-head pause, a pronounced body turn to face third base, a bowing of the legs during the arm swing, a dip of the torso, and a whirring follow-through. Every little idiosyncrasy is a hallmark of a Japanese pitcher, almost embedded in his DNA. Anraku throws that way. So does Tatsuta. Mechanics, the belief goes, keep a pitcher healthy, impervious to both genetics and overuse. Generations of Japanese pitchers, the story goes, avoided arm problems throwing this way, although no known facts, evidence, or data beyond the anecdotal supports this.

Even though Yukari Anraku believed in her son's mechanics, she admitted: “I'm also worried about what his future is going to be. Injuries.” Tomohiro Anraku's elbow started hurting less than six months after his 772 pitches in 2013. He sur
vived Summer Koshien, his fastball creeping as high as 98, and almost immediately went to the early September eighteen-and-under World Cup in Taiwan, where he pitched three times in five days. Over eighteen innings, Anraku didn't give up a run, didn't walk a batter, and struck out twenty-seven against some of the best young talent on the planet. He was the best player in the tournament, better even than Yoan Moncada, the Cuban teenager whom the Boston Red Sox spent $63 million to sign.

During a tournament with Saibi on September 22, Anraku's elbow flared up in the first inning. “I didn't get injured because I was throwing too much,” he claimed. “I had some form imbalance. That's why I got injured.” Tired legs from the World Cup, he said, led to a mechanical breakdown. News stories in Japan theorized that the ball used at the World Cup was more slippery than a typical Japanese ball, causing Anraku to grip it tighter, which compromised his standard delivery. The number 772 never came up.

Six days after he got hurt and the swelling subsided, Anraku visited Kenshi Sakayama, a doctor who fancies himself a Renaissance man. He makes stunning wood carvings and creates flavor profiles for artisanal ice pops. His office is a nightmare, littered with paperwork, wood shavings, a freezer, autographs, and pictures of him with famous athletes. Sakayama wore his black hair shaved high and tight on the sides and in the back, a white lab coat with the collar popped, khakis, and sneakers.

The first thing Sakayama told me at his office was that for all the national interest in Anraku's elbow, nobody had asked to talk with him. He seemed genuinely offended by this. His cell phone chirped every few minutes. Two ladies wanted to confirm he would meet them for a boozy dinner at an
izakaya
, a Japanese pub, later that night.

Anraku was unconcerned that Sakayama isn't an orthopedist and has never performed a Tommy John surgery. He is a renowned osteosarcoma surgeon, helping those with bone cancer
return to a normal life. Still, Anraku brought his million-dollar arm to Sakayama and returned for appointments and MRIs three more times.

“Nobody has seen this,” Sakayama said. He sat at a desk chair in front of his computer, pulled up the images of Anraku, and pointed out his curved spine, a result of scoliosis, before clicking on the first picture of his elbow. “Clean bone,” Sakayama said, comparing it to an MRI of another teenager whose elbow had sprouted a bone spur that looked like a meat hook. The integrity of the bones in Anraku's elbow seemed of far greater concern to Sakayama than his UCL, even though Masanori Joko said Anraku had sustained an injury similar to Masahiro Tanaka's partially torn ligament.

Sakayama offered no diagnosis on the cause of the injury, though he did say that shortly before it, in an effort to impress some girls, Saibi baseball players one day banged on a nearby drum set. Anraku, the kaibutsu, struck with the greatest ferocity. Perhaps, Sakayama theorized, the elbow pain came from this recklessness born of raging teenage hormones.

“I know about Tommy John surgery, but I don't know much,” Anraku said. “I was thinking when I got injured I may have to have surgery. But the people around me said never do surgery while I was a high school student. It's not a good thing. Compared to the adult body, which can get cured faster, people said my elbow can get back within two months.”

During Anraku's visits, hospital staff spirited him to a private room. Sakayama wanted to use low-intensity pulsed ultrasound equipment to stimulate the elbow and promote healing, but insurance didn't cover it. So he prescribed rest. Two months wasn't enough. Anraku needed six months off. His absence meant Saibi would not be invited to Spring Koshien in 2014.

When he returned for the games leading up to Summer Koshien, Anraku's fastball topped out at 92. Between his sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays, six miles an hour had disappeared. Without its monster, Saibi lost in the regional tournament.

S
HOTA TATSUTA DIDN'T MAKE IT
to Koshien, either. In the semifinal of his regional tournament, he allowed eleven runs to the local powerhouse, Chiben Gakuen. Never before had he yielded more than three in a high school game. Tatsuta did not cry, although he had been conflicted about pitching in the regional. The tattered arms of Koshiens past were familiar to all Japanese and lamented by those who refused to buy into the mythology and perpetuate the cycle of overuse. Just a year earlier, Tatsuta, like so many others in Japan, learned about Tomohiro Anraku and marveled.

“When I was watching him throw 772 pitches, I was hoping he wouldn't break his shoulder and arm,” Tatsuta said. “I'm sure Anraku is the type of pitcher who does nagekomi all the time, but I wonder—if I were in that situation, I am not sure if I would pitch that many.”

Tatsuta's quandary was a fundamental test of his value system, of Koshien's viability, of Japanese baseball's future. Given his potential for fame and riches and legacy and glory, would Tatsuta continue to heed the stories of his father? At the mere mention of Koshien possibly adopting a tiebreaker, Masanori Joko wondered: “Can that game give the audience enough emotional satisfaction? I understand that rule is for the players' health, but it loses excitement. The game won't move people as much as it does now.” And now a nation of like-minded baseball fanatics would hear of Tatsuta's reservations and view him as a traitor, someone who dared debase a Japanese institution.

“If my team moved up in the tournament, I would have asked for help from somebody else for the middle of the games,” Tatsuta said. “Otherwise, that would eventually be a bad influence to the team itself. If I was overwhelmed, it would've been better if other pitchers pitched for me or for the team.”

I couldn't tell if Tatsuta was just one independent-minded kid or the leading edge of change in yakyu
,
a culture that exalts
pain and sacrifice and gets it wrong the same way Major League Baseball once did. Real sacrifice is not throwing and throwing and throwing and maiming a healthy arm for the sake of the team. The Japanese revere yakyu because the Japanese created yakyu.

“In both America and Japan, people do their own thing because they believe that's the right thing,” said Yasunori Wakai, the manager at Tatsuta's high school who accepted his plea not to throw every game. “We don't know which one is right, but I respect his choice. . . . Even though I respect that certain style, and I'm offering that choice to him, I grew up with that old culture. So to me, I still think Tatsuta is a bit strange.”

It would be unfair to call Wakai the anti-Joko, just as it would be to call Tatsuta the anti-Anraku. Wakai and Tatsuta harbor a healthy respect for tradition, even if Tatsuta believes that prudence is the best path to a healthy arm and Wakai embraces Tatsuta's unorthodox view. They're not proselytizing, not intent on starting a revolution.

When Tatsuta bowed out of a tournament final his junior year, Wakai didn't quarrel. He prides himself on open-mindedness and understanding other cultures, whether it's American baseball or the fashion his son is studying at college in New York. Others weren't as kind: a club coach threatened to kick Tatsuta off the team for refusing to pitch because he wanted to save his arm for 2011's sixteen-and-under World Cup in Mexico. A tongue-lashing from Tatsuta's father forced the coach to capitulate, and Tatsuta went out against some of the world's top competition, throwing 7⅔ innings in the closer's role without allowing an earned run.

“There are some people who understand what I am doing,” Tatsuta said. “I may not be right, either, but the biggest thing is I hope I prove that I am right in the future by becoming a pro.”

All Tatsuta wanted from Nippon Professional Baseball was a fair opportunity. People could judge him and consider him a
fool so long as they considered him at all. Tatsuta worked out at Yamato-Koryo High School daily. He wore bright yellow socks intentionally; he wanted to be seen, to show scouts that his philosophies on pitching never would hinder his work ethic. It was easy at times to forget he was just a seventeen-year-old who goes for a run when he feels disappointed, plays cell phone games in his free time, and doesn't have a girlfriend. Or that Anraku sits on the bus with his Saibi teammates and sings along, because he secretly wants to be a Japanese pop star.

They're still just kids, pawns in the bigger plans of men who think they know best.

I
NSIDE THE SPACE 11 DARVISH
Museum, no detail is too trivial. There is a list of the fourteen different pitches Yu Darvish throws: four-seam fastball, curve, slow curve, power curve, changeup, high-speed changeup, forkball, split-finger fastball, one-seam fastball, two-seam fastball, vertical slider, slider, cut fastball, and sinker. Care to know the circumference of his shoulders? The right is fifty-seven centimeters around, the left fifty-one. You can't miss the two life-sized Darvish replicas. Wax wasn't realistic enough, so silicone artists rendered more accurate versions of Darvish, down to the bulging veins in his neck.

Tucked amid the boutiques and cake shops of Kobe is a white building owned by Farsad Darvish, the father of the Japanese pitcher who has found the most success in Major League Baseball. The Texas Rangers paid more than $111 million for six seasons of Yu Darvish's services. He's a six-foot-five, 228-pound right-handed colossus with a fastball in the mid-90s and an eephus curveball. Darvish personified cool on the mound and off. However much Tomohiro Anraku and Shota Tatsuta disagreed on pitching philosophy, both said they want to be like Darvish.