But I do understand another language, my fourth, and one I share with everyone in this stadium tonight.
Baseball.
The crack of the bat and the smell of the dirt or the leather of a glove, the rhythm of the game – building, always building to something – is so deeply ingrained in my soul that I most definitely speak the same language as the other fifty-five thousand people packed into the stands for the final game of theJapan Series as Kai Nakamura, the ace of the Yomiuri Giants, stands alone in the center of the diamond.
Ninth inning.
Two outs.
Nobody on.
Two strikes on the batter.
I’ve been here before, on the other side of it.
The Giants are up one to nothing, but it might as well be five or ten or a hundred runs.
The other team hasn’t reached base, not once. Not hits, no walks, not even a fielding error or a hit by pitch.
A swing and a miss.
Strike three.
Sutoraikusuri, in Japanese.
And that collective inhale explodes into a roar that I understand perfectly.
Baseball isn’t my first language, but it is the one I’m most fluent in.
I can’t help it – my gaze drifts across the field, past the delirium of the victors, to look in the visitor’s dugout, where I see a team that has just been dominated by the best pitcher in their league. Their season is over, with nothing to show for it but their memories, tarnished by this final one of watching another team celebrate the championship they’ve coveted all year long.
That feeling? That’s one I know better than most.
And it’s enough to remind me of someone who knows it as well as I do, back in Los Angeles, where we parted on a night a lot like tonight – an unexpected bonding moment, the bittersweet ending of a career and an unexpected kiss that I sometimes still relive with startling clarity.
“Sullivan-sama,” a stadium worker says, interrupting me before the memories take over. And I’m back in the Tokyo Dome, rather than more than five thousand miles away and twoyears ago at Dodger Stadium. “Sullivan-sama, your car is here for the airport.”
My flight isn’t back to Los Angeles, but to New York, to my new team: the Brooklyn Eagles, the team that had replaced the Dodgers when they left for the West Coast in 1957.
As their assistant general manager, I’m going to help make sure next yearfinallycomes.
And Kai Nakamura is the arm we’ll ride all the way to the World Series.
I don’t stay for the celebration.
He knows I was there. I was right behind home plate for the whole game. The cheeky kid even had the audacity to tip his cap in my direction before the first pitch. He’ll want to celebrate with his teammates, enjoy his championship, but, in a few weeks, when he’s ready, that will be my moment.
Until then, I’ve got work to do.
Conventional wisdom would be to sleep through most of my nearly thirteen-hour flight. There isn’t a lot of business getting done quite yet, just a week after the World Series. Most people who work in the league are taking a day or two to regroup before they evaluate their season and start executing their plans for the next one.
But I’m not going to wait. So, instead of sleeping, I’m bolt upright with a coffee cup that the flight attendant in first class never allows to get below half empty, working on my pitch for Stew.
Stew, whose real name isn’t Stew or Stewart, but who picked up the nickname during his playing days, where he went on a hot streak and only ate stew for four weeks, until his bat went cold, is the general manager and vice president of the Brooklyn Eagles and, more to the point, my direct boss.
My only boss, really.
When he brought me on last year, the Eagles were dead last,not just last in their division, but held the actual worst record in baseball. A disgrace by any measure, but, in New York, it was wildly unacceptable.
