A Baseball Gaijin
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| Author | : Aaron Fischman |
| Publisher | : Simon and Schuster |
| Total Pages | : 444 |
| Release | : 2024-06-18 |
| Genre | : Sports & Recreation |
| ISBN | : 1683584783 |
Like many American boys, Tony Barnette yearned to one day make it to “The Show,” playing baseball professionally. The Arizona State pitcher was drafted in 2006 by the in-state Diamondbacks. Gradually ascending the minor-league ladder, it looked like this was the beginning of a blessed life, where he could play the game he loved on the grandest of stages in front of family and friends. But things don’t always work out the way we want. On the verge of achieving his lifelong dream after notching a league-high 14 wins in Triple A, Tony looked ahead to 2010 with optimism. That’s when Japan came calling, offering a significant salary hike in exchange for forgoing a likely forthcoming big-league debut. The Diamondbacks agreed to release Tony so he could play for Tokyo’s Yakult Swallows, the renowned Yomiuri Giants’ intra-city rivals. At the time, the only thing he had in common with the country was a love for baseball. He did not know the language and was unfamiliar with Nippon Professional Baseball and essentially everything else. On his own in a strange land, the burning desire to one day make the major leagues never subsided. He knew the odds were against him, as less than one quarter of gaijin (Japanese for “foreigner”) ballplayers who go to Japan appear in the majors at any point thereafter. First-year struggles led to multiple demotions and his end-of-year release. But when you’re chasing a dream, you expect to encounter several obstacles. Tony refused to be deterred. Over six seasons in Japan, the starter became a reliever and then a closer. After a strong 2015 season, in which he guided his long-suffering Swallows to the Japan Series, he finally got the call he had been waiting for. Signing with the Texas Rangers in December, Tony would make his first major-league appearance on April 5, 2016, at age thirty-two. He’d go on to pitch four seasons with the Rangers and Chicago Cubs, fulfilling a lifelong dream. Through extensive research and reporting, Aaron Fischman worked directly with Tony to tell his story of perseverance, determination, and never giving up on your dream.
| Author | : Alan M. Gratz |
| Publisher | : Penguin |
| Total Pages | : 292 |
| Release | : 2008-02-14 |
| Genre | : Young Adult Fiction |
| ISBN | : 9780142410998 |
Tokyo, 1890. Toyo is caught up in the competitive world of boarding school, and must prove himself to make the team in a new sport called besuboru. But he grieves for his uncle, a samurai who sacrificed himself for his beliefs, at a time when most of Japan is eager to shed ancient traditions. It's only when his father decides to teach him the way of the samurai that Toyo grows to better understand his uncle and father. And to his surprise, the warrior training guides him to excel at baseball, a sport his father despises as yet another modern Western menace. Toyo searches desperately for a way to prove there is a place for his family's samurai values in modern Japan. Baseball might just be the answer, but will his father ever accept a Western game that stands for everything he despises?
| Author | : Robert K. Fitts |
| Publisher | : U of Nebraska Press |
| Total Pages | : 365 |
| Release | : 2008-09-01 |
| Genre | : Sports & Recreation |
| ISBN | : 0803213816 |
Wally Yonamine was both the first Japanese American to play for an NFL franchise and the first American to play professional baseball in Japan after World War II. This is the unlikely story of how a shy young man from the sugar plantations of Maui overcame prejudice to integrate two professional sports in two countries. ø In 1951 the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants chose Yonamine as the first American to play in Japan during the Allied occupation. He entered Japanese baseball when mistrust of Americans was high?and higher still for Japanese Americans whose parents had left the country a generation earlier. Without speaking the language, he helped introduce a hustling style of base running, shaking up the game for both Japanese players and fans. Along the way, Yonamine endured insults, dodged rocks thrown by fans, initiated riots, and was threatened by yakuza (the Japanese mafia). He also won batting titles, was named the 1957 MVP, coached and managed for twenty-five years, and was honored by the emperor of Japan. Overcoming bigotry and hardship on and off the field, Yonamine became a true national hero and a member of Japan?s Baseball Hall of Fame.
| Author | : Matt Faulkner |
| Publisher | : Little, Brown Books for Young Readers |
| Total Pages | : 144 |
| Release | : 2014-04-15 |
| Genre | : Juvenile Fiction |
| ISBN | : 1484712137 |
With a white mother and a Japanese father, Koji Miyamoto quickly realizes that his home in San Francisco is no longer a welcoming one after Pearl Harbor is attacked. And once he's sent to an internment camp, he learns that being half white at the camp is just as difficult as being half Japanese on the streets of an American city during WWII. Koji's story, based on true events, is brought to life by Matt Faulkner's cinematic illustrations that reveal Koji struggling to find his place in a tumultuous world-one where he is a prisoner of war in his own country.
| Author | : Joe Pepitone |
| Publisher | : Simon and Schuster |
| Total Pages | : 331 |
| Release | : 2015-05-12 |
| Genre | : Sports & Recreation |
| ISBN | : 161321796X |
At age seventeen Joe Pepitone signed with the New York Yankees, and soon experts were predicting that he would be the team’s next superstar. He could run, throw, and field, and he had a sweet home run swing. But during his twelve years in the major leagues Pepitone devoted most of his energy to swinging off the field. He blew his career, destroyed two marriages, lost custody of three children, and came very close to a nervous breakdown. At the age of thirty-three he quit baseball for good and finally admitted that for most of his life, he’d been living a lie. He’d been acting the carefree clown in order to cover up immense inner pain. In Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud, first published in 1975, Pepitone reveals what was behind his wild behavior. He does so in the most devastatingly honest terms, holding back none of the embarrassment, anguish, and guilt that perpetually haunted him. He tells of the father he loved so much, “Willie Pep” Pepitone, the toughest man in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood. Obsessed with making Joe a baseball star, Willie beat his son when he failed to meet expectations. One night, enraged at his father, Joe said, “Mom—I wish he’d die!” Willie died the next day. Along with pain, the book has plenty of humor. Pepitone tells of partying with Frank Sinatra and Mickey Mantle, carousing with groupies and hookers, and “living the life” of a famous ballplayer in the sixties and seventies. One of the most moving, honest, and hilarious books ever written by an athlete, Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud was selected by Esquire magazine as one of the “20 best baseball books ever.” Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Sports Publishing imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in sports—books about baseball, pro football, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, or soccer, we have a book about your sport or your team. Whether you are a New York Yankees fan or hail from Red Sox nation; whether you are a die-hard Green Bay Packers or Dallas Cowboys fan; whether you root for the Kentucky Wildcats, Louisville Cardinals, UCLA Bruins, or Kansas Jayhawks; whether you route for the Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, or Los Angeles Kings; we have a book for you. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
| Author | : Robert Whiting |
| Publisher | : Stone Bridge Press, Inc. |
| Total Pages | : 286 |
| Release | : 2021-04-20 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 1611729491 |
Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic 60-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark, fetid backwater and now the most populous, sophisticated, and safe urban capital in the world. Follow author Robert Whiting (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld) as he watches Tokyo transform during the 1964 Olympics, rubs shoulders with the Yakuza and comes face to face with the city’s dark underbelly, interviews Japan’s baseball elite after publishing his first best-selling book on the subject, and learns how politics and sports collide to produce a cultural landscape unlike any other, even as a new Olympics is postponed and the COVID virus ravages the nation. A colorful social history of what Anthony Bourdain dubbed, “the greatest city in the world,” Tokyo Junkie is a revealing account by an accomplished journalist who witnessed it all firsthand and, in the process, had his own dramatic personal transformation.
| Author | : Nobuko Adachi |
| Publisher | : Lexington Books |
| Total Pages | : 211 |
| Release | : 2017-02-16 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1498544851 |
This is a book about the power ethnic capital and how it drives both the economics of, and the quest for identity in, a Japanese Brazilian commune. Adachi tells readers what this small diaspora community can teach us about how life “in the trenches” looks to those on the outskirts of the exploding transnational world economy. This book explores the various strategies locals use to compete with others with whom they are linked locally, nationally, and globally. Through the story of Kubo daily life, Adachi offers insights into important aspects of social and linguistic theory, as well as explicating how cross-border relations become more and more intertwined. In a sense, Kubo’s story, with its struggles to maintain its identity—even its survival—in an increasingly globalized world, encapsulates many of the problems now faced by smaller communities around the world, be they diasporic or regionally entrenched, or ethnically, racially, or religiously composed. Adachi explores the motivations for racial and ethnic boundary-making based primarily on values and principles rather than purely physiological features by focusing on Kubo and its marketing of supposedly traditional Japanese cultural values, in spite of the commune being located in the interior of Brazil. To do this she incorporates notions from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, including problems of language maintenance, the relationships between language and symbolic power, and the intricacies of language and gender. Doing so helps theorize the tensions between hybridity and purity entailed in the complexities of identity dynamics.
| Author | : Alan Klein |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 275 |
| Release | : 2013-09-13 |
| Genre | : Sports & Recreation |
| ISBN | : 1317996097 |
This collection illustrates the expansiveness of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of sport. While rooted in anthropology, these essays consider American sports in their social, economic, cultural and political aspects, charting their evolution. The book draws from history, sociology, and political science; as well as considering the relationship between the developed and developing world; and culture and masculinity. The first part of the book considers the local and global interplay of professional baseball, covering: Major League Baseball’s impact on the Dominican Republic nationalism and baseball on the Mexican/US border the globalizing forces of baseball as an industry. The second part of the book is concerned with the cultural examination of the responsiveness of masculinity to social and cultural forces, examining: the exaggerated world of bodybuilders in Southern California the cross-cultural comparisons of male behaviour on a bi-national baseball team in Mexico the historical examination of Jews in American sport. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society
| Author | : Alan M. Klein |
| Publisher | : Yale University Press |
| Total Pages | : 355 |
| Release | : 2006-09-18 |
| Genre | : Sports & Recreation |
| ISBN | : 0300135122 |
A sociologist and anthropologist scientifically examines the worldwide growth of MLB and America’s favorite pastime. Baseball fans understand the game has become increasingly international. Major league rosters include players from no fewer than fourteen countries, and more than one-fourth of all players are foreign born. Here, Alan Klein offers the first full-length study of a sport in the process of globalizing. Looking at the international activities of big-market and small-market baseball teams, as well as the Commissioner’s Office, he examines the ways in which Major League Baseball operates on a world stage that reaches from the Dominican Republic to South Africa to Japan. The origins of baseball’s efforts to globalize are complex, stemming as much from decreasing opportunities at home as from promise abroad. Klein chronicles attempts to develop the game outside the United States, the strategies that teams such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Kansas City Royals have devised to recruit international talent, and the ways baseball has been growing in other countries. He concludes with an assessment of the obstacles that may inhibit or promote baseball’s progress toward globalization, offering thoughtful proposals to ensure the health and growth of the game in the United States and abroad. “A superb inside look at how the national pastime has reinvented itself . . . Klein’s writing is engaging, and his research is top-notch.” —Tim Wendel, author of The New Face of Baseball: The One-Hundred-Year Rise and Triumph of Latinos in America’s Favorite Sport “A timely contribution to our understanding of baseball in our contemporary age.” —Michael L. Butterworth, Sociology of Sport Journal
| Author | : Mark Panek |
| Publisher | : University of Hawaii Press |
| Total Pages | : 320 |
| Release | : 2006-05-31 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 0824838041 |
At the age of eighteen, Chad Rowan left his home in rural Hawai'i for Tokyo with visions of becoming a star athlete in Japan's national sport, sumo. But upon his arrival he was shocked less by the city crowds and the winter cold than by having to scrub toilets and answer to fifteen-year-olds who had preceded him at the sumo beya. Rowan spoke no Japanese. Of Japanese culture, he knew only what little his father, a former tour bus driver in Hawai'i, had been able to tell him as they drove to the airport. And he had never before set foot in a sumo ring. Five years later, against the backdrop of rising U.S.–Japan economic tension, Rowan became the first gaijin (non-Japanese) to advance to sumo's top rank, yokozuna. His historic promotion was more a cultural accomplishment than an athletic one, since yokozuna are expected to embody highly prized Japanese values such as hard work, patience, strength, and hinkaku, a special kind of dignity thought to be available only to Japanese. He was promoted ahead of his two main rivals, the brothers Koji and Masaru Hanada, who had been raised in the sumo beya run by their father, the former sumo great Takanohana I. Perhaps the defining moment of the gaijin's unique success occurred at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, when Rowan, chosen to personify "Japanese" to one of the largest television audiences in history, performed a sacred sumo ritual at the opening ceremony. Gaijin Yokozuna chronicles the events leading to that improbable scene at Nagano and beyond, tracing Rowan's life from his Hawai'i upbringing to his 2001 retirement ceremony. Along the way it briefly examines the careers of two Hawai'i-born sumotori who paved the way for Rowan, Jesse Kuhaulua (Takamiyama) and Salevaa Atisanoe (Konishiki). The author shares stories from family members, coaches, friends, fellow sumo competitors, and of course Rowan himself, whom he accompanied on three Japan-wide exhibition tours. The work is further informed by volumes of secondary source material on sumo, Japanese culture, and local Hawai'i culture.
