Remembering Randy Bass:some thoughts on Ichiro and his pursuit of history

I was watching the tube with the in-laws earlier tonight when the sports news came on, the lead story of which was Ichiro‘s pursuit of the Major League Baseball record for most hits in a season, which has been held for 84 years by George Sisler. Going into yesterday’s game, Ichiro needed 24 hits to tie Sisler’s mark of 257 hits. Alas, he didn’t get any hits in the game and remains on 233 hits, with just 16 games left in the season.

In the game Ichiro was intentionally walked twice, and this produced cries of kawaiisou from the in-laws (“kawaiisou” might approximate “you poor thing” or just “poor thing” in this case). I explained as best I could that Seattle’s opponent, the Anaheim Angels, were in the penant race and that an intentional walk was a legitimate strategy to win the game. Not that I like it mind you, obviously I want to see Ichiro get a chance to get a base hit like everyone else, but you can’t disparage the Angels for trying to win the game any way they (fairly) can. “But he’s going for the record,” they replied.

I then asked if they remembered what happened to Randy Bass some 20 years ago. Now, you’d have to be a fairly hardcore baseball fan, or to have lived in Japan, to know who Randy Bass was. In fact, there were two Randy Basses, the MLB Randy Bass, and the Japanese Pro baseball Randy Bass, and while they shared the same body that’s really where the comparison ended. After a bench-warming six-year career with 5 different teams, hitting a career .212, Bass quit the Majors and came to Japan to play for the Hanshin Tigers, one of Japan baseball’s oldest teams.

In six years for Hanshin, Bass (pictured here) tore up the league, winning two triple crowns, and leaving with a career .337 batting average and 202 home runs. 54 of those home runs came in the 1985 season, and the Tigers won their first penant in 20 years. The story of those 54 home runs, and why Bass didn’t perhaps have more than 54, was what I was asking my in-laws about.

Going into the final series of the season, sitting on 54 homers, Bass needed just one more to tie the Japan baseball single season record for home runs of 55, set by the great slugger Sadaharu Oh. The Tigers’ opponent for those final two games was the Tokyo Giants, their archrival, managed by none other than…Sadaharu Oh.

Did Bass see any pitches to hit during that final series of the year? Not a chance. In fact, in 9 plate appearances, he was walked 6 times. In the final game of the year, Bass was walked all four times he came up to the plate (though none of them were official “intentional” walks). At one point, with pitches being thrown so far out of the strikezone that it was as clear as day what was happening, Bass turned his bat upside down is disgust. The story goes that Giants’ pitchers had been warned that they would be fined if they gave Bass any pitches to hit. Who’s to say whether Bass would have been able to homer even had he had a decent chance to swing the bat. (I feel compelled to add, however, that Oh set the record in a 140-game season, while Bass was trying to break it in a 130-game season).

Whether Oh’s actions were motivated by personal reasons (“He ain’t gonna break my record as long as I have something to say about it.”) or a larger xenophobic one is beyond me to say. It’s complicated, to be sure (Oh himself is half-Chinese). Readers interested would be advised to seek out a used copy of Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa or Pico Iyer’s essay “Perfect Strangers” which appears in his book Video Night in Kathmandu.

One thing I know for sure: as the walks to Ichiro increase, as they surely will — after all, all of Seattle’s remaining games are against teams with a legitimate shot at the postseason, and Ichiro is Seattle’s biggest threat — so will the cries of “kawaiisou” and “kibishii” (idiomatically, “that’s harsh”) and “okashii” (“strange”). Perhaps there’ll be some idle speculation that Americans don’t want to see a foreigner break “their” record (a notion even I the cynic have no qualms about dismissing without a second thought). I can only hope that somewhere out there in the Japanese household, or on the various TV networks that serve them their news, some of them will remember Randy Bass.

As I’ve been writing this, the biggest Japan baseball story of this season has broke: the Japan professional players association has decided to go on strike, effective tomorrow (for now, the strike only effects games played on the remaining weekends of the season), for the first time in its 70-year history. The fans are overwhelmingly on the side of the players in this one: as I type this, one of the news shows is running a call-in poll on whether or not viewers support the strike or not. At the moment, 235,700 callers are in favor of the strike, while a measly 7,800 are not. There’s more to be said here of course, but I’ll save that for another day.