Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Celebrity Commentary" (coming soon)
This is a "small" (小) post—click here for an explanation of Round and Square post lengths.
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One year ago on Round and Square (3 June 2012)—The Accidental Ethnographer: Ocean and Isle (Fiji)Two years ago on Round and Square (3 June 2011)—Living and Learning: Warring States, Divided Lessons
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| [a] Individual and Society RF |
可飛ばせ, 田中!
Let 'er rip, Tanaka! OR
Fly to base, Tanaka!
Fly to base, Tanaka!
—Common Japanese baseball chant
(Tanaka is a common surname, like "Smith")
(Tanaka is a common surname, like "Smith")
It's time to let 'er rip, so let's start with the differences between the baseball diamonds (infields) in Japanese major league baseball and the United States.
Yesterday, we discussed the fact that there aren't any differences between the American major league baseball diamonds and Japanese professional ones. We even had a handy-dandy diagram to show how this works.
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| [b] Standard RF |
It was only a tiny part of the story, though. You see, aside from the distance to the bases, and from the pitcher's mount to home plate, there are all sorts of differences. Today, we are going to keep things only focused on the infield diamond, where the four bases frame the pitcher's mound. Remember, the distances are the same, whether you are playing in Osaka or Houston.
But the "diamonds" are different.
In major league baseball in the United States, the pitchers mound is made of dirt, and the base paths from home plate to first base (and third base to home plate) are made up of a slender path of dirt with a white (usually chalk) foul line running down it.
Moreover, there is a wide swath of dirt on either side of the base path (the path the base runner must follow). Toward home plate is the infield grass; on the other side is the vast outfield grass. So many Americans have grown up watching infield diamonds that look like this that they may not realize that professional baseball does not always follow this pattern...even in the American major leagues, as we shall see.
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| [c] Grass-dirt RF |
In Japan, the diamonds often look different. For example, the once-popular American infield configuration used in domed stadiums is so common in Japan's...domed stadiums (and there are a lot of them)...that it seems to be the way a diamond "should" look in Japan. The picture to the left [c] shows the combined grass-dirt infield.
Ah, but there is one thing that you never see in the American major leagues, and it remains quite common in the Japanese leagues.
It's the all-dirt diamond.
You may remember them from your high school softball days. If there has ever been such a diamond in the American major leagues, it has been many decades since they started growing grass.
Koshien Stadium (甲子園, for those of you who are aware of the "cycle of sixty" in East Asian culture) has always had an all-dirt infield and a grass outfield. It's the oldest, and most storied of Japanese baseball venues
And the game is a little different when the grounder bounces toward the shortstop...only on infield dirt.
[If you don't read Japanese, but want to have some sense of the Japanese kana and kanji in these posts, just copy the phrases and paste them into translation software such as Babylon or Google Translate].
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