From the Daily Sports Online column / デイリースポーツオンラインの連載コラムから
“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify, because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city. You’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt; they hate him now. Boo! Different shirt! Boo!”
Jerry Seinfeld
Seinfeld’s bit might sound a tad ridiculous, but he’s not far from the truth. I often find myself marveling at sports fandom. By and large, we do not know anything about the guys who wear our home team’s uniforms. We have no clue if they are approachable or if we’d be friends if we ever had the chance to sit down and have a meal together. On the flipside, we also do not know if they are chauvinists, abusers, or egotistical maniacs. All we know is the uniform they wear and what we want them to do while it is on their bodies. We also know that we do not want the guys wearing the wrong clothes to perform well, even though, for all we know, they might be our best friends in a parallel universe.
I can understand back in the day before the draft, when teams were primarily collections of local players. The Hanshin Tigers, for example, were probably once largely composed of men from Kansai. So when they went up against the Yomiuri Giants, who were mostly Tokyoites, of course we would cheer for our boys to pound theirs. It’s a geopolitical war, albeit on a playing field where there are no casualties, just losers (and it better be THEM, not US!).
But in 2023, the Tigers have 73 players under contract and just thirteen of them are from the Kinki region (Hyogo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Wakayama, and Shiga). Of those, just five (Teruaki Sato, Kai Ueda, Seishiro Sakamoto, Koji Chikamoto, Hiroto Saiki) played with any regularity last year. So essentially, we are cheering outsiders who have (perhaps against their own will) made Kansai their “new home.” And we are cheering against a lot of players (many of whom are global stars, like Tetsuto Yamada, Hayato Sakamoto, and Masahiro Tanaka) who were born and raised in our backyard but have since moved out of town.
And that brings me to the upcoming World Baseball Classic. Which “clothes” do I cheer for? I’m from Canada, so do I root for my home and native land? See, I have lived in Japan more than half my life. So shouldn’t I give them my undevoted love and affection instead? Why do colors and clothes even matter?
I have to admit, as much as I just marveled at the oddity of rooting for colors and manmade borders, I still have a fierce attachment to the Hanshin Tigers, and a natural repulsion of anyone unrelated to the team. Can I root for a Munetaka Murakami home run in March, but root against that same result from April to October? Do I allow myself to temporarily root for the guys who wear Giants orange all season? Something about it feels… wrong.
My conclusion? I am going to cheer for solid baseball to be played by all teams. I want to see amazing plays, jaw-dropping performances, and dramatic finishes to games. Regardless of which pile of laundry comes out victorious. Enjoy the WBC, everyone.