BASEBALL AT GROUND ZERO
Mitchell, Greg
BASEBALL at GROUND ZERO BY GREG MITCHELL The change of pitchers at Hiroshima Stadium is something to see. Relievers are brought out of the bullpen in a golf cart with an antenna at the back,...
...Professional baseball in Japan attracts what we would call a college football crowd...
...One does not want to think too deeply, especially at a ball game, about apparitions at Hiroshima Stadium...
...One cheerleader has a mohawk haircut and shouts through a bullhorn...
...Once a massive, four-story cement structure topped with a stately dome, the building—or, rather, its shell—somehow survived the atomic bombing...
...Still, Hiroshima Stadium has a reassuringly familiar look...
...at Shea Stadium, jumbo jets from LaGuardia Airport roar overhead...
...For a baseball fan from New York City, however, it's hard to take a seat behind third base at Hiroshima Stadium and enjoy the game while the A-bomb virtually hovers over you...
...With the arrival of the Carp, Mayor Shinzo Hamai hoped that baseball (the national pastime, ironically, of the country that had utterly destroyed the city) would "revitalize the spirit of Hiroshima...
...Since the bomb exploded directly overhead, its roof and inside walls were driven into the ground, but about half of the outer wall still stands...
...It reminds them of August 6, 1945...
...At Yankee Stadium, you have to put up with the screeching IRT subway...
...Obviously, the decision to build a ball park in Hiroshima has paid off...
...From the stadium, the bombed-out building with its peculiar crown looks eerie as dusk falls...
...Many others lost parents or other relatives to the Bomb...
...In size and structure, it resembles a Triple-A minor-league stadium in the United States, rather than a major-league facility...
...Greg Mitchell, an editor at the Public Agenda Foundation, is the former editor of Nuclear Times...
...The fans are fabulously well-informed and avid, in a regimented way typical of Japanese society...
...It's one thing not to dwell on the past, to rebuild and push ahead, to promote temporary amnesia as a way to cope with the memory of 100,000 friends, neighbors, and loved ones killed in an instant...
...The scoreboard in right-centerfield is electronically primitive...
...The copper skin that had covered the dome blew away or melted, but, amazingly, the network of steel rods that supported the dome and gave it shape held firm...
...As Hiroshima rebuilt, the same city officials who ordered construction of the baseball stadium removed virtually all visual reminders of the bombing, except for the Dome...
...The cart, directed by remote control, delivers the relief pitcher to the mound and then, weaving along the right-field foul line, returns to its berth in the bullpen...
...Carp fans applaud the two American players on their team, former major leaguers Randy Johnson and Rick Lancel-lotti...
...One of the few structures in the-city to survive the atomic bombing, the A-bomb Dome became the most famous memorial to the tragedy...
...Today, the wind whistles through the ribbed hump that now only suggests a dome...
...for many years, their team was the only one in the league owned by the city rather than by a giant corporation...
...But baseball 300 yards from Ground Zero...
...From several vantage points one can spot, just to the south across a wide boulevard, the batHiroshima's 30,000-seat stadium was built seven years after the bomb did its dirty work...
...Obnoxious cheerleaders orchestrate highly organized cheering sections...
...It might, he reasoned, help the residents forget what happened on August 6, 1945...
...Carp fans are intensely loyal...
...Fans in the outfield bleachers, peering toward home plate, can see the A-bomb Dome directly over the lip of the stadium, and right above it in the sky the exact spot where the atomic bomb exploded...
...Perhaps out of guilt or uneasiness, I found myself cheering loudly for the Carp and heckling the American players on the other team—as if this could somehow compensate for the decision to drop the Bomb...
...Yet thousands come to this spot where so many perished to drink beer and cheer...
...The city's "fighting spirit," a most admired quality in Japan, is in good shape...
...There is no evidence that the disquieting setting of Hiroshima Stadium makes Carp fans more fatalistic or reflective...
...Some sections fly red-and-white Carp flags or six-foot kites in the shape of fish...
...it is the place where it is played—now a ball field, once a killing field...
...A visitor from America obviously has little right to criticize the way residents of Hiroshima choose to cope with their tragic legacy...
...Baseball had come to Japan many years before, but Hiroshima had never landed a franchise...
...Many of the recent arrivals in town, and even some of the survivors, hate the Dome...
...This is odd, since one Hiroshima resident in eight is officially considered a hibakusha—an A-bomb survivor—and some still suffer and die from radiation-related illness...
...It is often said that the ghosts of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and other great players haunt Yankee Stadium...
...And in June of1 this year, Carp third-baseman Sa-chio "Iron Man" Kinugasa broke Lou Gehrig's record by playing in 2,131 consecutive games...
...At Hiroshima Stadium, there is no escaping the atomic tragedy...
...at Hiroshima Stadium, you get the A-bomb Dome...
...It doesn't hurt that the Carp have appeared in two of the last three Japan world series, winning in 1984 and losing in seven games last year...
...Hiroshima erected the 30,000-seat stadium thirty-five years ago to welcome its first professional baseball team...
...Sitting behind home plate with two other Americans, I felt extremely self-conscious, surrounded by residents of a city that had suffered horribly at the hands of my country...
...Though Hiroshima, a growing metropolis of 900,000 on the western end of the island of Honshu, is one of the smaller cities to host a professional baseball team in Japan, the stadium is often sold out...
...Surprisingly, in the land of Diamond Vision, there is no giant television screen for instant replays...
...But because Hiroshima does not attract many tourists from the United States, one rarely sees American faces at Carp games—so rarely that a local television crew filmed my appearance...
...The remote-control bullpen cart is the only concession to modern technology...
...Bands play almost continuously, even when the pitcher is going into his wind-up...
...Yet he built the stadium 300 yards from the epicenter of the atomic explosion...
...tered shell of a building that has become a worldwide symbol of the atomic bombing, the Genbaku Dome, or A-bomb Dome...
...Meanwhile, the Hiroshima fans slurp their soup and noodles, drink their Kirin beer, and go a little crazy over the hometown team, the Carp, in an old ball park adjacent to Ground Zero...
...To a visitor from the United States, it is not the fact of baseball in Hiroshima that is disturbing...
...With only a single tier—there is no mezzanine, no upper deck—it seems to be a relic from the 1930s, right out of the movie The Natural...
...Relievers are brought out of the bullpen in a golf cart with an antenna at the back, courtesy of the Mazda Cprporation, which is based in Hiroshima...
Vol. 51 • August 1987 • No. 8
