The Education of Reggie Smith

He came down the clubhouse ramp at Korakuen Stadium, limping slightly, his knee already bothering him, though the season was still young. Once of the Boston Red Sox, then the St. Louis Cardinals, the Los Angeles Dodgers and finally the San Francisco Giants, a veteran of seven all-star games and four world series, now the highest-paid baseball player in the history of Japanese baseball, Reggie Smith managed to look more than a little out of place. A burly, powerful man in any setting, he seemed immense here alongside his Japanese teammates, as if he were not just a bigger ballplayer but of an entirely different species.

The prevailing hair style of his teammates, befitting the most somber and most establishment baseball team in Japan, was a Marine Corps crewcut worthy of the early Pete Rose or the middle Haldeman. Smith's was early Afro (circa 1967), though thinning at the top. He wore a mustache, which was not unusual for a ballplayer on most American teams, but this was the first mustache ever sprouted by a member of the Yomiuri Giants. When Smith was about to sign with Yomiuri, the mustache became the subject of a great deal of discussion in the Japanese press. His contract, after all, was the largest ever signed in Japan by any player, American or Japanese (between $800,000 and $1,000,000); Sadaharu Oh, the great home-run hitter, had made only $400,000 and only at the tail end of his career, and that had been the previous top salary. But the Giants had never permitted facial hair in the past. In a country like this and on a team like this, which was the pride of Japanese baseball, rules were important; minor rules were the same as major rules; there was no difference. Otherwise, all the discipline of a team might unravel and the Yomiuri tradition would be despoiled; and, worse, all Japan might soon follow. But Smith had made it clear that the mustache stayed; it was a part of his personal statement as a man, and that was important. (Besides, during the 1978 world series, when his old friend and nemesis Tom Seaver was announcing the games for ABC, he said on the air one day that he'd been trying to figure out why Reggie Smith seemed less intimidating in this series and had finally decided it was because he had shaved off his mustache. That act alone, Seaver said, had made him seem more benign. Since the last thing Smith wanted was to lose any element of intimidation, he had immediately gone back to the mustache.) He had let the Yomiuri executives know this: Facial hair was nonnegotiable.

The Giants had wanted him badly. They had not made the Japanese world series in the previous year, and even more than the old New York Yankees, they were supposed to win. In the truest sense, they were Japan's team. Indeed, partisans of the other teams in Japanese baseball sometimes thought that the entire sport existed so that their teams could lose to the Giants. Once, in fact, when the Hiroshima Carp had won the Japanese championship, they were cautioned the following spring by their owner not to try quite so hard; the owner, it turned out, was a Giants fan at heart. So in the miraculous way that the Japanese do business, the subject of hair had come up but had also never come up, and Smith had been able to keep both the money and the hair.

Reggie Smith was 38 now; his son, Reggie, Jr., was 15, almost as big as his father was when he broke into the minor leagues. The father was in the twilight of a career, playing it out in Japan, where he was better paid and a good deal lonelier than if he had stayed at home.

He came out of the park and the Japanese fans, among the most intense in the world, began to follow him. A few young fans wanted autographs and he patiently signed them and then, suddenly, a young man crossed (continued on page 128)Reggie Smith(continued from page 100) a certain barrier as the Japanese fans sometimes do, for foreigners are still regarded, if not as exotic, certainly as oddities, and he touched Smith as if he were something different and strange. It was not a pleasant moment and the player resented it, for the fans do not do this with their own players--they are cautious and respectful with them and do not take such liberties lightly. Smith very firmly removed the hand of the young Japanese. "I am not your damn freak," he said, giving vent to a feeling that many Americans, especially black Americans, have had about being in a country where foreigners are considered strange.

Smith was not in a good mood. His knee was hurting and he could not run full out. In addition, he was completely frustrated by his failure to see any fast balls. On this day, against the Hanshin Tigers, he had not seen a single one, and he had barely seen anything in the strike zone. Desperate to show these fans what he was capable of, he had swung hard anyway, raising two immense pop-ups and grounding out twice. He had also heard the Tigers' manager yell to his pitcher to walk Smith-san and to give him nothing to hit.

"I'm a fish out of water here," Smith told a friend. "They pay me all this money to do a certain thing and it's supposed to be something they love, and then they won't let me do it. I just don't know if I belong here."

He was facing this season with increasing melancholia. For although he had known that Japan would be different, he had not known, like many a gaijin (or foreigner) before him, that it would be this different, nor had he known that he might never again see a real fast ball.

The confrontation of baseball was what Smith missed most, a power hitter against a power pitcher. For him, that was the real excitement of the game, a challenge of the most personal kind. But he had come to believe that the Japanese game, like the society itself, was designed to avoid challenge and confrontation. If there were a way of avoiding a confrontation, the Japanese would find it. In his case, it meant throwing him junk balls out of the strike zone. Dinky shit, he called it. If he walked, so be it. No one threw him fast balls; no one threw him anything out over the plate. They walked him consistently. In the first weeks of the season, he walked three times with the bases loaded, twice on four straight pitches. All of that took a great deal of pleasure out of his work, for Smith, a proud, outspoken player, found that he could not do what he was supposed to do. It was as if they were paying him a great deal of money but in the process stealing something even more precious from him.

Often, now, he came to daydream about the past and, of all things, about confrontations with Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton and Seaver, power pitchers all, men whom other hitters often feared to face and men who had given Smith as good as he had given them. He even recalled now a game in which Ryan, by then with Houston, had disposed of him with three pitches, each seeming to come in a little faster and each rising a little higher in the strike zone. The Dead Red, players called it, meaning pure heat. The third pitch had been blindingly fast and Smith knew he had been beaten by a master. He had screamed in a kind of instinctive primal anguish, then had tipped his cap to Ryan, who had tipped his cap in turn. The Houston bench had seemed surprised, not understanding this was a personal thing, a war within a war, and that on this occasion Ryan had won.

Batting against Carlton was equally challenging; he was so excellent and complete a player that he was known simply as Lefty, needing neither first name nor last. Carlton was simply the best pitcher in baseball right now, Smith believed, a man of supreme physical gifts and, perhaps more important, awesome mental ones. Lefty had an almost perfect harmony of mental and physical strength, Smith thought. His concentration was complete. That gave him a special spiritual toughness that was rare in any aspect of life, including baseball. Lefty, Smith believed, liked to control a weaker person and create a certain doubt in the hitter. The hitter came to bat knowing how strong Lefty was, and how smart, and knowing, too, that, unlike the hitter, Lefty knew exactly where the pitch would be. In most cases, that made for a mismatch, but Smith enjoyed the combat. He knew that when he beat Carlton, he had beaten the best.

But Lefty was back in Philly and Ryan was in Houston, both of them caught up in their own competition for the all-time strike-out record. And Reggie Smith was in Tokyo, looking vainly for a fast ball.

•

Earlier in the season, an opposing pitcher had mistakenly come into the strike zone with a nice fat pitch and Smith had hit a monstrous home run, and at the end of the inning, the Japanese pitcher, returning to the dugout virtually in tears, had to be consoled by his manager. It was very clear that the Japanese pitchers were under orders that this highly paid American should not demonstrate his power (and, thus, figuratively, American superiority) against them. So on this day, though it had been a big game--the hated Hanshin Tigers against the Giants, the huge stadium filled hours before the game--Smith's frustration did not abate. He simply could not find a pitcher to challenge him, could not get a pitch to hit.

"Small baseball," he said, "they play small baseball."

He did not say this disparagingly but as a statement of fact. He was, in truth, on his best behavior here, accommodating to the Japanese press, careful and sensitive with his teammates, ready to give tips on hitting but careful, given the importance of the hierarchy in Japanese society, not to intrude on the territory of the hitting coaches, who were more numerous, more influential and more meddlesome here than in the United States. Jim Lefebvre, the former Dodger, had told mutual friends that Smith, who had a reputation for being at the very least blunt and outspoken (and, to some critics, a clubhouse lawyer), would not last four months here.

He was trying to be a good ambassador, a good baseball player and a good teammate, but it was getting harder all the time. In his mind, he was cooperating, trying to do his best; but the entire nature of the Japanese game, of small baseball, was stacked against him.

By small baseball, Smith meant a precise definition of the game. Small baseball was a game tailored to the needs, both physical and cultural, of the Japanese. Because the Japanese, by and large, did not have powerful throwing arms, they made the relays better than Americans, and they were very good at hitting the cutoff man. Because the society was oriented toward the group instead of toward the individual and because hierarchy prevailed, the manager and his strategy were far more important. There was much more playing for one run and, starting in the first inning, the infield always seemed to be drawn in, trying to cut off a run.

All baseball leagues had different styles, Smith believed. The American League, in his early years, was a slow, almost stagnant league, modeled on the great Yankee teams of the Fifties. Its stars were largely power hitters, they were white and their teammates waited upon their mighty swings. They did not, in his opinion, play a hard-edged game of modern baseball in which speed and power were combined. The prototypical American League star during the era when Smith broke in was Harmon Killebrew, a kind, gentle player who generated offense only through his awesome swing. By contrast, the National League was the blacker league. Its tempo (continued on page 196)Reggie Smith(continued from page 128) reflected speed combined with power and, Smith believed, with a certain barely disguised black rage.

The typical National League player was Frank Robinson, who was intense about everything. Robinson helped transform the American League, Smith believed, when he was traded to the Orioles. He changed the Orioles, and as he changed them, the entire league began to change. There was something about Robinson--the ferocity with which he played the game and his attitude about winning--that was almost frightening. His was an unrelenting presence, and teammates and opponents alike feared to cross him. Once, when Smith was a young player with the Red Sox, he had watched Robinson run out a ground ball and, noticing the man's odd, almost spindly legs, had made a smart remark: "Pump those wheels." It was the way that black players often teased one another in those days. They were brothers, after all. But Robinson, enraged by the remark, had gone past the Boston bench on his way back to the dugout and had pointed a finger at Smith and said, "You don't know me that goddamn well." Later, after the game, Robinson came and told him that next time the teams played, maybe they could go to dinner. But there was no doubt of the warning that had been issued or of the man's transcending hardness.

To Smith, the National League was about power, complete power, the power to hit for distance and to run with speed. It was also about territory; each man's success--indeed, his edge--came at the expense of someone else, and it seemed to Smith that those edges, no matter how small, were more reluctantly conceded in the National than in the American League. It was a game far more exciting than the American League version, constantly pitting power against power.

The Japanese game, by contrast, seemed to avoid power, to avoid the confrontation between hitter and pitcher. Much of the game, Smith believed, was not so much assertive strategy and tactics as it was an attempt to avoid making mistakes or taking responsibility. It was a cautious game and it probably suited their physical and psychic needs, but it did not suit him. It was, therefore, small.

•

Sometimes, now, Smith wondered whether or not he had made the right decision in signing. Two years earlier, when he was a free agent, the Yankees had made a handsome offer, something well over $1,000,000 for three years. Although that would only have made him one of about five first basemen and seven designated hitters on the team, he had been tempted by the deal. There was, after all, enough doubt about his physical condition, particularly about his arm, to limit his bargaining power. But there was something about the negotiations, a certain imperiousness to the Yankee bargaining style, that put him off--that, plus George Steinbrenner's reputation for paying athletes well and then believing he was entitled to play with them.

In that sense, Smith thought, the modern owner was not unlike the modern fan; there was more psychic tension than ever before between him and the star player. The relationship was not as it had been in his early days on the Red Sox, a shared relationship between star and owner, but, rather, a new, instant relationship in which the owner shared the spotlight in the moment of signing and felt freer than ever to attack the star. If the star failed, it was not the owner's fault, for he could show how much he had paid; he remained a good owner who had hired a bad player.

In the end, Smith signed with the San Francisco Giants for the 1982 season and enjoyed a surprisingly good year, with 18 home runs and 56 R.B.I.s in some 350 at bats. After the season, he began negotiating with the Giants with marginal success, but they had their eyes on Steve Garvey. And when it became clear that the American Giants would pay Garvey more than three times as much as Smith, he began to take the Japanese Giants more seriously.

In the beginning, he was amused by the cultural differences when the Yomiuri representatives came to him and asked if he wanted to sign with them. He responded in the good American tradition by asking how much they were willing to pay. They, in turn, said, "Tell us whether or not you'll sign and then we'll tell you how much we'll pay." He responded that he wanted a close idea of their offer before he committed himself. They replied that they could not make him such an offer, because if they made it and he turned it down, they would lose face. "Man, I'm not ready for Japan yet," he told them. Then they began to negotiate in earnest.

Soon one of the Giants' negotiators told him they wanted him to have a very good year, to hit perhaps .270 with 20 home runs, but not to have a better year than their own stars, particularly Tatsunori Hara, their talented young third baseman, who had hit 33 home runs the previous season. "That's really weird," Smith had said. He enjoyed the negotiations, however. They went on for some three months and, as they got more and more serious, Smith noticed a certain cultural progression, most apparent in the ascending level of sophistication of the clothes worn by emissaries of the Giants. The sports clothes quickly gave way to suits. Then the suits got progressively darker, the shirts whiter and crisper, the ties more subdued. At the higher levels, the men began to wear leather watch straps. When he finally got to meet Toru Shoriki, the owner of the team, Smith was waiting in a lounge having a drink; suddenly, a Giants executive materialized out of nowhere and, without even asking, snatched the drink away. "You should not be drinking when Shoriki-san comes in," he said. Just then, Shoriki himself walked in, an elegant man in a beautiful, understated black suit and the most subtle white shirt Smith had ever seen. "That's the boss," he decided.

Now he was sitting around having a postgame drink with a man named Robert Whiting. Whiting, a young American who had gone to college in Japan, stayed around after graduation and, because of his special interest in both Japanese culture and American baseball, ended up writing a book about Japanese baseball called The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, one of the best of all books on modern Japan. In it, Whiting details the hard times Japanese baseball has often inflicted upon its American participants, the gaijins, and the equally hard time the gaijins have inflicted on the Japanese--times so hard that some Americans have in recent years come to be known as Pepitones (a derogatory name in honor of the former Yankee first baseman Joe Pepitone, who took so much money, caused so many problems and played so few games that he became the dubious standard against which other ballplayers were measured). One of the high points of the Whiting book is a description of the 1965 season, in which Daryl Spencer, once a San Francisco Giant, was making a run for the Japanese Pacific League home-run title and virtually every opposing pitcher in the league began to walk him on four pitches. All of this, Whiting was now telling Smith, was a reflection of the schizophrenic Japanese relationship with the Western world. They wanted to be like the West--were, in fact, the world's foremost imitators of Western customs--and they wanted just as badly to be left completely alone, unblemished by foreign influence. So, Whiting said, they know they need the gaijins and want them, on occasion, to do well, but they do not want them to do too well. Of course, the gaijins are also very handy in case a team begins to do poorly. They can always be blamed. That, he noted, might become Smith's role if things did not go well this year.

Indeed, the real belief of the people who run Japanese baseball is that as long as there are gaijin players, Japanese baseball cannot really be considered first class. The current commissioner has asked all clubs to be rid of their Americans in five years.

"Last year," said Whiting, "Tony Solaita, the former Yankee and Toronto Blue Jay, had a great year. Everything went right. Led the league in home runs and R.B.I.s. Led the league in game-winning hits. In the second half of the season, he got 14 of his 17 game-winning hits." Whiting paused. "He finished a distant third in the M.V.P. voting. His manager told all the writers to vote for one of the other guys. So I told Solaita what happened and he was really pissed and he called the manager, who said, 'I'm sorry; I didn't know you wanted it. Besides, you weren't here.' Solaita had a hard year. He was in the race for the home-run title, and the Japanese are still sensitive about that title, because it means power, and they're more touchy about power than about average. So in the last part of the season, the opposing pitchers started walking him all the time. He got desperate and asked his manager to argue with the umpires, and the manager did. Then he asked if Solaita wanted him to walk the other home-run hitter. Solaita said, 'No, it's unprofessional.' But in the last appearance of the last game, he took himself out."

Smith listened carefully as Whiting spoke. He had been warned.

•

A day later, Smith was frustrated even further. Sliding into third base, he hurt his knee badly. It would be at least a month before he could run hard again. If he were lucky, he would be able to pinch-hit in about two weeks. It would be even harder now to perform here the way he wanted.

A career for an athlete was an elusive thing, he thought. Only when it was virtually over, when the physical powers were diminishing, was it possible to have any genuine insight into what made a career--not a season but a complete career, the signature of a man. He saw himself now as a contemporary not so much of certain teammates from the Red Sox or Cardinals or Dodgers but, rather, of a handful of players who had entered the major leagues in one era, the mid-Sixties, and lasted through an entirely different one, the early Eighties. The first era had been harder; the game was tougher, the pay was smaller and a rookie was always a threat to a teammate's job. Smith himself had been paid $6500 in his rookie season. It was a world without guarantees. The players were forced to be much tougher, both mentally and physically (particularly, he believed, the black players, who had all spent time in vicious little Southern towns and who later, in the bigs, faced a more subtle kind of racism, an attitude that allowed a black player to be accepted as long as he was unquestioning of authority and was not different and did not complain. As long, in Reggie Smith's view, as he remained as white as he could be).

That era had gradually come to an end in the late Seventies with the advent of free agency. By the early Eighties, even mediocre players were signing huge contracts with so many built-in guarantees that the pressure on players to maximize their talents had eased. Only in exceptional cases, he believed, did pride goad a young player into higher levels of excellence. Hunger, he was convinced, had diminished.

He remembered, now, with almost astonishing clarity, the beginning of his own career--not just the hard times in Wytheville, Virginia, where he had encountered a racial prejudice unlike any he had known before, but far more clearly the time when he showed up at Red Sox spring-training camp in Scottsdale in 1964. He had been a rookie, and rookies were still almost subhuman in those days, referred to by the veterans as "Bush," existing to be seen but not heard. If, in conversation, a rookie volunteered some experience of his--a minor-league moment, of course--the veterans would say, "Yeah, Bush, you hit .300 in Appalachia. We all hit .300 back there."

Spring training with the Red Sox had been almost as much dream as reality. There had been Ted Williams prowling the field, his intensity and instinct for confrontation not dimmed by three years of retirement. It was amazing, Smith thought, that the man had been away from the game all those years and was still stalking pitchers. He noticed that wherever Williams went, the Boston players began almost unconsciously to edge away, particularly the pitchers. Williams liked to taunt pitchers; it was a challenge he carried over from his days as a hitter. Pitchers, he said, "couldn't goddamn help themselves. They're just dumb by breed."

Williams loved to study young hitters. He was like a drill sergeant and he taught them, above all else, concentration.

"Bush, where was that pitch?"

"It was outside, Mr. Williams."

"Where outside?"

"About two inches."

"What do you mean about? Don't you know?"

"Yes, sir."

"Bush," he would say in disgust, "you're too dumb to be a hitter."

That spring, Williams had told reporters that a kid named Reggie Smith looked like a ballplayer, and that had been sweet.

In some ways, the real education of Reggie Smith had begun in that, his 19th year. Boston had assigned him to room with Earl Wilson, the Red Sox' only other black player, an immense power pitcher. Wilson's legend preceded him; he was not to be trifled with. In the previous season, he had pitched a no-hitter, and he was said to have only marginal tolerance for rookies. On the first day of spring training, Smith, determined to be respectful and not to behave like a rookie, had carried his suitcases down the hall, practicing all the while how he would greet this legend. He would prove to Wilson that he was a serious young man, not some brash rookie, since he was in truth a brash rookie. He finally knocked on the door and a huge voice told him to come in.

"Hello, Mr. Wilson, my name is ..." he began.

An enormous black form began to rise out of the bed. "Get the fuck out of here!" he shouted. "My name is Earl."

So Smith left the room, knocked again, entered and said, "Hello, Earl." With that, he decided many years later, his education had commenced.

Not until long after both he and Wilson left Boston did he truly understand how generous Wilson had been. For Wilson, virtually alone on a mostly white team, had taken him in hand and made sure that he did not waste such exceptional natural gifts, particularly in an organization that had not yet become an equal-opportunity employer. That was not always easy or painless, for Wilson was educating a relatively soft young man for a harder world.

"You're so young, Bush," he had said to him in that first week, "that you don't even have your man muscles yet."

That spring, Wilson was pitching batting practice to Smith, who had power but did not yet know how to pull the ball. Wilson threw an inside pitch and Smith hit it sharply through the box. Wilson just managed to duck out of the ball's way.

Dick Radatz, the mammoth relief pitcher, began to get on Wilson. "You going to let that little kid get away with that, Earl?" he shouted. The next pitch, very fast, hit Smith in the back.

"Now hit that one back the middle," Wilson said. So Smith started trying to hit everything through the middle and Wilson, in turn, finally threw right at his head. That made Smith even angrier, though his anger was directed at Radatz, who, he decided, had started all the trouble. Earl, after all, was his friend. So he started yelling at Radatz; then Wilson came in and grabbed him by the collar. A hand had never seemed so large.

"Hey, Road," Wilson said, using a nickname for a roommate, "you're out of line. This is the big leagues, and you've got to learn to pull pitches like that."

A few minutes later, Smith was sitting in the dugout, still fuming, when a huge foot belonging to Radatz suddenly appeared in front of him, blocking all else from view. It was surely the largest foot that Reggie Smith had ever seen. "You mad at me?" a voice that was in some way connected to the foot had asked. This man, Smith thought, is huge. Just huge.

"No, I think I'm over it now," he answered.

"I'm very glad of that," the voice said, and both it and the foot disappeared.

Later that day at Korakuen Stadium, Smith recalled an incident from his boyhood in California, a very long way from Japan. He had been about 15 and was driving back from a semipro game with his father when they had spotted Willie Mays doing a promotion in a tire store. Reggie had walked up to Mays and told him that he, too, was a ballplayer. Mays, to his surprise, had not asked him whether he batted lefty or righty or which position he played. The only thing he had said was, "Do you know how to duck?" Now Smith finally understood what Mays had meant.

Earl Wilson understood, too, by the time he spotted the immense raw talent in Smith. "He's in the Clemente/Mays class," Wilson would say, and he loved, that first spring, to show him off. Once, when Boston played the Giants in an exhibition game, he went over to the San Francisco bench and took Mays aside. "Willie," he said, "you think you've got an arm. Now watch this kid." Wilson worried about Smith, about his instinct for defiance in a profession not much given to contention ("Reggie reminded me a lot of me," he later said), and he had worked to protect him. Smith remembered now how Earl had told him once, when the younger player was depressed, that he was not allowed to get down nor to let his temper diminish his talent. "Reggie," he had said, "you've got to make it. You are the best young prospect ever to come along in the Boston organization. You've got the best chance and so you've got to make it. Not just for yourself but for all of us."

•

It happened very quickly. By 1967, he was in his rookie season and having a wonderful year. At first, he'd taken pleasure from the status, from simply being in the big leagues, and he had done the usual rookie things: bought the requisite T-bird, endowed it with Reggie plates and enjoyed it when he was recognized on the streets of Boston. He had learned to time it, to watch the excitement in the face of the surprised citizens, and had learned to be very cool under the glare of that attention.

His natural gifts had shown through from the start, and he loved it when opposing teams gathered in front of their dugouts to watch him throw from the outfield during pregame practice. Roberto Clemente, who had been one of his heroes, said that Smith had the best arm in baseball. Carl Yastrzemski had taken him under his wing that first year, and that had been both generous and unusual, since Yaz usually stood apart from the others. But in 1967, the ball club came together. It was a young team, and it did something no team had done in 20 years--it went from last place in one season to first place in the next one. Baseball was sheer pleasure for Smith, and it generated a sense of excitement he had not known before. He simply could not wait to get to the ball park every day. In the morning, there was always an impatience, a feeling that they should skip the pregame drills and just play the game.

That summer, he watched his friend Yastrzemski with an admiration that was complete. Yaz had always been an exceptional teacher, not so much by what he said as by what he did (the lessons were there if you wanted them, but you had to ask; he did not volunteer anything). From Yaz had come not only his own shrewd insights about hitting but the distilled lessons of Ted Williams as well, for Yaz had listened carefully to Williams and shared with him that intensity of concentration, as if in life, baseball alone mattered.

If that was normally true, then it was even more true in the summer of 1967. During the pennant run, Yaz started taking extra batting practice after home games, something he had picked up from Williams. Soon he asked Smith and a few others to join him, and there was a special pleasure in those hours, a rare sense of camaraderie among big-leaguers. There they were, staying behind after everyone else had gone home, men playing like boys, exulting in the dual pleasures of their manhood and their boyhood.

Eventually, Boston went sour for Smith. There were divisions on the team; he was in the Yaz group, and the people who did not like Yaz took out their frustration on him, not on the superstar. There were racial tensions with fans and sportswriters, for the Boston sports press in the late Sixties was not entirely ready for a brash young black player who seemed to lack what some sportswriters felt was the requisite gratitude of a black player to a white newspaperman. Then, in the early Seventies, there were the beginnings of his injuries, and with them he became more of a target for the Red Sox fans.

At the end of the 1973 season, he was traded to the Cardinals. He was glad to go, glad to get out of Boston, where he had stayed too long, he thought, and where there was still a curious reluctance to accept a black star. He was also glad to be going to the National League, where he was sure his game would be more natural.

He loved the National League immediately. It was a far better place to utilize his skills. He felt liberated there, able to play the game all out as he had not been able to in Boston. (With a similar number of games played in each league, Smith made the all-star team five times from the National League and only twice from the American.) Speed was of the essence here; he was aware of that the moment he walked into the Cardinals' locker room. No one symbolized it more than Lou Brock. He might seem like a perfect gentleman on the outside, but there was an intensity with which he exploited his speed and pressured the opposition with his running that was almost frightening. No one was going to stand in the way of what he wanted. Brock's preparation for a game reminded Smith of nothing so much as a razor being sharpened and then sharpened again. Brock had exceptional speed, but what gave him his edge--it was all about edge, no matter how small--was his intelligence and passion. Smith worked with Brock, helping time opposing pitchers and catchers on their moves, and he decided they were all part of the same generation. They were the lineal descendants of Jackie Robinson, all in their own ways fighting the stereotype that blacks had talent but not intelligence. They were hard men, Smith decided later, because they were always proving themselves.

The Cardinals were an organization in transition, and Smith enjoyed playing there but eventually got into a contract hassle with Augie Busch and, to his delight, was traded to the Dodgers. He was pleased to be going back to California, which was his home, and delighted to be playing for the Dodgers. They were, he thought, just one player--and a certain amount of toughness--away from being a great team. He was fascinated by the Dodgers as an organization; it did all the little things well: It scouted the minor leagues carefully; it taught fundamentals; and it looked for the type of player who would fit in with the new clean-cut, California Dodger tradition, which was, of course, different from the older, flintier Brooklyn one, for the tradition must fit the locale. Dodger Blue--the idea that they were not only cleaner but somehow spiritually superior to other baseball players--sold well. The seats were always filled and the teams were good, albeit not quite good enough. They lacked the inherent meanness of some of their opponents. Tommy Lasorda was a good front for it all, a man of the organization who not only articulated the team's myth but propagated it himself. Walking Eagle, some of the older players called him, meaning that he was so full of shit he could not fly. It was a handsome new media team for the brave new media world.

Smith was always amused by the idea of Dodger Blue and Dodger harmony; in its own way, it was one of the most divided teams he had ever known, as much wrought with truly petty jealousies as any team could be. Still, he admired the organization, the sheer professionalism of it on every level. He knew that Al Campanis had understood free agency before any other general manager in baseball and had signed all of his relatively young players to what seemed like generous long-term contracts. Generous they were the day they were signed; but within a few years, $300,000 a year was what utility players were being paid. As the contracts were about to run out in the past year or two, Smith had tried to warn his friends on the team that the Dodgers would not re-sign them, that they would turn to the younger players they had been stockpiling in the minors. But none of them really believed him. They were Dodgers, men of the organization; Walking Eagle was their buddy and they had been good to the organization, and they were now sure that it, in turn, would reward them. Smith was right, of course, and the Dodgers did not even try to sign Steve Garvey when he became a free agent. Soon Ron Cey and Davey Lopes were also gone, as was Reggie Smith.

It was a tough, well-run organization, Smith understood, a place absolutely without illusion or loyalty.

•

A month after he twisted his knee, it was still giving him a lot of pain. He was pinch-hitting now, which meant that instead of seeing bad pitches four or five times a game, he was seeing them only once. And that meant he was pressing even more.

The Japanese press was beginning to needle him. There were references to him as "the million-dollar pinch hitter." It was too bad, one sportswriter noted, that his body was so old, because he was certainly trying hard. "But, fortunately, our young Japanese players are so good that we do not need Smith-san."

"It's getting harder and harder for me," he was saying as he got ready to go to the ball park in Osaka. "I can't show what I can do. I keep wondering why they brought me here. Why did they want me so badly? If they want their Japanese counterparts to be bigger stars, then OK, but I could have stayed in America. I pop up now and they spend half the paper writing about it, discussing it, analyzing my swing." He paused. "You know, one of the reasons they told me they signed me was that they wanted to measure their best against genuine American stars. But then they back away from it. Sometimes I think the most paralyzing thing in this game--probably in this country--is the fear of failure. They would rather not try at all than try and fail. But to be an athlete, I mean a real athlete, you have to have the courage to try, which means the courage to fail." He shook his head.

Hector Cruz, one of the three Cruz brothers and Smith's one gaijin teammate, met him in the lobby. They got into a cab and headed for the ball park. "Reggie," said Cruz, "you are the best I've ever seen at getting around in Japan. You never get lost. You just get in a cab and they look at you and take you to the ball park. Maybe it's the haircut."

Cruz was having an even harder time than Smith. Part of it was language. Smith spoke English and, thus, the interpreter could readily connect him to the team. But Hector spoke Spanglish, and on the way from his native Spanish to their Japanese, a great deal got lost. Then there was the cultural difference exhibited in style, attitude and body language. The Japanese were formal, disciplined; indeed, tight. Their body language was unbelievably formal. Even the baseball players seemed as if they should be wearing blue suits. Cruz, by contrast, was loose. Everything about him was loose--his body movement, his attitude. Japan was not easy for Hector; nor, for that matter, for his brother Tommy, who had played the year before for the Nippon Ham Fighters. The time a batting coach tried to correct Tommy's swing, he simply looked at him, dropped his bat on the plate and left the ball park. On another occasion, there was some difference of opinion on whether or not the team was going to pay Tommy Cruz's utility bill, as his contract promised. He showed up for a game one night quite angry because the bill had not been taken care of. He would not, he insisted, play in the six-P.M. game unless it was done. No one took him very seriously. At 5:45, he returned to the clubhouse, dressed and left the ball park. They caught up with him outside the park and persuaded him to come back. But Japan had not been easy on the Cruz family, nor had the Cruz family been easy on Japan. Hector had been injured early in the season, but now he was ready to play. The team was winning, however, so there was no need to replace a Japanese player with a gaijin.

Smith and Cruz arrived at the ball park already dressed; the facilities were too primitive to shower there. There were still more than three hours to kill before the game. The Japanese sportswriters filled the Giants' dugout, so Smith and Cruz sprinted to the outfield. The sportswriters were eager to talk with an American colleague about visiting baseball teams of the past, particularly the old Yankees.

"We were very excited when Mr. Yogi was going to come here," one of the sportswriters was saying, "because we heard a great deal about Mr. Yogi and how funny he was. But then he came here and we did not think he was very funny. We wanted him to say funny things, but mostly he told us to get out of his way. We do not think Mr. Yogi liked Japanese people."

Another sportswriter mentioned Mickey Mantle. "Mantle-san," he said, "liked the Ginza very much, we think. He and Mr. Billy Martin went to the Ginza and they stayed in Ginza all night, and the next day, Mantle-san struck out three times. A real Ginza swing."

At the ball park, Smith and Cruz seemed distinctly apart from their teammates. They stayed, after all, at different hotels and they did different pregame drills. The Japanese were deadly serious about their practices; they ran hard and exercised hard, and a good practice was considered important, a sign that a player was ready to have a good game. The gaijins didn't work that way; by nature, they coasted through practice, assuming that what they were capable of doing was a given. It was part of the sticking point between the gaijins and the Japanese. The far larger roles of the manager and the coaches in the Japanese game irritated Smith. There were 13 coaches on the Giants and 14 on the Hanshin Tigers. To his mind, that was far too much meddling.

That evening during batting practice, for instance, an American player named Steve Stroughter was getting instruction from a Tiger coach. "Look at that!" Smith said. "Just look at that. That batting coach is full of shit. Doesn't know a damn thing about what he's saying, but he's going to tinker anyway. The kid has been swinging that way all his life, but he's going to play with him anyway. Just a coach anxious to screw someone up." He checked the coach's number. "Hey, Ichi," he called to the team interpreter, Ichiro Tanuma, "who's number 84?"

"Katsura Yokomizo," said Tanuma.

"He ever play Japanese baseball?" Smith asked. The distaste was palpable.

"He played outfield for Hiroshima," Tanuma answered.

"Sure he did." Smith said. "A great star there."

It was not a good game for Smith. In the fourth inning, with the bases loaded and one out, he was sent up to pinch-hit. He grabbed a bat, but first he told Sadaharu Oh, now a Giant coach, that it was too early in the game to use him. "It is never too early to hit a home run," Oh said.

The first pitch caught Smith by surprise. He had been expecting the Hanshin pitcher to waste two or three and, instead, it was the best pitch he had seen in two weeks, right over the plate. He hit a soft pop-up to shortstop. He was not pleased with himself. The game, which did not have a lot of hits, took more than four hours and ended with Yomiuri's winning 5--4. To the Americans, the Japanese game seemed interminable; by contrast, the Japanese do not like telecasts of American games, which they find far too short.

•

Smith had hoped to be playing regularly by early June, but when he finally tried, his knee buckled completely. He would be a pinch hitter, it appeared, for quite a while, if not the entire season. Now the Japanese press was riding him hard. One paper thought he did not smile enough. Another quoted the Giants' general manager about how fortunate it was that Smith had only a one-year contract.

"That's mild," Bob Whiting remarked, like a veteran family counselor, involuntarily expert at watching the breakup of Japanese-American baseball marriages. "It won't get really good for another two weeks," he said. Two weeks later to the day, Whiting phoned. "It's begun," he said. "You have to know how to look for it. The tip-off came all last week. The camera on the televised games kept showing Smith and Cruz in the dugout. No one ever said anything, but the implication was always that they weren't paying attention and that they didn't care about the team. What they really feel is that Smith should be more contrite, that his face and manner should show more obligation--that he should be more Japanese. So today it's finally hit one of the tabloids."

"Fire Smith" was the headline. "The Japanese have a gaijin complex," the story said, "and it is being taken advantage of. The gaijins come here and don't do anything and Japan has become the laughingstock of the world because of it. What is a powerful economic giant like Japan doing hiring someone like Reggie Smith? We're one of the seven advanced nations of the world. Occasionally, he'll come to bat and get a hit as a pinch hitter and management will say thank you, and he'll answer with a superior smile, 'I'm a major-leaguer.' "

Only if the Giants fired Smith and sent him home to America, the paper said, would the rest of the world respect Japan.

By late June, after a month of that sort of thing, Smith would sometimes wait in the locker room for more than an hour after the game, until everyone else was gone. This particular night, the Giants had taken an early lead, and so he did not even have to pinch-hit, and now, as he got on the subway with some friends, he said, "You know, it looks like baseball, it smells like baseball, but it isn't baseball at all."

•

Slowly, he began to heal. In July, he returned to the line-up full time. He was pressing, and he struck out often and complained angrily about what he called the gaijin strike zone, a pitcher's delight. In Hiroshima, after being called out on strikes, he smashed up a couple of lockers. The Japanese were not amused. Nor was he; he was convinced that the Giant coaches not only did not back him up but rooted against him. Then, a little later, Oh benched him because he was "too nervous." The Japanese press loved it. It looked more and more as if he would not last the season.

Shortly after that, he tried to reverse the tide of his fortunes by having a "backward day," putting his entire uniform on backward, from underwear to shoes. The Giant players loved it, but the coaches were angry. He thought he was mocking himself, but they thought he was mocking something almost sacred, Japanese baseball. They ordered him to go in and change for batting practice. He refused. "I'll take batting practice in my mind," he said. Perhaps the Zen b.p. helped, for he hit a home run and a double that night. But overall, things were not going well for him, nor for the Giants, who were in the process of blowing a ten-game lead to the Hiroshima Carp.

A few days later, he was involved in a major incident in a game against the Carp. The Hiroshima bench began to get on him in a way that he could only partly understand: "Gaijin, gaijin!" they shouted, and then added some incomprehensible words in Japanese. Of the words in Japanese, he imagined the worst. To him, that was insulting. In his mind, they were all double-A ballplayers. Double-A players did not have the right to ride someone from the bigs. He started yelling "Fuck you" at them. The Carp pitcher retaliated with a brush-back pitch. The umpire did nothing. The Carp pitcher threw another. Smith used his bat to flip some dirt in the catcher's face. "If you want to fight," the umpire said, pointing his finger at Smith, "do it outside the stadium."

"If I wanted to fight," Smith answered, "he'd be lying on his ass on the ground right now."

The next night, before the game, he went over to the Carp bench and told them in a very cool and lightly ominous way to lay off the razzing and lay off the bean balls. Otherwise, he would protect himself. He suddenly looked very much bigger than they did. Late in the game, with two men on, the Carp catcher called for a brush-back pitch; the pitcher refused and threw it on the outside corner. Smith reached out and hit a three-run homer that won the game and also ended a run the Carp had been making at the pennant.

Some of his friends had thought that he'd come to the end of the road, but after that night, things began to change for the better. He and Oh, whom he respected, had a long dinner that helped clear the air, and the umpires seemed to ease up and give him more of a strike zone (there were quite reliable reports that the sainted Oh had talked to them). He began to get better pitches and he began to hit. He shortened his swing to match the style of Japanese baseball--hands right in front of his face. Suddenly, he was not just hitting, he was carrying the team. That was important; earlier, when the Giants seemed to have the pennant locked up, they had not needed him. Now, when they were making a run, he was dominating the game, going in the process from bad gaijin to good gaijin. By the end of the season, he had 28 homers and 72 R.B.I.s in only 261 at bats. (Tatsunori Hara, the team's star, who benefited from having Smith hit behind him, had 31 homers and 103 R.B.I.s in almost twice as many at bats.)

Soon after Smith got hot, the Japanese press was writing positively about him. The Giants clinched the pennant on a day in which he hit three home runs. A series of articles in a Japanese sports paper featured his tips on hitting and referred to him as Professor Smith. There were even some commercial endorsements, which was unheard of for an American player. He finished second in the most-valuable-player voting, behind Hara. The owner of the team, Shoriki, referred to Smith's salary as a bargain. Smith himself began to talk of what he would do when he came back in 1984 and about the advice he would give a new gaijin player ("Forget everything you thought you knew about baseball and strike zones and strategy ..."). Appreciated by the Japanese, he in turn became more appreciative of them, of how much they had created out of so little. Everyone seemed to relax a bit more. Acceptance bred acceptance. For the first time, there was on their part a recognition of how passionately he had wanted to excel.

In the end, some of the Giants' front-office people spoke of the fact that the team could not have won the pennant without him. Newspapers said that Smith was not like the other gaijins, who had come over only for the money. Instead, he had played hard and well under difficult conditions. Even a gaijin, it seemed, could learn something new about an old game.

" 'Small baseball,' he said of the Japanese game, 'they play small baseball.' "

" 'Man, I'm not ready for Japan yet,' he told them. Then they began to negotiate in earnest."