Chasing the Setting Sun: PEBA Diaries, #2

Prologue

(December 2019)

I’m Casey Neal.

You might already know my story. Or, you might at least know the particulars that are visible to the standard net search, or run on the mind-numbing television churn. There’s more to it than that, though…

That’s how my first book starts. You might have read it.

Or not.

I meet a lot of people who never heard of it. That’s all right, though. It’s a good story no matter how many people come to it, and it fits a place in my life that I can’t ever go back to. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the six years since I wrote it, it’s that time is like that. You only get one shot at the moment you’re in, and if you don’t do anything good with that second of time, it’s gone forever.

But I suppose it’s also just as fair to say that every second you live gets you a new chance, right? Every new second you step into is a new second you can use, a new shot at making a good decision and doing the right things. And if that’s true, then I guess you get as many fresh chances as you do seconds of life.

For you folks who haven’t read my first book or just don’t follow sports to any depth, the PEBA is, of course, the Planetary Extreme Baseball Alliance—the professional baseball outfit that took over when the old MLB group strangled itself in steroids and bad press back in 2006.

Anyway.

I’m thinking all this stuff while I’m sitting on an airplane that departed from San Francisco an hour ago, and is headed west toward the Great Far East. We’re at 34,000 feet if you trust the captain about things like that, and we're floating over a layer of clouds that covers up the ocean below. I’m thinking it all with a vodka on the rocks sitting on my seat tray that is now fully extended in front of me, cracking ice between my back teeth, and with a movie on the screen that I haven’t actually been watching for at least the last thirty minutes.

A lot’s happened since I wrote See the PEBA on $25 a Day.

I got the girl, I lost the girl. I pretended it was all her fault, and that it didn’t hurt a lick, and that sometime she would be the one who was sorry I was gone. I wrote some more books about baseball. Got a job, jumped ship on the job. Wrote some more books, and decided that, even if no one ever buys anything I write from this point forward, this thing with words is about all I’ll ever really understand. So I figure I better pay it some mind now. This learning alone is probably worth the six years it took me to get my sorry-assed behind onto this airplane and in front of this vodka.

Yes, friends, time flies when you’re not paying any freaking attention.

So now I’m sitting on this 767, heading to Tokyo and thinking about stuff I haven’t thought about in years.

Like, I’m thinking about Miley Cyrus.

You remember her, right? You remember that shortly after See the PEBA came out, she had this song called Wrecking Ball that everyone got their knickers all tied up in wads over because she didn’t wear no clothes for part of the video, and that was a big A’ed deal back then because everyone was still trying to shoehorn her into their own little image of Hannah Montana. But she had already gone past that herself and wasn’t having any part of it no more. So she did the song, and she did some dancing in ways that a bunch of folks thought was just Too Danged Far Over the Top, and she said a crap-ton of crazy-assed-weird things that, let’s face it, pretty much every kid in their late teens and early twenties says.

Who would have guessed she would be where she is now, eh?

Things are not always as they seem, it seems.

And I’m thinking about cars, too.

I’m remembering a long, beautiful rust-bucket of a convertible that Don-o and I named Annie, that made her way across the big ol’ USA with just a touch of loving care. And I’m thinking about ballparks. I go to a lot of ballparks now, you know? Part of the job. But today, as the vodka sits on my tongue, I’m remembering how Don-o and I would shiver in the bleachers during games in the Duluth spring and I’m remembering how we squirmed in hard seats out west as I nursed both my beer and a sunburn that would have peeled skin off Scrooge McDuck. I’m thinking about outfield fences, and green grass, and popcorn, and DozerDogs.

I’m thinking about Japan, too.

When the scandal around Japanese baseball first broke, I—like most every other baseball fan in the US—took it in over the news feeds. It was interesting, but didn’t seem that immediate. Yes, it was baseball, but it was Japanese baseball. Japan’s League of the Rising Sun (the LRS) had replaced their old Nippon League just as the PEBA had replaced baseball in America. And yes, it was millions of dollars missing—a chunk of money big enough that no one really downplayed the stature of the crime (no more than they downplayed the whole idea of Japanese baseball itself, anyway). And the whole multiple-identity thing lent a certain James Bondish sensation to the story. I mean, how many times has one guy managed to pull off pretending to be five different guys, and run five different baseball teams all at the same time? Talk about schizophrenia to the max. But for me it felt like it did when I hear news that an earthquake has devastated some distant shore. It didn’t mean much to my daily life.

What I knew could be summed up as this.

A guy named Shannon Franklin had somehow taken on four more identities and bamboozled a total of five different teams to hire him as their general manager. He then commenced to making deals and siphoning off cash into the odd Swiss bank account here and there. The whole thing gave us writers great fodder for post-game barroom banter.

How many light bulbs does it take to light the homes of all the general managers in Japan?

Response: Just one.

And.

I hear Japan started a new basketball team to play the Globetrotters?

Response: Yeah, named them the General Managers. They had to forfeit every game due to no-show.

Late-night comics had their moments with one-liners about Japanese general managers turning down their own offers, and cloning gone amuck, and several other such memes.

It was all in fun, though.

But then things started happening over in America, and next thing you know the PEBA itself announced the merger that would bring the two leagues together, and it was like: Holy Freaking Shazaam!

Suddenly the P in PEBA, the letter that stood for Planetary in the Planetary Extreme Baseball Alliance, was real. International baseball in its purest form was coming to the world.

Sure, the league has always had the Underground in London, and the LRS had its toehold in Seoul, Korea, but this was inter-freaking-national baseball on an entirely new level. News of the merger included franchise movements that would put teams in Cuba and in Amsterdam, and rumors had it that the league might pursue expansion into other geographically diverse locations like Australia or Spain.

Suddenly I needed to pay attention. Suddenly I needed to understand.

So I went back and I read the news reports.

I read about fraud, about identity theft, about organized crime and baseball.

I learned the names: Shannon Franklin and his four alter-egos—Dylan Ortega, Donald Walters, Rick Watts, and Cash Reynolds.

I followed news reports about strange things happening in the front offices of clubs all around the world (including some interesting tidbits that suggest baseball in the US was not so clean of the scourge itself). I grew quickly annoyed at the roadblocks the Japanese authorities were so clearly running into as they worked to pursue their investigation, an investigation that’s being hampered by international politics and the all-too-human ugliness that surrounds everything that such efforts entail.

All anyone can say for sure is that every time one of the Five Amigos …which is really an odd colloquialism here in the US for what should probably be the Five Tomodachi if we were to Americanize the Japanese word for friend or friends … anyway, every time one of them made a deal with each other, somehow money got siphoned away. And to say these five made scads of deals would be akin to saying the Duggars had a few kids. Then, of course, the ruse was discovered, and now Shannon Franklin and his four alter-egos are as missing as the money he swiped. No trace. No clues. David Copperfield could not have done a better job of making himself disappear.

In the vacuum of this disappearance, four Japanese baseball clubs went bankrupt and the LRS applied a metaphorical tourniquet by contracting them out of existence.

Reading about it made me feel grimy.

It made me feel sick.

But while I spent hours wading through a seemingly endless flow of legal wrangling and police procedure, I also read about the games.

And in those stories I saw wonderful words thrown about on the page. Phrases like: Wasei Junkesshou (the playoff series), Gurabukin (a phrase that roughly translates to Grab the Gold, and describes the Japanese version of the All Leather awards, or the old MLB’s Gold Gloves), and Saiyu-shu-senshu (the coveted Most Valuable Player award). I read about fans in Niihama-shi who raised such an outcry when their general manager resigned, and created such a groundswell of support for him that he actually came back for a year. I learned about the Eva Empire. I marveled at the rise of the Lupin Cliff Hangers. And I felt somehow drawn to the Edo Battousai, a team whose logo carries a samurai—a logo that will now see its last stand in 2020.

I learned that the Japanese play the game differently from how it’s played here in the US.

It’s a faster game, less television, but more corporate.

I read about fans there who live for defense and for laying down the perfect sacrifice bunt. How they applaud discipline and loyalty. That until this season, the teams played 144 games a year rather than 162, and that their pitchers still went to the plate.

Along the way, a strange thing started to happen.

Every time I learned something about this thing called the League of the Rising Sun, and about the strange goings-on that nearly led to its demise, I realized I wanted to know more. There was something deeper happening here. I could feel it, even if I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

It was a great feeling, really.

To be interested in something again.

To actually care.

That’s when I knew I needed to write about it.

That’s when I started setting up interviews, when I spent three days at the league’s winter meetings, when I bought this ticket, and hopped onto this steel horse that is, as I’m writing these very words, flying westward and chasing the setting sun.

And, yeah, finally, I admit I’m thinking about Don-o, too.

I’ve still got his last letter to me. I keep it stashed away in the apartment.

Never saw him again after all the stuff that happened in the summer of 2013. Sometimes that seems like forever ago. Sometimes it seems like it was just yesterday.

But, yeah, it's been six seasons.

Long enough that the League of the Rising Sun went from drawing 20 million fans a year to nearly double that. Long enough that the revenue stream of baseball in the Far East grew to compete with the big guns over in the US.

That’s what I tell everyone is bringing me over here, of course.

Baseball in Japan?

Can they make it? Can baseball in Japan step into the spotlight? Can this quaint game of theirs flourish with the big boys? Will it survive this attempt at self-immolation?

And why does it matter?

I mean, what is it about people and the games we share that makes us care?

These are all things I want to know.

Next season, three Japanese-based franchises from the LRS will scatter like lotus blossoms across the globe, and the five that remain will comprise the Rising Sun division of the global PEBA. But now, against the sizzling simmer of an investigation into the most corrupt workings in a sports league that has been uncovered for years, the League of the Rising Sun is preparing to play its last season as an independent organization.

It’s like a senior year in college, isn’t it?

A last go-around before stepping into this big, bright world that would just as soon chew you up as give you an inch.

One last season.

One last year.

As they say in Rent, that’s five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes to spend both in the moment, and in thinking about where your future might go. Or—assuming I’ve got my vodka-laced math about right—something over thirty-one and a half million fresh second chances.

To be absolutely frank, the idea of landing in Tokyo feels edgy to me. I mean, what the hell do I know about Japan? The idea of being there for as long as this story is going to take me to put together makes me feel like an alien, like a space man getting ready to land on a distant planet. It’s not my culture, you know? I worry about the food.

It’ll be all right, though, I think as I crack another ice cube between my molars.

Baseball is baseball, right?

And, this story of the merger between baseball in Japan and baseball in the rest of the world is the biggest thing I’ll ever get my hands on. If I do it right, anyway.

That’s the whole reason I’m on this plane, right?

To get it right?

Finally?

I crack more ice, and look out the window.

1. WELCOME TO JAPAN

(December 2019)

I grew up in a place called Duluth.

It’s a place in the north of Minnesota built onto the western edge of Lake Superior. It’s everything you might expect from your typical harebrained American city. It’s got your greasy burger joints, your high school football fields, your wide open places to park a car, and it’s got places where you can catch a third-run movie for just $3.50. The Warriors play baseball in Duluth at a ballpark that Don-o and I used to call Good Ol’ Doyle Buhl. It’s the home of the North Summer Brewfest, the birthplace of a one-time Baywatch Babe, and the birthplace also of one Robert Zimmerman.

I hear that guy wrote a pretty good song or two at one time.

So, yeah, Duluth is an American place.

Yet, it’s also nearly Canadian.

On an afternoon you can hitch a road trip up highway 61 and find yourself in Thunder Bay just a couple hours later. If you sit in a bar in Duluth I guarantee you’ll hear an apology from someone within five minutes, and you might well live there for ten years before you’ll hear a freakin’ car horn blown in anger. It’s a city that likes its Molson as well as any other, and a place that appreciates a good