THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 20, 1996 TAG: 9606200574
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY RICH RADFORD, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 63 lines
Foreign tourists? Nah. These five Japanese visitors, who took in a game at Harbor Park Wednesday, are baseball fans.
Make that FANS!!
What's not to like. Saturday in Atlanta, they saw the Los Angeles Dodgers turn a triple play. Sunday in Orlando, they caught a U.S. Women's Baseball League game. On Wednesday afternoon, they toasted Lou Gehrig's 93rd birthday.
Who would even know that it was Gehrig's birthday? Members of the Japan-based American Baseball Research Association, that's who.
Back in Japan, the group of about 70 diehard baseball fans research the U.S. baseball scene for Japanese historical value. And for the love of baseball.
Five members of the organization are on an 11-day trip to the East Coast to soak up as much folklore about the game as possible. Yoshi Fukushima, Kazuo Hitomi, Kiyotaka Ito, Hiroshi Tsukada and Takashi Ando figure to spend more than $6,000 each - split roughly 50-50 between transportation and memorabilia.
Most of their stops have had a Japanese angle. They were in Atlanta to see Hideo Nomo and in Orlando to see Keiko ``Scoop'' Suzuki, who tore up the Japanese Women's Recreational Baseball League before coming stateside.
Wednesday's hook was Norfolk Tides manager Bobby Valentine, who managed the Chiba Lotte Marines in the Japanese League last season.
After raiding the gift shop at Harbor Park and watching the Tides lose to Syracuse 3-0, the group met with Valentine so he could autograph Japanese-language copies of his book, ``Beyond the 1,000 Ground Balls.''
``We want to see real baseball,'' said Ken Miyauchi of Miami, the group's interpreter. ``Japanese baseball is so much different. There isn't the deep history of the game that there is here.''
This isn't the first time the association's members have trekked to U.S. ballparks.
``Every year, we get an idea or a seed,'' Miyauchi said. ``Maybe there's a new stadium we want to see. Maybe there's an old stadium we want to visit.''
On Monday, the group worked its way through North Carolina with stops in Durham, Winston-Salem and Greensboro before catching the South Atlantic League All-Star Game in Asheville.
Tuesday it was Wilmington, N.C., for the Double-A Port City Roosters vs. the Carolina Mudcats.
Today they'll catch Syracuse vs. the Charlotte Knights. Friday, they'll see Port City again, this time against the Orlando Cubs.
The trip winds up in Tampa, where they will see Katsuhiro Maeda, a 24-year-old former Japanese minor league star who signed a $1.5 million bonus with the New York Yankees last month. If Maeda's hair, dyed bright red, doesn't set him apart, maybe his fastball will. It's been clocked in the high 90s.
Saturday's stop in Atlanta for three games might have been the highlight of the group's adventure.
``We get all of Nomo's games on TV in Japan,'' said Fukushma through the team's interpreter. ``But being there for that and seeing a triple play in the first inning, that was special.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
CHRISTOPHER REDDICK/The Virginian-Pilot
Keiko Suzuki, left, and Japanese fans Hiroshi Tsukada, Kiyotaka Ito
and Kazuo Hitomi took in the Tides' game Wednesday. Suzuki is a
former Japanese Women's Recreational Baseball League star. by CNB