SAN DIEGO — He could see Meadowlark Lemon turning two, almost hear “Sweet Georgia Brown” whistling through vacuous Petco Park. As Japanese and Korean infielders gobbled up grounders during infield practice Tuesday and whipped the balls among themselves in bouncy syncopation, Mark Weidemaier sensed he was watching a different sport, a different show.
Outfielder Norichika Aoki of Japan during a batting practice session.
“They’re the Harlem Globetrotters,” said Weidemaier, who has spent this week scouting the San Diego bracket of the World Baseball Classic for the Los Angeles Dodgers. “They’re not flashy or showy, I don’t mean that. But the footwork and timing. They’re going full bore, full speed. They go through every play that needs to be made in the game. They’ll get more ground balls than a big-leaguer takes in a week.”
Baseball scouts are known for watching games, but the best in the business focus just as much on pregame practice, sometimes more. Three games can pass without getting to see how a shortstop can flash into the hole, or how well a second baseman charges a slow grounder. But when top Asian teams take batting practice, a scout’s inner aesthete awakens to the beauty of the game.
Tuesday night — when Korea beat Japan, 4-1, to advance to this weekend’s W.B.C. semifinals — presented a double shot for the two dozen scouts in attendance. All of them want to be prepared in case any player becomes available to be signed, and both teams’ hour of pregame drills had oodles to eyeball.
“Korea has a B.P. routine they use where it’s more about moving runners over and hitting to the opposite field,” said Orrin Freeman, a longtime scout for the Florida Marlins who has watched international baseball since the 1980s. “You watch a major league team in the United States take B.P., and most of the guys are just playing home run derby.” (B.P가 뭔가효 -_-;;?)
As Japan and Korea practiced before Tuesday’s game, Freeman watched from the loge seats behind first base. He saw a distinctly Korean defensive drill in which any ball that goes beyond outfielder depth draws an infielder deep onto the grass to take a relatively short cutoff throw, in large part because third-base coaches tend to hold runners if cutoff men already have the ball. After Korea left the field, Japanese infielders took fungoed grounders at almost infield-in depth, pushing their reflexes so that the real game would feel easier, not unlike how a hitter might swing three bats in the on-deck circle.
Rob Ducey, a former major league outfielder who scouts for the Toronto Blue Jays, sat beside the third-base dugout and enjoyed a sonata of skills rarely seen in the majors. He saw Japanese shortstop Yasuyuki Kataoka field grounders in perfect position to turn double plays, and other infielders moving to balls on angles that would make Euclid proud. Korean third baseman Bum Ho Lee charged grounders with the intensity of October, which for many foreign players this W.B.C. might as well be.
“They work their craft a whole lot more than we do,” Ducey said. “They work on their swings instead of being pull, pull, pull.” Asked how a typical major-leaguer might respond to pregame practices as intense as those of Asian teams, Ducey said: “They’d feel like it was overkill — ‘I don’t want to get gassed.’ Major league players, not all of them, but they do enough to get by because physically they’re such gifted athletes.” (I don`t want to get gassed. 가 무슨말인가요?)
Not unlike how Asia’s practices are more rigorously exacting than those in the major leagues, several scouts said that Japan’s infield drills are generally more taut than Korea’s, a difference they ascribed to Korea’s having larger players with more power and less reliance on basic run-at-a-time fundamentals.
Cleanup hitter Tae Kyun Kim packs 220 pounds on his six-foot frame, while first baseman Dae Ho Lee stands a downright behemoth 6-foot-4, 264. Japan has only one regular who weighs as much as 205: catcher Kenji Johjima, who perhaps not coincidentally makes his living with the Seattle Mariners. (베히모쓰에서 폭소.)
“The Japanese, they are far superior fundamentally,” said Ducey, the Blue Jays’ coordinator of Pacific Rim operations. “They take thousands of ground balls a week, not just the young guys, all of them. The Japanese run hard down the line all the time. Koreans, it’s a little haphazard at times. And Koreans are generally more physical, more aggressive at the plate. They’re more suited for our game.”
And still, a few hours later, the Koreans proved that they were plenty fundamental, more so, on this night, than Japan. They beat Japan on execution alone, all in the first inning.
It started with the first two batters of the game: second baseman Keun Woo Jeong grabbed a high chopper and threw to first to barely nip Japan’s speedy Ichiro Suzuki, and on the next play, first baseman Tae Kyun Kim dived to his right for a hard ground ball and threw to the pitcher hustling over to cover first. Rather than an early first-and-second, no-out jam, the inning soon ended peacefully.
And in the bottom half of the inning, Japan looked uncharacteristically clumsy. After a leadoff single, second baseman Akinori Iwamura double-clutched a ground ball in the hole for what was ruled a single; later, with Iwamura trying to start a double play, Kataoka could not handle Iwamura’s low throw and got no out at all. Two batters later, Korea’s Jin Young Lee stroked a beautiful opposite-field single through the left side for two runs, a 3-0 Korea lead and San Diego’s best imitation of Tony Gwynn in years.
With the loss, Japan left itself having to play Cuba on Wednesday night to stay alive in the tournament it won three years ago. Disappointing for Japanese fans, but a treat for American scouts. Just another day at the symphony.
“Watching the Japanese fungo hitters is great,” Weidemaier noted. “They’re hitting every type of ball that can happen to an infielder: to the left and right, backhand, sharp one-hoppers, backspin, top spin, slow rollers. Rat-a-tat-tat, they’re so precise in all their movements. To me, that’s what makes this game so beautiful.”
;)
