Make Believe Mailer 68: Baseball-Crazy
"Let's do the baseball boogie / can't stop doing it night and day"
The crack of the bat, the ball smacking into the catcher’s, the roar of the crowd, the sweet sounds of a professional athlete singing a novelty single…folks, baseball season is here.
Not a ballplayer, but an actual musician
Japan loves baseball — it really can’t be emphasized enough how enthralled the nation was by Samurai Japan’s triumph in the recent World Baseball Classic, I had parents at my kid’s school stopping me to talk about it — and as any country obsessed with sports can attest to, that bleeds over to everything else. That includes music. In the same way that football teams and Olympians have ventured into crafting song, players in Nippon Professional Baseball have given singing a go. It’s…interesting!
To celebrate the official start of both the MLB and NPB season (by the time this gets sent out…I’ll be on a train to an opening game for the latter), here’s a handful of professional baseball players in Japan who have, for whatever reason, decided to give music a go, even just for a little bit.
This is just a few personal favorites — more posts in the future??? Maybe, but thanks to the essential Baseball Music book for helping highlight a lot of these.
Sadaharu Oh — “Shiroi Ball” (1964)
100 Minutes Version, If You Love Songs About Baseballs
NPB and technical global home run king Sadaharu Oh hit 868 dingers during his career with the Yomiuri Giants. That might make him the most accomplished player to ever record a single (Barry Bonds doesn’t have a single I’m aware of). “Shiroi Ball” is about…baseball, and like literally just lists things that happen in a baseball game (double play, single, etc.). When you discover this tune was written for literal children — like this is aimed at toddlers — it makes much more sense.
Tatsunori Hara — “Arifureta LOVE SONG” (1982)
Former Central League Rookie Of The Year, MVP, multiple champion and current Yomiuri Giants skipper Tatsunori Hara has one other honor to add to his resume — an attempt at a musical crossover. Released a year after his dazzling debut season, Something only exists in bits and pieces online, but from those scraps we can piece together that Hara had a lot on his heart (despite getting to stand next to an incredible looking pooch for the album art). “Arifureta LOVE SONG” captures the general vibe — Hara tackles balladry, in all its complexities. Just don’t dwell too much on the high notes.
Hideki Kuriyama — “Koutekisyu” (1992)
This man just coached Samurai Japan to a WBC title.
Part of the charm of all these ‘80s and ‘90s ballplayer songs is they exist in this weird window where J-pop — as shaped by Eurobeat and modern dance trends — hasn’t taken hold, so they are performing nostalgic little ballads over what sounds like keyboard presets with a few strings worked in for extra drama. This one’s all about having a rival on the diamond…and appreciating that fact.
Young Swallows — TO THE TOP VICTORY ROAD (1993)
The ballsiest thing about “The Super Bowl Shuffle” isn’t that the 1985 Chicago Bears called their shot…they did that and won the championship. TO THE TOP VICTORY ROAD pulls off something similar, albeit with a whole album’s worth of material and slightly less swagger. Delivered by Young Swallows (misleading, as several players featured here were veterans by this point), this set courtesy of Tokyo Yakult Swallows’ players features synthesized pop underlined by guitar cheese. It only occasionally puffs out its chest to declare “we’re taking it this year,” instead finding the team…expressing a love of karaoke. Baseball creeps in, but a lot of songs here are about longing and love. Walter Payton talked about scoring sure, but that carried two meanings.
Anyway, a deeply weird album but still prophetic…the Swallows won the Nippon Series in 1993, so this deserves to be held up alongside everything else in that season. It also features hall of fame catcher Atsuya Furuta just going for it over electric guitar, which is something.
Lee Brothers — “Baseball Boogie” (1980s)
Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa documents a time when non-Japanese baseball players faced an uphill challenge in adjusting to the country’s professional league1, facing challenges domestic players never had to contend with. I think those times have largely changed — like, it probably isn’t a breeze, but I imagine it is nowhere near as hard bridging that gap as it was in the Bubble Era.
“Baseball Boogie” is one of the few ways I think I can experience how weird that time must have been.
Leon and Leron Lee had long-running careers in Japanese baseball, piling up honors and generally excelling. Yet even being great at their sport couldn’t save them from having to record novelty single “Baseball Boogie,” featuring the lyrics “come on baseball boogie / take you to a happy wonderland / let’s do the baseball boogie / take a ball, take a bat, come outside.” That sounds even rougher than it looks, a reminder of why rhyming is useful. Still, as far as curios go, this is more of a nice souvenir with a ton of unintentional humor surrounding it. It could have been worse for the Lee Brothers.
Thomas O’Malley — Thomas O’Malley Dynamic English (1994)
Thomas O’Malley won an MVP in NPB for god’s sakes, and he still had to record a novelty set, including his effort to sing Hanshin Tiger’s “Rokko Oroshi” in Japanese. Maybe it’s because O’Malley and the Lee brothers were so good they had to enter the world of baseball pop — even greatness carries its hurdles.
DJ DOALA — “Doala No Theme” (2008)
Let’s end this by cheating — Doala, the koala mascot for the Chunichi Dragons, is not a professional baseball player. However, their 2008 “Doala No Theme” as DJ DOALA deserves credit for, one, being clearly the best song featured on this list and, two, merging sounds of the time into the baseball landscape. Blockheaded dance with touches of Eurobeat…now that’s what I’m talking about! The fact this bear could release this now and feel on the pulse of popular music makes it all the more special.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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One of the other documents of this period is…Mr. Baseball, the Tom Selleck comedy about an aging MLBer trying to make it in Nagoya. I have a whole draft about this movie in the Substack back-end…when I threaten to start making subscriber-only posts, it’s for stuff like that.