I must start by issuing an apology to anyone who has been aching for a new post on this blog since October. Since then my career writing sports at a daily newspaper has pretty much consumed all my sports-writing energy. I have been blogging a bit, but it has been on my blog through the newspaper, which can be found at http://dgsports.areavoices.com/. I'm unfortunately one of those people that too easily gets caught up in the idea that life is too busy to deviate too much from a set schedule, which is of course completely ridiculous, because when we look back and see how we all spend our time, we all inevitably find that we waste an incredible amount on it on worthless tasks.
That being said, I've decided that continuing this blog is something I won't continue to put off any longer. I will provide at least a post a week for the next few weeks catching up on some of the things that have been on my list to write about, so there will actually be reason to keep an eye on this sight for those interested.
This first post of my comeback is dedicated to blog artist extraordinaire Tyler Hanck, who gave me the necessary motivation to get back to blogging. The actual post starts now:
When faced with moments of tragedy, it is human nature to take a step back from our everyday lives to reflect on the greater matters of life. Although some people treat sports as if they are a life or death affair (I can't properly attribute this quote, but I remember a British soccer fan once saying of their team's success, "It's not life and death - it's more important than that"), the truth of the matter is that they are about as far from a matter of life and death as there is.
After the devastating March 11th 8.9 scale earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan, one of the things I'm sure you haven't heard people worrying about is how it will affect the upcoming Japanese baseball season. It matters very little when there are thousands of people that have lost loved ones, and who are still without homes or steady access to food, water or electricity, and probably won't be able to go back to living an everyday life still for days, weeks or months to come. There are people who's lives were transformed in mere minutes by a completely unforeseeable act, and who are living through events that very few of us can imagine ourselves going through.
There is plenty of work that needs to be done for things to return to normal in Japan, but there is no doubt that things will become normal again. Japan is as good as any other place in the world at receiving a bad hand and overcoming the obstacles that are created. It is a country that modernized swiftly in the 19th Century after centuries of self-imposed isolation, that rebuilt after being bombed relentlessly in World War II to become one of the great economies of the world, and more recently rebuilt an entire city after the 1995 earthquake in Kobe.
The Japanese people don't want the rest of the world feeling sorry for them. They just want to get back on their feet.
One small way that Japan can focus on returning to normalcy is for the baseball season to go on as planned. The league (Nippon Professional Baseball) originally planned to start on schedule in late March even in the wake of the disaster, but inevitably had to postpone opening day to April 12. One of the league's 12 teams - the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles - is based in Sendai (the biggest city to be destroyed in the wake of the tsunami) and delaying the season makes perfect sense given the situation.
However, it is important that the season be only delayed and not canceled altogether. It is not unheard of for a professional sports season to be canceled - it has happened it times of war, and more recently in times of labor dispute - and a disaster of the scale of what has happened in Japan may seem a justifiable reason to cancel a season as well. But the act of not playing baseball doesn't change what happened, and it doesn't do anything to help alleviate the situation.
On the contrary - the act of playing baseball can actually make a difference.
On Saturday April 2, all 12 Japanese professional teams matched up and played baseball games. None of the games were a part of the actual season - all of them were played strictly for charity to raise funds to help with relief efforts. They will do the same again on April 3 (which is when this blog is being typed). Here is an article with more details.
I'm already getting a bit long winded, and will add more on this idea in a future post, but one of the major functions of professional sports is as a sector of a nation's economy - albeit it a sector that provides return in entertainment rather than in raw materials or physical products. People often complain about the business model of professional sports as funneling money straight to the top to create a class of people with way more money than they know what to do with (which of course holds truths), but as this situation demonstrates, the potential is also there for sports to create revenue that can be distributed to places where it is much more sorely needed.
This happens on a small scale in the most pro sports, with teams or individual players often making generous donations to charities , but unfortunately it doesn't happen often enough when there isn't a cause to rally around like there currently is in Japan. That being said, there have been some incredibly generous individual donations to relief efforts in Japan: Major League Baseball player Ichiro Suzuki made a $1.25 million donation to relief efforts, fellow Japanese MLB player Daisuke Matsuzaka made a $1 million donation and Japanese pro golfer Ryo Ishikawa pledged to donate his entire tournament winnings this year to the cause. A group of professional skiers also started up a charity where they pledged large chucks of their winnings to the cause - you can read more about this effort on their website, skiershelpingjapan.com.
But it isn't for the potential donations alone that it is important right now for Japanese baseball to get up and running. Life becomes a grim prospect when the only thing you have to think about it the necessities of survival - we all need distractions to retain our sanity. Sports provide us with such a distraction, and the presence of the distraction of sports is one way that life can start to return to normal for the people of Japan. The people of Japan have the ability to focus on both relief efforts and baseball at the same time, and in instances like April 2 and 3, they focused on both at exactly the same time.
There are unfortunately people in the world who find their lives filled with hardship and don't have the luxury of being able to use sports as an escape, but I can think of nowhere in the world where people would refuse to turn to sports where given the chance (be it playing crude soccer matches played with bare feet and a pieced together ball, or something even simpler). I've already brought up the idea in this blog of sports acting as a unifying force, and there is no better example of a time when people need to be unified than in tragedies such as Japan is currently facing - and the situations in New Zealand, Libya, and countless other nations where people's everyday lives have had to take a back seat in the face of natural disasters or political turmoil.
I hope that I have made any sense. Feel free to post comments with your thoughts, suggestions or ideas on where you think I could/should expand.
My next blog post will be coming shortly.
