Lincicome: Baseball and Japan both are capable of surprising you

This just in. The national anthem will be sung on Opening Day by Yoshiki, a local lad, not to be confused with Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the starting pitcher. Further highlights will include the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers and those handy stooges, the Cubs, a team from Chicago, in a game of baseball.

All of this will take place in Tokyo, baseball’s dome away from home, for reasons not entirely obvious but generally offered as extending baseball’s “global footprint.”

Not necessary. Japan needs another baseball game like it needs another hatchback. It is getting harder to tell who is doing whom a favor here.

This is where we are, starting the baseball season before training for the baseball season has ended. The White Sox, for example, will still be sorting themselves out in Arizona, their own opening day a faint threat.

The novelty of playing our game at their place has worn off. The Cubs just did this, what, 25 years ago? Much has changed since then, including the emergence of the best player in the game, Shohei Ohtani, not a Cub, although Shota Imanaga and Seiya Suzuki are.

A quick personal note. As a teenage innocent, I lived in Japan for two years, doing my best to extend America’s global footprint, although on an enlisted man’s salary it seemed my extending had to do with hocking my high school class ring between paydays. I imagine it is still somewhere in Tachikawa.

At that time American baseball came to Japan on tour, trouncing Japanese teams and signing autographs. The first time I ever saw Willie Mays was in Korakuen Stadium, a game between the Giants and the Giants, one San Francisco, one Yomiuri.

I went to the game in a tiny taxi with the brand name Toyota. Huh, I thought, no one is ever going to buy a car named Toy-something and Japanese baseball is no challenge. Twice wrong.

I suppose there is no real harm in this, except that the games will count, and it is so blatantly anti-pastime, so unashamedly greedy, Baseball is selling off Opening Day, one of the grandest American traditions.

The NFL goes to London and to Germany and the NBA to Beijing and Paris while the NHL hangs out in Florida and Los Angeles, places where ice is usually surrounded by bourbon.

No one asked my permission for globalization. Certainly not Opening Day. What is annoying here is contempt for tradition, the disrespect for baseball’s fundamental fabric, the diminishing of the rite of renewal. The beginning of baseball is more than just the first of many games. It is the uniting of hope and community and optimism.

There can be no greater promise than the first pitch of the first game, harder to appreciate when the first pitch is at 5 a.m.

What next? If Opening Day is for sale then why not the All-Star Game (which they can have) or even the World Series, the key word there being “world.”

In most places, not to pick on Chicago, optimism usually only lasts until the third inning or so, but that is no reason to peddle it to Asia. Or to Australia. Or to Mexico. Let them have sumo wrestling and their idea of football, we’ll keep Opening Day and Texas Hold ‘em.

This is just wrong. I don’t remember us gaining a greater appreciation for soccer just because we hosted the World Cup once (and will again) or that we have suddenly coughed up millions of tiny midfielders because of the arrival of Messi.

And one more thing. One of the great blessings of American baseball is its insularity. We may call it the World Series without involving the whole world, but that is our vanity, and it is our business.

Let the British call their cricket championships whatever they want to or the Aussies their Australian Rules Football finale the Match of the Universe, for all I care. Just keep them where they belong.

To quote from an actual Japanese baseball song — "Man blooms as a flower on the earth. Baseball is drama, it is life … Fly away Yakult Swallows.”

Try that during the seventh-inning stretch.