Baseball After a Tragedy: A Routine that Heals

Many of us have a few routines we could live without, and many more we hardly notice. Yet recent articles on the role of high school baseball in Japan, as kids recover from the earthquake and tsunami, remind us that routines can be a respite from overwhelming loss and grief.

Baseball is famously a sport of the routine. It doesn’t often offer the spectacular athleticism of football or basketball, but for the initiated, its repetition and rhythm are comforting. For many who played the game growing up, the fondest memories are not of walk-off homers and trophies.  Rather, they are of endless hours throwing the ball around with their dads, brothers, and friends.

Japan’s national high school baseball tourney, known as Koshien for the town where is the final rounds are played, is the country’s most popular sporting event (see this NY Times piece, one of a series, for a description). Over 4,000 teams vie for a chance to play. This year, the organizers considered calling it off because of the emergency, but decided to go ahead with some special accommodations.  For example, the games would begin early in the morning to minimize power use in light of electricity shortages. 

Schools in the hard-hit areas of northeastern Japan faced the most difficult decisions: should they play their seasons and pursue the national tournament at all? 

It is difficult to imagine the pain experienced by the young people in the towns hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami. This article describes the team from Ofunato High School, located in a town believed to have lost about 2,000 of its 23,000 residents. The team was practicing when the waves hit, and survived by running from its practice field to higher ground. Many of their family members didn’t make it.

The Shizugawa High School team described in this piece was also on its practice field when the tsunami hit. Players carried residents from a nearby nursing home to higher ground, saving only some before the water got too high – and then losing a number of the initial survivors due to cold weather on the first night. As one boy related to his father, “I saw old people being swept away. They were saying, ‘Help,’ and I couldn’t do anything.”

Add to this trauma the ongoing dislocation of life in shelters, often surrounded by ruins, and it’s clear these young men are bearing a heavy weight of grief and shock. Yet some coaches asked the kids to return to the routine of baseball.

Many, perhaps surprisingly, have.  They’ve done so even under the most difficult circumstances – long rides to practice at unfamiliar sites, playing for a team cobbled together from different schools, and even waiting out daily radiation checks at the ball fields.

The routine of youth baseball in Japan is one few Americans would recognize – well, unless we’re in the Marines. It involves things like seven-hour practices, conducted year-round with a martial intensity that seems wholly at odds with our conception of baseball as a languid pastime. For the Japanese high school players, though, this all-consuming routine has been a source of healing.

For U.S. baseball fans, an echo of the role major league baseball played in helping our country recover from September 11 exists. Those first games after the attacks, particularly in New York, were a small but somehow important symbol of the larger reality that life would go on – that we would insist on it.

Of course, it’s not really about baseball.  Countless other routines help people move on from their tragedies. Sometimes the routines that help most at these difficult times are the communal ones, the ones that bring people together, out of their solitary grief and into community. In the case of Shizugawa, for example:

In those early weeks, the players talked less, cheered less and moved more slowly than they used to. Five players never rejoined the team, including one who had lost his father. Dodo [the manager] took it easy on those who remained. But he told his players to act as they did before, betting that the old routines could reawaken the old feelings…

During the past two months, coaches and players have seen a transformation: The players hustle because they think they should, and chatter during practice because they want to. During a recent exhibition game, after their center fielder threw out a runner at home, a half-dozen players joined in an impromptu circle and started dancing.

In fact, baseball has even helped some of those involved in the tragedy to look outward . A ballplayer from another school who got to know the Ofunato team remarked, “I thought that they were down, and I wanted to encourage them. But it was the opposite. I was the one being encouraged by them.” The manager of Shizugawa put it this way:  “Facing a disaster of this scale, this is the year we have to be conscious of the people who are watching us and to encourage them.”

When we face loss in our lives, of course the big things matter – but so do the little things. The routines of our lives give us a way to reclaim life, step by step. To begin to remind the world, and ourselves: we are still here.

One of the boys put it this way: “We were playing baseball and we were all together when the tsunami happened. We were saved. Now I think baseball is helping to save us again.”