I had the pleasure last week of meeting Tokyo's most talkative taxi driver. He picked me up in Shibuya and dropped me off in Roppongi some 15 minutes later. In that time we talked baseball nonstop with the Giants-Carp game humming in the background.
Mr. Cabdriver is a lifelong Giants fan, loves Ichiro Suzuki's golden swing, thinks the Swallows will fold down the stretch and played baseball in high school.
"What do you think of Tuffy Rhodes and his zillion home runs this season?" I ask at a red light.
My question is greeted with silence followed by the sound of an embarrassed man sucking air. "You mean the gaijin for the Seibu Lions?" he asks. No, that's Alex Cabrera.
"Sorry, but I'm not familiar with the guy," he confesses.
Shocking. All Rhodes has done this season is hit 54 home runs, more than any other Pacific Leaguer in history. He needs two more to surpass Sadaharu Oh's single-season Japanese record of 55 set in 1964.
Every baseball-loving man, woman and child should know his name by now. To many fans on this baseball-crazed island, however, the Kintetsu Buffaloes slugger remains an unknown.
It's not hard to understand why. Open up your Japanese newspaper or turn on your television and you'll see -- or won't see, to be more precise -- the reason. The Japanese media are treating Rhodes' pursuit of history like a sideshow.
Sports dailies rarely mention the home-run race on their front pages. Television stations also bury the story beneath less important ones.
Last Saturday afternoon, Rhodes smacked his 51st and 52nd homers to tie the PL single-season record. But Nikkan Sports only ran a brief story on Page 5 accompanied by a photo smaller than a grasshopper. Sankei Sports also hid the story on its inside pages.
Rhodes went deep for No. 53 on Sunday to shatter the PL record. Pictures of Hidetoshi Nakata, however, were splashed across the front page of Sports Nippon. All Nakata did that day was perform poorly for Parma in a 2-2 draw with Inter Milan. The Hochi Shimbun, meanwhile, led with the way-in-first-place Swallows losing to the Giants. On television that night, many stations led with the Central League before getting around to Rhodes. One station dedicated a few seconds to his accomplishment before moving on to an in-depth look at another game. On his midnight program, TBS' Terry Ito even insisted that there wasn't much to talk about with respect to Japanese baseball these days.
Ito and his brothers in the Japanese media must be going blind. Or perhaps they just don't want to see a gaijin become Japan's single-season home-run king. I've heard numerous foreigners cry foul lately.
They are quick to point out that CL teams, not wanting a foreigner to be crowned king, pitched around Hanshin Tigers hitman Randy Bass when he challenged Oh's record in 1985. Bass ended the season one homer shy of tying the mark. It remains a black spot on Japanese baseball to this very day.
Is an anti-gaijin bias affecting the coverage of this year's home-run race? You can bet that if Hideki Matsui or any other big-name Japanese ballplayer were on the doorstep of 55, he'd receive far more coverage.
In their own way, the Japanese media have been pitching around Rhodes ever since he reached the 50-homer mark. That's when the story deserved to take center stage. Television producers and newspaper editors are either intentionally abandoning their obligation to report news in a fair and responsible manner (perhaps subconsciously even), or they're simply inept.
In either case, the story deserves more and better coverage. Heck, even USA Today ran a snappy piece about Rhodes on the front page of its sports section last week. Something is definitely wrong when overseas coverage of a Japanese sports story trumps the coverage in our own backyard.
I've heard the rationalizations about why the coverage here has been so shoddy. Rhodes plays on a historically bad team and in the less "sexy" Pacific League, some people note. Others claim that fans here are more interested in what's happening in the major leagues than ever before.
These points are all true, but so what? When any player threatens what is perhaps the most revered sports record in all of Japan, it's big (BIG!) news. Nothing on Pages 1 through 4 are bigger than what Rhodes has been doing on Page 5. So far, it's the sports story of the year on these shores -- but you'd hardly know it.
Ichiro, Nakata and the Giants are big news in Japan too. But these usual suspects always dominate the front pages. The Japanese media need to take a step back and realize the enormity of the story being played out in Osaka this week. It's dramatic, historic and even involves Oh-san -- one of the most beloved figures in Japanese baseball. The usual leads can take a back seat just this once.
If they don't, clueless taxi drivers and countless others will continue to roam the streets unaware that more history, in all likelihood, will be made under their very noses. What a pity.