Believe it or not, it was 30 years ago this week when the "Baseball Bullet-In" first appeared in the pages of The Japan Times. I was 27 years old and still a student at Sophia University on Tokyo when the first column ran on April 4, 1976.
Through the years, I have often been asked how the column started but, for anyone who has not heard the story and might be interested, it goes like this:
One day in May of 1975, I was reading the sports pages in the paper and going over a recap of the previous night's games in Japanese baseball. By that time, I had been in country for six years, including three serving with the U.S. Air Force in Fukuoka, and I had been studying the Japanese language at Sophia and getting to know more about baseball as it is played here.