History has seen lots of baseball players play for long periods of time — Chunichi's Masahiro Yamamoto, in his 29th season, and Jamie Moyer, still pitching in the U.S. at age 49, to name a pair — but no one has yet figured out how to play forever.
Alex Ramirez has been around long enough to understand that, and in his 12th season in Japan, after playing from 1993-2000 in the U.S., Ramirez is paying special attention to everything around him, storing even the smallest details away for future use.
"I'm trying to learn as much as I can, soak up as much as I can," Ramirez said at Seibu Dome Saturday before his Yokohama BayStars took on the Seibu Lions. "Because in the future, I want to be a manager in Japan. So I'm trying to do my stuff, while also taking in as much as I can."