#4 Baseball

 Some are either blessed or cursed in life because of the weird manifestation of  their mid-life crises.  Hands down, I had the weirdest and I challenge anyone to come up with something stranger:  I left the US for China, Hong Kong and Thailand at the end of 1990 and with the exception of 7 two week trips to the States over the next 33+ years, I didn't return to live there again until the end of 2023......and that return was something I never, ever anticipated.

Of course I still watched baseball!  Joanna and I went to our first ballgame in Japan together, in 2006 at the Kyocera Dome in Osaka.  The two of us, guests of the Japan High School Baseball Federation, saw Shohei Ohtani pitch his final high school game during the August, 2011 National Tournament at Koshien Stadium in Osaka.  That day was filled with truly memorable events but what do both of us remember?  We didn't take sunscreen and came home with horrid sun burn!

I do remember one other baseball 'event' at the Tokyo Dome truly worth remembering:  It was 2014, I believe (got to check this out for 2d draft), Japan - US baseball series.  Game 1 in Tokyo - Katherine and Joanna opted to shop.  I sat in the stands and watched Team Japan pitch a no-hitter against the best that America could offer..........I was wearing a Japan jersey and rooting for that successful no-hitter, the third I've attended:  Sal Maglie vs the Phillies at Ebbetts Field in 1955;  Sandy Koufax vs the Cubs at Dodger Stadium in 1965; and Team Japan vs Team USA at the Tokyo Dome in 2014.

And during all this time, what about the Dodgers?  What about MLB??  When I had video access and when the time was convenient, I read, I watched, I tried to stay knowledgeable about what was happening but it really was not a priority.  I was very much involved with baseball in China leading up to the 2008 Games in Beijing.  I lost count of the times there were only three of us in the stands at a Guangdong Leopards game in the Chinese Baseball League:  a scout from Japan, a scout from Korea;  and ...... me.  Hey, I pitched batting practice at age 65, marveling about actually being able to reach the plate......most of the time.....

It was also during this time period that Evergrande Group of Guangzhou pyramided towards  becoming the world's  biggest urban real estate developer and put some of its cash into fielding a world-class team that played less than a mile from where I lived in Guangzhou. The sad reality is that this conglomerate defrauded tens of thousands of would be home owners before crashing into bankruptcy - that is definitely worthy of a stand-alone essay about fraud, Chinese-style.  Yet the stands were filled back in those good old days with local, loyal rooters -~50,000 in the stands...I doubt there were 10 of us white guys amongst them....but it was really fun!    I also saw world cup cricket in Mumbai and Test cricket at Lords in London (which was a great way to sip wine all day long!) so I was never lacking for a good sporting event and MLB was truly on the back burner of my mind for around 3 decades.

Does anyone really understand what the switch from working for 6 decades to not working at all and having absolutely no idea what to do with my time in a strange land.  Yes, after all this time, the US is very strange to me and I'm far more comfortable being in an Asian environment!  Alas, circumstances did not dictate this but we were able to choose other aspects of our life.

Did I survive the transition fully intact?  Sadly, hell, no!  Is it still ongoing after 2+ years, hell, yes.  But I am now a student, again, enrolled at Santa Monica College;  We do not have a car but we do have bus and metro passes and use public transportation; and we do not have a television - if it ain't on Netflix, Peacock or Prime or YouTube, we don't watch on the computer......  Baseball?  Impossible to get a Dodger game if you live in the greater LA area and are not a subscriber to various systems.  I do get two games a week from the systems I have so I get baseball but not the Dodgers.