CALLED STRIKE -- WARREN CROMARTIE'S MEAN-SPIRITED MEMOIR By Chris Mathison (1991)

   SLUGGING IT OUT IN JAPAN: An American Major Leaguer in the Tokyo Outfield by Warren Cromartie with Robert Whiting, Kodansha International, 1991, 277 pp., ¥3,000 (US$19.95)

    Serious fans of Japanese baseball automatically pick up and devour anything new that Robert Whiting, doyen of the sport's English-language writers, offers on the subject. In his first book, The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, he accurately defined and chronicled Japan's peculiar version of the American pastime. In dozens of subsequent articles written for Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian, Penthouse and other publications, Whiting further illuminated and elevated the topic. In last year's hugely successful You Gotta Have Wa, he transcended sports altogether and gave us what David Halberstam summed up as "one of the best of all books on modern Japan."

    So, naturally, one grabs Slugging It Out be­cause Whiting has batted a thousand so far. This time out, however, ex-Montreal Expo/Yomiuri Giant Warren Cromartie is Whiting's designated hitter -- and Cromartie strikes out.

    The latter, now a utility player for the Kansas City Royals, gnaws the hand that fed him millions of dollars and superstardom for seven seasons, and does so throughout this mean-spirited memoir. He characterizes his Giant teammates as overawed country bumpkins who (gasp) read comic books on the bullet train or watch samurai movies on the team bus. Before games they overeat, smoke cigarettes, and primp; they drink, relieve themselves in the showers, and cruise the hostess bars afterward.

    In detailing all this familiar player trivia, however, Cromartie makes enemies instead of sense. When he's not bashing his teammates, Cromartie reveals, for instance, that he knows where all the nightclubs in Roppongi are, and what's in store for celebrity ballplayers there. His description of Japanese female sexuality and technique also makes one wonder why he finds randy behavior by fellow Giants so noteworthy.

    Like Reggie Smith before him, Cromartie openly despises Japanese training and coaching methods, yet admits he and foreign teammates Keith Comstock, Louis Sanchez, and Bill Gullickson were largely exempt from the more extreme regimens. He decries the racism he experienced here, but embraced the double standard applied to foreigners whenever it worked for him.

    Cromartie also rails against Japanese front-office control of players' lives and outside business activities, and then turns around and gloats about how much he overcharged for unauthorized interviews. He describes his pursuit of a second career here as a jazz musician, frets constantly over his popularity, then heaves a huge sigh of relief at finally being billboarded in a national ad campaign for Kirin Beer -- as if these sidelines meant more to him than the team's pennants, his selection as an All-star, or the Japan Series championship and his MVP award in 1989.

    To Cromartie's credit, he apparently fostered close relationships with the two Giants managers he played under -- home-run legend Sadaharu Oh and Motoshi Fujita. He also enjoyed mutually supportive relationships with foreign players on other teams, notably Randy Bass (whose temporary absence from the Hanshin Tigers to care for his critically ill son drove a team official to commit suicide, and got Bass kicked out of Japanese baseball), and Dick Davis (run out of Japan for smoking dope).

    Unfortunately, Cromartie apparently couldn't be bothered to catch and record historic moments in Japanese baseball-he purposely absented himself from a season-ending game in which Bass, with fifty-four homers, was challenging Sadaharu Oh's single-season record of fifty-five, and in which Bass was walked four times by the Oh-managed Giants. Cro's only comment: "The Giants wouldn't give me permission to leave, even though I was in a cast. So I packed up and went home anyway. This time I was fined a million yen, but what did I care? I was sick of team harmony."

    Cromartie also seems oblivious to historical trends affecting the game on both sides of the Pacific. For all of his book's cant against the Giants' ownership, he fails to understand how lucky he and other major leaguers in their prime were to be able to play in Japan in the first place, and what a price the Japanese baseball establishment is now paying for that largely failed experiment.

    In 1983, when Cromartie put himself on the free-agency block, it was the Tokyo, not the San Francisco, Giants that made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Talented big-league ballplayers had started heading for Japan in the mid-Eighties, partly because major-league owners were in collusion against free agency, and partly because the Japanese bounded into the bidding fray and upped the ante. Their money earned pennants for the Giants and Hanshin Tigers, boosted attendance for some other clubs, but drew enmity from many American club owners and general managers.

    Now that the U.S. baseball commissioner and the courts have ruled in favor of the players, owners have been fined and chastened, and with competitive free agency restored and major-league salaries once again spiraling out of sight, it's doubtful that established players of Cromartie's caliber will be back in Japan anytime soon. Not that the Japanese teams would want many of these extremely spoiled sports back. Cromartie's book is a good indication why; it seems designed to humiliate the Yomiuri Giants organization and all who work for it. No wonder Cromartie's name is never mentioned in team speeches, or that relations between Japanese clubs and major-league baseball are at an all-time low.

    Warren Cromartie slugged it out in Japan for seven seasons. Toward the end of this book he admits he now appreciates the fabulous opportunities he had here, but it all comes too little, too late, and doesn't appear at all sincere. He seems, after all the money and glory, to have grasped very little of the expatriate experience.

    In Japan, as Robert Whiting surely knows, baseball is neither a pastime nor a game; like sumo wrestling, it is a kind of national ritual enacted year-round, embodying cultural values. Foreigners might view as oppressive or silly the "voluntary" pre-spring conditioning in the dead of winter, the stiff hierarchy of management and authority of coaches, and the post-season training camps and exhibition games in late autumn, but such things help make a glamorous, relatively well-paid occupation acceptable to the other overworked denizens of the nation. Without such a manifest work ethic, ordinary Japanese would just not be able to relate to the sport.

    Readers of Slugging It Out will undoubtedly notice that Whiting filters out virtually nothing from his loquacious subject; for 277 pages we get pure, unadulterated Cro. Although the book suffers from numerous glaring typos, a lack of career statistics, and no index, the photo insert is one of the best collections ever presented in a sports biography. Of course, Cromartie's expressive countenance helps, too. All in all, the book is worth reading but not relishing, just as Japanese fans have felt for years that Warren Cromartie was worth cheering but not prizing.