How the Japanese saw Friday night’s weirdness

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SAN FRANCISCO –- Only in America.

That’s what a couple of Japanese reporters said they were thinking on Friday at AT&T Park, where a new rule was basically made up on the spot, leading to Bengie Molina not being credited with a run on his two-run home run.

‘Something like that would never happen in Japan,’ said one of the reporters, as we were walked down Market Street that night past an enterprising young man who tried to sell us marijuana. ‘Americans know how to market themselves and their products, but they can’t do anything else right.’

The reporter wasn’t only talking about there being no rule in place to legislate what happened, but also about how Giants pinch-runner Emmanuel Burriss, though officially credited with scoring a run on Bengie Molina’s home run, wasn’t in the box score.

‘Everything’s like ‘whatever’ here,’ he said.

Because of the Dodgers’ signing of Hiroki Kuroda, we’ve had an increased number of Japanese reporters covering the team this season. Many of them said they came to the United States with similar feelings as their players: They wanted to challenge themselves by covering the best baseball in the world and live in the greatest country in the world.

But what they found wasn’t what they expected.

Often, I’ve heard them cackling in the back of press boxes during games, laughing at what they see as gross incompetence on the field.

‘The players here are bigger and stronger,’ one reporter told me, ‘but they don’t know how to play baseball. They can’t do anything fundamental.’

The Japanese see American baseball reporters as being equally negligent. Japanese reporters track every pitch thrown by or to a Japanese player. We would never even think of doing that. (I should note that this is largely because clubhouses are off-limits to reporters in Japan. While we in the U.S. tend to write stories based more on personalities, they’re forced to report more on the technical aspects of games.)

‘America,’ one Japanese reporter told me this season, ‘is a bluffer’s society.’

I tried to explain to him that culture is a guide to survival that is formed over centuries of trial and error. I pointed out that the U.S. has a relatively short history, and because a disproportionate share of that history has been spent as an industrial country that nature hasn’t been an enemy and that our culture is based largely on ideas of what we want to be instead of what we have to be to survive. We’re idealistic, not sensible. Our culture and our economy -- these matters are always linked -- are scaffolds of illusions.

‘See,’ he said. ‘That sounds good. I don’t want to take the time to analyze what you said, but I assume there’s something wrong with it. The problem is that people listen to that and think you’re reasonably intelligent, when, in fact, you have no education.’ (This is true.) ‘I bet your boss hired you thinking you’re smarter than you really are.’

I shrugged.

Late Friday night, I ended up at a Japanese restaurant with two reporters mentioned at the top of this post.

‘Well,’ one of the reporters said, ‘I did discover one American airline company that has decent service. Virgin America.’

I had to inform him that Virgin America was the brainchild of Richard Branson.

Branson is British.