Nisei Step Up to the Plate at Hall

They had a league of their own not by choice but because, like their brethren in the Negro Leagues, Japanese American baseball players were shut out of organized baseball in the first half of this century. Yet baseball remained an anchor in America for Japanese immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants, and the game helped them endure years of discrimination and the U.S. government’s shameful decision to place them in internment camps during World War II.

Japanese American baseball’s unique history is told in a special exhibit, “Diamonds in the Rough,” which opened this month at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. The story begins in Japan in 1872 when Horace Wilson, an American who was teaching in Tokyo, introduced baseball to children there. The first team of Japanese immigrants was organized in Hawaii in 1899. By the 1920s, their Japanese American children, the Nisei, had organized 100 teams in California, Hawaii, Washington and the Rocky Mountain states.

They played against each other as well as in exhibitions with Pacific Coast League and military teams. Four Nisei players were on the Twilight League all-star team that played with New York Yankee stars Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth on their 1927 barnstorming tour of California.

Those few who played on mixed-race teams sometimes caught the eye of professional scouts but never received offers. One tearfully recalled an agent telling him, “Forget it, kid.”

Enthusiasm for baseball did not wane behind the barbed wire of the World War II camps. A poignant reminder is a baseball uniform, handmade from mattress ticking, in the Cooperstown exhibit. Emblazoned on the jersey is “Topaz,” the name of the camp in Utah.

As Nisei families rebuilt their lives after the war, their children could aspire to the major leagues, some successfully. Pioneers included Ryan Kurosaki, who pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1975. Lenn Sakata had a 10-year career with Milwaukee, Baltimore, Oakland and New York, and Don Wakamatsu played for the Chicago White Sox. Now U.S. teams increasingly are reaching across the Pacific for nationals playing in the popular Japanese leagues. One recruit was the Dodgers’ star pitcher Hideo Nomo.

When a number of Nisei players, now in their 70s and 80s, travel to Cooperstown for the dedication ceremony of the “Diamonds in the Rough” exhibit next week, they will be sharing the glory of legends like Ruth and Gehrig. That does not make up for opportunities lost in the times of racial restrictions, but it helps.