The Jays fan and author Adrian Lee, right, poses with Sin from Fukuoka, Japan. Sin, who loves George Springer, cheered for the Jays in Dodger territory.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
If you have the chance to see a Japanese baseball game, you have to take it. In the Nippon Professional Baseball League, the high-energy baseball experience is an alternate reality of what Major League Baseball could be.
Passionate fans wear face paint and scream individualized songs they know all the words to for each of their home team’s players, complete with horns. In the style of a European soccer game, they carve out safe spaces in the stadiums for supporters of the opposing team. Multiple kinds of mascots perform on-field skits surrounded by cheerleaders, and relief pitchers are driven to the mound in an actual car, with great pomp and circumstance. And at the end of each game, the home team comes back out and bows to the fans in each section.
It’s the same game, but the NPB captures something about the sport that North America’s original version too often forgets: that it should be fun.
Watching Major League Baseball in Japan, on the other hand, is a bizarre, other kind of alternate reality. It’s as if someone had heard about the MLB thirdhand, decided that people were fans of the league itself rather than its constituent teams and star players, and set to work selling soulless products about the enterprise as a whole, rather than the sport.
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Owing to an ill-timed press trip, I – a Jays fan since I was a child, who took in so many games through the lean years and who called in sick to drive to Buffalo and see Vladimir Guerrero Jr. play his first game as a Bison in Triple A – found myself in Japan for the duration of this World Series. When George Springer, our old war horse, hit that miraculous home run to effectively win the American League Championship series over the Mariners on one knee, I wept – mostly because of the power of Toronto narratives shifting under me and the stunning way the unreal had become real, but also a little bit because I was realizing I wasn’t going to be in Toronto for the event I’ve been yearning for, aching for, my whole life.
But I’ve found ways to be there, such as it is, from Japan. I watched Addison Barger blast his pinch-hit home run on a train in the Japanese countryside, pumping my fist to the confusion of others around me. I brought my lucky white Bisons shirt and ecru Jays hat on the trip, despite fears that I could get them dirty in my travels. I wore an earbud to listen to the radio broadcast while half-engaging with the beautiful sights on Miyajima, an island off Hiroshima where a Shinto torii gate is perched in the ocean.
I like to joke that my wife has to suffer my various hijinks, as if I’m some kind of Archie Bunker figure. But with the Jays on the brink of potentially winning it all, she did have to indulge me in a detour on Saturday morning: traveling to the suburbs of Fukuoka, Japan’s fifth-most-populous city, to watch Game 6 at the MLB Café, in what would be the weirdest baseball experience of my life.
The MLB Café in Fukuoka.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
Some of the strangeness can be explained by time-zone dissonance – 13 hours between here and Toronto. For instance, it only compounds my playoff-baseball anxiety that I’m watching in the morning, while drinking coffee. But some of it is inexplicable. The MLB Café’s menu feels like the search results spat out by an early-launch AI about what Americans eat at baseball games: Mini pancakes, fried shrimp, and cheese consommé fries (these were delicious, actually). The food is eaten with silverware off white china, as if at a hotel breakfast buffet, and the café is all leather booths and exposed brick and red tablecloths in the style of an Italian restaurant in New Jersey, just halfway around the world.
And it’s decorated like a blurry real-estate rendering, celebrating Major League Baseball mostly as an idea, with a scattering of paint-by-numbers signage representing most teams (but not the Jays). In one corner, there is a poorly Photoshopped poster claiming there are “fan rules” for supporters of the Tampa Bay Rays: laugh loudly, tell the truth, smile often. (For new baseball fans: these rules are not real, certainly not for a team who had to play last season in a minor league ballpark after their home field was destroyed in a hurricane.)
A gift shop at the MLB Café.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
Strangely, despite the NPB energy I was familiar with, the vibe in the café was that we were at the ballet. The restaurant was about two-thirds full, and while the attendees were clearly all Dodger partisans – the Japanese are ultimately fans of their hometown players, and L.A. boasts three – they showed it only by offering light polite claps after a hit or a strikeout; otherwise, they were completely, surreally silent.
The intermittent claps and yelps and occasional chants that soundtrack North American sports bars with every strike or before so many pitches were absent; there were only occasional whispers. It felt in keeping with the reflective aspects of Japanese culture when, after Miguel Rojas barehanded a ball to get Addison Barger out at first, they admired the replay and gently applauded again.
I spotted another fan from North America here: an Angeleno named Scott, a Dodgers fan visiting family just down the street. He was wearing a Yamamoto jersey and a cap upon which the Dodgers logo was spelled out in Japanese kanji. We shook hands and exchanged a “let the best team win.”
In the third inning, a Japanese man wearing an Ohtani jersey and full polarized baseball sunglasses sat down and smilingly asked us, “Dodgers?” But when we pointed to my hat and said “Blue Jays,” he grimaced in disappointment and responded as if we had told him his cat had died: “Oh my God…”
George Springer hits a single against Roki Sasaki of the Los Angeles Dodgers during the eighth inning.Mark Blinch/Getty Images
My wife and I were not totally alone in our Jays support, though. In a front booth, a man named Sin was incongruously decked out in a Houston Astros cap and jersey. He was specifically a Springer fan, he told me, because he plays “good defence.” Sin joined me in clapping for each Jay hit, even if it didn’t come from his man.
The guests may have adhered to Japanese etiquette during the game, but the rules were different when it came to Shohei Ohtani. There was a light but distinct rumbling throughout his at-bats, audible groans to his outs, and the only cheers were reserved for his successes. The room felt like it was physically tensing, with hands clasped in prayer as if for the health of a family member. Given how his face endorses every other product here, he may as well be one.
Truthfully, there was something that my superstition-addled, symbolism-seeking self was hoping to stitch together at the MLB Café: that watching here, on the home-field grounds of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, which won the Japan Series just a few days ago, would bring championship luck. Of course, that didn’t happen. What’s more, the room had its only communal outburst when Barger was called out at second to end the game (though the room strangely returned to respectful silence quickly after).
But at the very least, something did hold up between the two solitudes: immediately after the Dodgers got the final out, the man in sunglasses and Ohtani jersey turned to us with a bow and said – unusually for Japan, in English – “sorry.” Scott shook my hand; Sin came by to tell me that he’ll be here tomorrow, and asked me to join him.
Same game. But it’s fun.