The Best American Sports Writing 2014 by Glenn Stout

to tend to their field, on which heavy weekend rains have left a small lake where third base should be. Joko supervises the digging of a network of trenches that would impress a corps of engineers. Then most of the team sets upon the lake with wooden rakes and buckets and sponges. It takes them close to an hour of quiet, tireless work, but slowly the lake recedes. At last the bag is put into place.
    All the while, Anraku has been nearby, working on his mound with his own rake, shaping its gentle curves. It is necessary, Joko says, that the boys maintain their own field. They need to learn a place in order to learn their places in it. Joko is not teaching them to be baseball players, he says, because most of them will not be baseball players. But one day all of them will be men. After they finish tending their field, they bow to it, because there is honor even in dust.
    Next, they assemble in tight rows on the dirt, the starters sitting in the first row, the backups and the hopefuls sitting in two neat rows behind them. Joko gives them a talk, gentle, reassuring. “I have taught you the only way I know,” he says. Then his voice grows stern. Between their weekend games, the boys had tucked into lunches behind one of the dugouts, and one of them had left his empty bento box on the ground. “We were their guests,” Joko says. “We must leave these places cleaner than we found them.” He turns to Anraku. “This is your responsibility,” he says. “This is up to you.”
    At the end of his speech, Joko asks the boys to stand and turn to face toward home—not home plate but the place they were born. They turn in every possible direction, north and south, east and west, toward the cities and the mountains and the sea. They take off their caps and hold them to their chests. “I want you to think of where you come from,” Joko says. “I want you to think of your mothers and fathers, of the people whose love brought you here. I want you to think of what you mean to them, how precious your gifts are. I want you to think of them and decide what it is you want to do today. Will you do your best? Will you make them proud?” And then he has the boys stand in quiet contemplation for a minute, for two minutes. Their faces crease; paths form in the dust under their eyes.
    It’s hard to imagine an American coach making the same speech. It’s hard to imagine American boys taking off their caps and turning to face Philadelphia and Yonkers, San Antonio and St. Louis, and making up their minds about what it is they want to do today, and how well, and to honor whom. It’s hard to imagine our physical pursuits also being spiritual ones. It’s hard to imagine an America in which something as rare and special as a fastball is seen as less a possession than a sacrifice, more a communal property than a personal one.
    It is just as hard to imagine an American manager asking his 16-year-old star to throw 772 pitches in a single tournament.
    The boys begin their practice. It too doesn’t look like something we would ask our children to do. It is two hours before any of them touch a baseball. At one point, heavy logs are lifted and swung. Anraku, wearing a leather jacket to prepare his body for summer’s heat, watches the sweat drip off the end of his nose. Soon he will leave for a six-mile run on a hilly golf course. He runs every day. He must get stronger. He must reach the next level.
    â€œLet me ask you,” Joko says to an astonished guest. “Why do Japanese arms break in America?”
    He has heard many theories. He has heard that the Americans don’t let the Japanese throw enough and they get weak. He has heard they get too muscle-bound, or too fat on American food, and it alters their formerly perfect mechanics. He has heard that the ball itself is different—the American ball is bigger—and so their grip must change, which changes everything