Time Machine: 'You Gotta Have Wa' - Excerpt
This story originally appeared in the June 1989 edition of Winds — the inflight magazine of Japan Air Lines.
TOKYO — October 1987. He sat there in the cramped and crowded dining room at Kawasaki Stadium, surrounded by buckwheat noodle-slurping teammates, his 6’1” 200-pound frame dwarfing all but two or three of them. He had always marveled at how they would go out and run themselves silly for two hours, then come in and gorge themselves with soba just before a game. It was one of the many things he still didn’t understand about Japan.
For 11 years now, American Leron Lee had been coming to this decrepit park redolent of liniment and soy sauce and other stronger odors. (The Kawasaki team toilet had only recently been used as a set in a prison movie. Its squalor, said one screenwriter, was magnificent.) He had endured the part, its perpetually empty stands, and the haze of industrial smog that constantly engulfed it to become one of the best baseball players in the history of the Japanese game — as well as one of its least recognized stars.
Since joining the Lotte Orions in 1977, Lee, a lefthanded outfielder-designated hitter, has won every major batting title there was to win. He had the highest career batting average of any player to play the game in Japan: .320. He had hit .300 for 10 consecutive seasons. He also had more hits (1,579), more home runs (283) and more RBI’s (912) than any other foreigner.
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