Preface
Baseball, like literature, is a game of rhythm. A game of waiting, of small gestures, of moments that seem inconsequential until they become everything. For years, I have sat in the stands at Jingu Stadium, watching the Yakult Swallows, a team that, like a well-written novel, embraces both triumph and quiet resignation. A team that understands what it means to endure.
Poetry, too, is a game of patience. It is the space between words, the unexpected movement of a line, the way a stanza can lift off like a fastball at the perfect angle. And so, this collection is not just about baseball. It is about time, memory, and the strange beauty of persistence. It is about standing in the outfield, watching the dusk settle over the city, and feeling, if only for a moment, that everything is in its right place.
There is something uniquely poetic about cheering for a team that does not always win. The Swallows are not giants; they do not always dominate. But they are a team for those who understand that joy exists in the act itself—the rhythm of the innings, the rising arc of a home run, the collective sigh of the crowd as a game slips away. In that sense, these poems are a tribute not just to baseball, but to the quiet magic of being a Swallows fan, of believing in something even when the outcome remains uncertain.
May these words, like a well-hit ball, find their way into open space.
A Quiet Encounter at Jingu
I didn’t mean to arrive,
but the night opened like a worn paperback,
and there it was—Jingu Stadium,
waiting as if it had been expecting me all along.
The lights flickered against the deepening sky,
moths circling like stray thoughts.
The crack of a bat,
the hush before the ball met the outfield grass—
a silence that contained everything.
A man beside me chewed his beer with patience.
A child counted pitches under her breath.
And in right field, a player I had never met
stood waiting for something
that might never come.
This is the kind of place
where nothing happens—
until, suddenly, it does.
A bloop single, a stolen base,
the slow build of hope, fragile but real.
I watched the Swallows play
as if reading a familiar sentence,
one I had encountered before but never quite understood,
until now.
Swallows in the Night
Under the lights of Jingu, they gather,
blue shadows against the grass,
restless, waiting,
wings folded, but never still.
The Yakult Swallows do not soar like hawks,
do not circle like eagles,
do not strike with the weight of thunder.
They move differently—
quick, sharp, vanishing into the seams of the wind,
a flicker of motion where silence used to be.
A bat lifts. A ball spins.
The moment folds in on itself.
Then—
contact, and the swallow takes flight.
Through late summers and quiet Octobers,
they return, skimming the edges of possibility,
never the strongest, never the heaviest,
but always there,
threading through the spaces between giants.
Somewhere beyond right field,
a real swallow cuts the sky,
its path uncertain, its purpose clear.
Like them, it does not stop.
Like them, it does not fade.
It flies,
because that is all it has ever known.
Afternoon Ball at Jingu
The city hums beyond the gates,
but here, inside Jingu, the world moves slower.
The afternoon sun pools in the outfield,
spilling over the grass,
warm and unhurried.
A breeze stirs the paper cup in my hand.
The beer is cold, golden,
foam tracing the rim like the edge of a quiet memory.
The game unfolds—not loud, not urgent,
but steady, like the turning of a page.
Aoki stands in the box, bat resting lightly in his hands.
The pitcher exhales. A wind-up, a pause, a throw—
and for a moment, everything stills.
Then, the sharp whisper of contact,
the ball skipping over the infield,
finding the empty space it was meant to find.
No one is in a hurry.
The crowd claps, not in a roar, but in a rhythm,
an easy pulse that rises and fades,
like waves against a quiet shore.
A child laughs somewhere behind me.
The scent of fresh-cut grass drifts through the air.
The swallows circle above,
their wings carving slow arcs in the pale blue sky.
They do not chase. They do not force.
They move because they were made to move,
because the air carries them,
because the sky is wide and open.
The inning ends.
The pitcher walks back to the dugout,
adjusting his cap,
his footsteps soft against the dirt.
And the game,
like the afternoon,
drifts on.
Ode to Meiji Jingu Stadium
Some places exist outside of time.
You step inside, and the years loosen their grip,
the past and present folding into one.
Meiji Jingu Stadium is one of those places.
The lights flicker on, cutting through the dusk,
casting long shadows over the outfield grass.
The air smells of rain that never fell,
of beer half-drunk, of peanuts cracked open and forgotten.
Here, the game moves at its own pace.
A slow grounder rolling toward second,
a pitcher exhaling before the windup,
a pop fly drifting high into the summer night—
held, for a moment, between gravity and fate.
The Swallows play as if each inning were a short story,
sometimes comic, sometimes tragic,
always unfinished.
The crowd hums like the first pages of a novel,
turning, waiting, wondering.
Somewhere beyond the left-field stands,
Tokyo continues, indifferent and endless.
Trains glide over iron tracks, neon signs flicker,
lives are lived and forgotten.
But inside Jingu, time lingers.
The past does not vanish,
it settles into the dirt of the infield,
into the worn wooden seats,
into the voices that still echo, even after the final out.
And when the stadium empties,
when the lights go dark,
when only the ghosts of the game remain,
Jingu Stadium breathes,
waiting for another night, another game,
another quiet miracle.
Jingu, Where the Sky Opens
There is a place where the city exhales,
where the neon softens,
where time does not vanish, but lingers.
Not trapped—just unrushed.
Meiji Jingu Stadium.
Not the biggest, not the loudest,
but a place that holds its own rhythm,
a quiet pulse beneath the floodlights,
a breath drawn between fastballs and summer air.
Beyond the outfield, the trees stand watch,
their leaves rustling like a conversation half-heard,
half-understood.
Even the wind here moves differently—
carrying the scent of grass, of history,
of rain that might fall, but hasn’t yet.
The crack of a bat.
The low murmur of the crowd, swelling, then settling,
like waves finding the shore.
The beer girl moves through the stands,
silver keg strapped to her back,
pouring golden arcs into plastic cups,
foam tilting, catching the light.
Somewhere in the bleachers,
someone watches, not just the game,
but the way the night unfolds.
The way the scoreboard glows against the dark,
the way a foul ball disappears into the trees,
as if it has gone somewhere better,
somewhere secret, somewhere only Jingu knows.
A stadium, yes.
A ballpark, of course.
But more than that—
a place where the sky opens,
where the swallows return,
where the night stretches just a little longer,
before the city calls you back.
Golden Sip at Jingu
The first sip of beer is always the best.
Cold against the tongue, sharp, like memory.
The crowd hums, a low and endless ocean,
stretching beyond the outfield fence.
A man in a pinstriped jersey leans forward,
elbows on knees, eyes tracing the arc of a fastball.
The batter swings—crack—
the sound cuts through the summer night,
clean as a knife through ripe fruit.
I take another sip.
The bitterness settles,
soft like old jazz from a faraway radio.
Foam lingers at the edge of the plastic cup,
fizzing out, dissolving like forgotten names.
Behind me, a beer girl weaves through the rows,
silver keg strapped to her back,
like a traveler with no fixed destination.
She pours another for the old man in front of me,
his hands steady, his eyes tired but bright.
Somewhere in the outfield, the ball drops.
An error. A chance. A new story beginning.
I drink again, watching the moment stretch,
until it’s just baseball, just beer, just the night—
and nothing more.
The Swallow’s Path
At twilight, a swallow cuts the air,
its wings carving silence into motion,
a flicker of black against the deepening blue.
Norichika Aoki steps to the plate,
bat loose in his hands, breath measured,
his eyes tracing the unseen currents
that ripple through the pitcher’s fingertips.
The ball comes, a blur of white unraveling space.
Aoki does not swing—he moves,
bat meeting leather with a whisper,
not force, not struggle,
but the quiet inevitability of rain touching earth.
The ball skims past the mound,
a skipping stone finding its place on the water,
and he runs.
He runs like something weightless,
feet barely marking the dust,
a silent wind slipping between fielders,
always a fraction of a second ahead
of hands reaching, gloves stretching,
shadows grasping at something already gone.
A swallow does not think about flying—
it simply knows.
And Aoki does not hesitate,
does not count the steps,
does not measure the distance.
He simply moves,
as if the bases were drawn
before time had a name.
The pitcher turns, too late.
The throw comes, too slow.
The base is his.
And still, he watches—
for the next flight,
the next opening in the sky,
the next perfect moment
to disappear.
A Tragicomedy in Nine Innings: Yakult Swallows, 1970s
First Inning: The Art of Losing Gracefully
They say baseball is a game of failure,
but the Swallows in the ‘70s took that as scripture.
Strikeouts like cherry blossoms,
errors blooming at second base,
a bullpen so unreliable
you could set your watch by the late-inning collapse.
Jingu Stadium, half-empty, half-hopeful,
where beer flowed faster than base hits,
and the faithful few learned to cheer ironically—
a survival tactic, like whistling in a typhoon.
Second Inning: The Opposing Team’s Batting Practice
Some nights, the other team hit so well
I suspected we had secretly changed sides.
Home runs soared into the humid Tokyo sky,
disappearing like unpaid bar tabs.
The outfielders gave chase
more out of politeness than strategy.
Third Inning: A Pitcher’s Existential Crisis
Our ace—if you could call him that—
stood on the mound, staring at the catcher,
perhaps questioning his life choices.
Fastball? Curve?
Quit baseball and open a coffee shop?
All options equally valid.
Fourth Inning: A Rally in Theory
A single! A walk! A bloop hit to right!
Suddenly, the Swallows had two runners on.
The crowd stirred, sensing something unfamiliar—
could this be… hope?
And then—
a double play.
Of course.
The universe, restored to balance.
Fifth Inning: A Meditation on the Scoreboard
5-0. 8-1. 12-2.
The numbers changed, but the story stayed the same.
The scoreboard operator must have felt like a novelist
rewriting the same bleak chapter every night.
Even the hot dog vendor shook his head:
“Again?”
Sixth Inning: The Mascot’s Loneliness
The Yakult Swallows had a mascot,
but I swear, even he looked embarrassed.
He flapped his oversized wings,
trying to inspire a team that barely inspired itself.
A tragic figure, really—
like a poet reading to an empty room.
Seventh Inning: The Beauty of Acceptance
At some point, you stop expecting miracles.
You sip your beer, watch the inevitable unfold,
and find peace in the absurdity of it all.
There’s something strangely poetic
about a team that refuses to win,
like a haiku missing its final line.
Eighth Inning: The Opposing Team’s Victory Lap
The other team stopped celebrating their runs.
It was like beating up an inflatable doll—
amusing at first,
but after a while, just kind of sad.
Ninth Inning: The Swallows Take the Field, Again
The final out came, as it always did,
softly, mercifully.
The players shuffled off,
as if apologizing for their existence.
And yet, the next night,
they returned.
Picked up their bats, laced their cleats,
stood under the lights once more.
Because baseball, after all,
is a game of failure—
but also a game of showing up.
And in that, the Yakult Swallows
were undeniable champions.
1978: The Summer the Swallows Took Flight
For years, defeat was a familiar melody,
a jazz tune played in a half-empty bar,
soft, resigned, inevitable.
The Swallows would take the field,
play their part in the great cosmic comedy,
and then disappear into the neon haze of Tokyo nights,
forgotten before the last train home.
But then came 1978.
Something shifted.
A wind, a whisper, a note held longer than expected.
The rhythm of losing stuttered, faltered,
and in its place—
something like music, something like flight.
Jingu Stadium, once a temple of patience,
became a cathedral of miracles.
Base hits fell where gloves were not.
Pitchers who once buckled under pressure
stood tall, fearless, unblinking.
The scoreboard, long a harbinger of sorrow,
began telling a different story.
We watched, disbelieving.
Could it be?
Was this real?
Had the gods of baseball finally remembered
the quiet men in navy and white?
The final out, a catch, a breath,
and then—eruption.
Beer spilled, voices cracked,
grown men wept in the aisles.
A team that had spent its life in the shadows
stood, for once, in the sun.
And somewhere in Tokyo,
on a side street where no one was looking,
a writer sipped his coffee,
folded his newspaper,
and thought, Yes.
Even the Swallows can win sometimes.
The Subtle Art of Hitting .300
Katsuo Osugi steps to the plate.
The pitcher looks at him.
Osugi looks at the pitcher.
The catcher looks at both of them.
This goes on for a while.
The pitcher throws.
Osugi swings.
The ball leaves the bat like an unmailed letter,
floating toward right field,
where a fielder waits,
but not well enough.
A single.
Osugi nods to himself.
Not with excitement,
but with the quiet satisfaction of a man
who finds exact change in his pocket.
This happens often.
Osugi was not a home run king.
Not a base-stealing ninja.
Not a defensive wizard.
But he hit.
And he hit well.
Like an old radio that always
finds the right station,
even in the middle of nowhere.
People tried to explain it.
Good eye.
Quick wrists.
Balanced stance.
But in the end,
he just swung,
and the ball just went
where it needed to go.
Years passed.
Pitchers changed.
Stadiums changed.
Osugi did not.
One day, he stopped playing.
A new batter took his place.
The infield dust continued to settle,
unconcerned with history.
But somewhere, in a quiet game,
on a quiet evening,
a Yakult Swallows batter
loops a single to right.
And a fan, half-paying attention,
thinks, for no reason at all:
“Huh. That was very Osugi-like.”
Wakamatsu: The Unwritten Swing
I. The Arrival
A man steps onto the field.
Not a hero, not yet.
Just a name on a lineup card,
printed in ink that could be erased.
The stadium hums, half-empty,
lights flickering like thoughts on the edge of sleep.
He adjusts his grip. The bat feels real enough.
II. The Motion of Things
The pitch comes. It always does.
The ball spins—
a blur, a question, an unresolved chord.
His body moves,
not as choice but as consequence.
The swing is a sentence halfway written,
and then—contact.
A line drive splits the infield.
Or maybe a fly ball drifts into waiting hands.
It doesn’t matter.
The bat returns to his shoulder,
and the game moves on, indifferent.
III. The Making of a Name
Somewhere along the way,
the numbers begin to matter.
Hits accumulate like old receipts,
stacked, stored, mostly forgotten
until someone needs to check the total.
The name, once small,
echoes a little louder now.
The swing, compact and deliberate,
becomes something more than motion.
It becomes expectation.
People speak of his hands—
how they wait, how they react,
as if they hold secrets no one else can read.
IV. The Moment
Every story has a moment,
though few recognize it when it arrives.
Perhaps it is in the Japan Series,
when the stadium is full and the air is thick,
and the pitch comes—
faster this time, sharper—
and the bat finds it,
sends it arcing into the unclaimed sky.
Or perhaps the moment never existed,
except in the retelling.
A collection of swings and seasons,
blurred together by memory,
distilled into a name on a wall.
V. The Exit
A man steps off the field.
Not a hero, not anymore.
Just a name in a record book,
printed in ink that will not be erased.
The stadium hums, half-empty,
lights flickering, waiting for the next arrival.
And somewhere in the outfield,
the grass still bends
where he once stood.
Matsuoka: The Arc Without Sound
I. The Beginning, or Something Like It
A man stands on the mound.
The ball rests in his hand, small, weightless, inevitable.
The air is still. The crowd shifts, but he does not.
The batter waits. The umpire waits.
Time is measured in exhales.
The motion begins—
a step, a turn, an unfolding of limbs.
The seams of the ball rotate against his fingertips,
a quiet spiral toward an unknown end.
II. The Space Between
A pitch is not just a pitch.
It is an unanswered question.
It is the silence before a decision,
the moment before consequence.
Some land in the catcher’s mitt,
a dull sound swallowed by the night.
Some disappear into the outfield,
chased by figures too far to reach.
Neither outcome is remarkable.
Neither outcome is final.
The motion repeats.
III. The Numbers That Do Not Speak
Wins, losses, earned run averages.
Digits that settle into old newspapers,
read, then forgotten.
A game played over a decade,
distilled into a few sentences in a record book.
Did he throw a perfect game? No.
Did he carve his name into legend? No.
He pitched. He existed in the spaces between great moments,
a constant figure in an ever-changing script.
IV. The Exit, Though It Was Always There
One day, the arm does not move as it once did.
The ball feels heavier, the mound steeper.
The motion slows, then stops.
There is no final crescendo,
just a last pitch,
thrown, caught, and then gone.
A man steps off the mound.
The game does not notice.
It continues without him,
as it always has.
Somewhere, in an empty stadium,
the dirt of the mound still bears the shape of his footstep.
But the wind moves over it,
and soon, even that is gone.
Yaegashi: A Catcher in the Vanishing Game
I. The Position That Waits
A man crouches behind the plate.
His knees ache, but he does not move.
The mask obscures his face,
but it would not matter if it didn’t.
The ball travels toward him,
turning, shifting, deciding.
He catches it. Or maybe he doesn’t.
It makes no difference—
another will come, and another after that.
A catcher exists between motions,
between calls that are heard but never seen.
The game is played in front of him,
and yet, it never truly belongs to him.
II. The Work Without Applause
Hits come sparingly, like loose change in a coat pocket.
A double on a summer night.
A single no one remembers.
The numbers accumulate,
but they are never enough to build a monument.
Behind the plate, he signals.
A flick of the fingers, unseen by most,
a silent language no one outside the game learns to read.
He receives the pitch,
returns the ball,
and the cycle repeats.
The pitcher gets the credit.
The batter gets the headlines.
The catcher gets a sore back
and a handshake at the end of the inning.
III. The Weight of a Name
Yaegashi. A name that appeared in lineups,
that hovered on the edge of recognition.
Too reliable to be forgotten,
too ordinary to be celebrated.
Years passed.
A Japan Series win, a few bright moments.
But the game does not stop for reflection.
It moves forward, always forward,
and those who keep up are lucky.
IV. The Slow Disappearance
One day, the mask is set down for the last time.
Not with ceremony, not with applause.
Just set down,
as if left absentmindedly on a train seat,
forgotten until it is too late to retrieve.
The game continues.
Another man crouches behind the plate,
another signals, another catches,
as if nothing changed—
because nothing has.
A name fades into box scores,
then into old programs,
then into the dust that settles in empty stadiums.
Yaegashi was here once.
But now, he is not.
Manuel: A Foreign Swing in a Familiar Game
A man stands in the batter’s box.
Not from here, but here all the same.
The dirt underfoot is the same,
the white chalk lines do not bend for passports.
He grips the bat.
The pitcher winds up.
The ball arrives.
It always arrives.
Some nights, it meets the barrel,
sent skyward, disappearing briefly into neon reflections.
Other nights, it finds the catcher’s mitt,
silent, unremarkable, recorded only in numbers.
The game does not care where he was born.
The outfield fences do not shrink for accents.
The swings speak a language of their own—
fluid, direct, unavoidable.
In 1978, the arc of the bat finds its rhythm.
Home runs drift into the humid night.
The stands murmur, then cheer,
then forget.
A season ends.
A name lingers, then does not.
A flight leaves Narita,
somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow.
The game continues.
The Yakult Swallows and the Art of Quiet Defeat
I
In the heart of Tokyo, under neon hum,
The Yakult Swallows played baseball like a haiku.
Sparse, deliberate, mostly empty,
A gentle breeze stirring the outfield grass,
A team perpetually three games behind fourth place.
Every spring, the newspapers said,
“This is the year.”
And every autumn, they said,
“Well, it wasn’t.”
The players lined up like salarymen
At the gates of inevitability,
Polite in their strikeouts,
Demure in their errors.
There was an elegance to the futility,
A purity in losing by only four runs.
II
Jingu Stadium smelled of beer and wasted summers,
And the Swallows wore their losses
Like an old man wears his tweed jacket—
Comfortable, familiar, just slightly frayed at the cuffs.
They had a pitcher, Tanaka,
Whose ERA was a philosophy.
Four earned runs in six innings,
Every time, without fail.
A perfect imperfection.
You could set your watch to it,
If you had nowhere important to be.
And there was Kato,
Who hit .242 for six consecutive seasons.
Not bad, not good,
Just .242.
His bat was made of wood,
His swing was made of air,
And the ball, inevitably,
Was made of disappointment.
III
The Giants had money.
The Tigers had rage.
The Carp had scrappy, small-market tenacity.
The Swallows had fermented milk drinks
And the wisdom to know their place.
They played baseball the way a jazz record spins
At the back of a used bookstore—
Not quite in tune with the times,
Not quite out of place either.
The scoreboard flickered like an old man’s memory,
And somewhere, an outfielder lost a routine fly ball
Against the backdrop of a darkening sky.
He turned, jogged half-heartedly,
Watched it land, then threw it in.
There were runners on second and third now.
It didn’t really matter.
IV
Summer turned to autumn,
Autumn turned to regret.
A man in the stands waved a Swallows umbrella,
Not out of joy, but out of habit.
The announcers talked about fundamentals,
And how losing with grace
Was still a form of beauty.
And perhaps it was.
The Swallows were not a team that won,
But they were a team that existed,
And that, in its own way, was enough.
The season ended.
Yakult stock remained steady.
Tanaka’s ERA stayed exactly where it had always been.
And Kato batted .242. Again.
A perfect imperfection.
A quiet defeat.
A team gently slipping into arrears,
Like a jazz record,
Like an autumn breeze,
Like a slow but certain
Sayonara.
The Silence Between Signals
Junzo Sekine stands in the dugout.
His hands rest on the railing,
lightly, like a man holding an umbrella
on a day when it probably won’t rain.
The game unfolds.
Pitchers throw, batters swing, fielders move.
Sometimes they succeed.
Sometimes they do not.
Sekine watches, nodding occasionally.
He does not yell.
He does not scowl.
He is a manager, not a prophet.
A batter returns after striking out.
Sekine pats him on the shoulder.
“You’ll get the next one,” he says.
Maybe the batter will. Maybe he won’t.
That is baseball.
The Swallows win, and Sekine smiles.
The Swallows lose, and Sekine also smiles,
though slightly differently.
Tomorrow is another game.
And after that, another.
The season passes.
The leaves turn.
The fans come and go.
Sekine remains in the dugout,
hands still resting on the railing.
Somewhere, far from Jingu Stadium,
someone drinks a Yakult.
It is a quiet, ordinary moment.
Junzo Sekine would probably approve.
Kazushige at the Plate
(Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Swallows)
Kazushige steps up, bat in hand,
eyes like an old salaryman staring at his last can of Yebisu.
The pitcher winds up—
a guy who probably folds his socks with military precision—
and the ball comes in, spinning like a small existential crisis.
Kazushige swings.
A majestic, poetic, slightly misguided swing.
Like a jazz saxophonist improvising at the wrong moment.
The ball, unimpressed, continues its journey to the catcher’s mitt.
Strike one.
The crowd murmurs.
A man in the bleachers eats a yakitori skewer
with the grim determination of a 13th-century samurai.
A woman in a Swallows jersey sips her beer
like she’s watching a French arthouse film she doesn’t understand.
Kazushige nods. Adjusts his gloves.
He knows this story.
His father’s shadow is long,
but shadows can’t hit curveballs.
The pitcher winds up again.
Kazushige swings again.
The ball meets the bat.
The bat meets the ball.
Somewhere in the outfield, a seagull watches, unimpressed.
Somewhere in a parallel universe, the Giants sigh.
But here in Jingu Stadium, the ball lands fair, rolling lazy as a summer afternoon.
A single.
Kazushige stands on first base, hands on hips,
as if contemplating the meaning of life
or just wondering if he left his car lights on.
The crowd cheers.
The woman with the beer nods sagely.
The yakitori man takes another bite.
The game, much like life, continues.
The Burden of Knowing
Katsuya Nomura sits in the dugout.
Arms crossed, eyes half-lidded,
like a man who has already read the book
but watches others struggle through the first chapter.
Baseball is simple.
Hit the ball. Catch the ball. Throw the ball.
That is what they say.
They are wrong.
Nomura does not believe in instinct.
Instinct is just another word for ignorance.
There are numbers,
patterns,
tendencies,
fractions of seconds that separate the clever
from the foolish.
His players do not always understand.
This does not bother him.
Understanding is not a requirement.
Obedience is enough.
A runner reaches first.
The bench coach mutters about stealing.
Nomura does not look up.
“The catcher has a 1.8-second pop time,”
he says, almost bored.
“The pitcher is slow to the plate, but the throw will be perfect.
If he runs, he will be out.”
The runner runs.
He is out.
Nomura does not react.
What is there to react to?
His strategy is called ID Baseball.
Some think it means intelligence.
Some think it means information.
Some think it means something else.
Nomura does not care what they think.
They are not the ones managing the team.
The season grinds on.
Pitch counts rise.
Batting averages flatten.
The fans demand excitement.
Nomura gives them logic instead.
One day, he stops managing.
Someone younger takes over.
Someone who believes in instincts,
who trusts his gut.
The reporters smile.
The fans cheer.
Nomura sits at home, watching the game on TV.
A bunt attempt fails.
A pitcher throws the wrong pitch in the wrong count.
A runner gets picked off first.
Nomura exhales slowly.
He has already read this book.
The ending is obvious.
He Knows Everything
Katsuya Nomura squats behind the plate.
The pitcher exhales. The batter grips the bat.
Nomura is the only one who already knows
how this will end.
He calls for a fastball.
Low and away.
The pitcher hesitates.
Nomura does not.
The ball moves. The bat swings.
A sound, sharp but empty.
The strikeout is just a formality.
This was his gift.
Not power, not speed,
but knowing.
Knowing the pitch before it was thrown.
Knowing the swing before it began.
Knowing that baseball,
like life,
was a game of patterns.
He became a manager.
He watched from the dugout, arms folded.
His players saw a man who rarely smiled.
A man who demanded.
A man who spoke in statistics and signals
and rules they did not yet understand.
But the team won.
And then they won again.
Because Nomura saw the game
the way a clock sees time.
Not as moments,
but as movement,
as inevitability.
Years passed.
Other managers came and went.
They spoke of fire, of heart, of will.
Nomura spoke of probability.
And probability rarely lost.
One day, he left the field.
But the game did not leave him.
Somewhere, a catcher crouches,
signaling for a fastball,
low and away.
And Nomura, wherever he is,
already knows
how this will end.
The Echo of Vanishing Numbers
Takahiro Ikeyama stands at shortstop.
His uniform is clean, for now.
The infield dust settles around him,
waiting for something to happen.
Something usually does.
A ground ball rolls toward him.
Not fast, not slow. Just a ball,
rolling in the way balls tend to roll.
He bends down, glove open.
The ball meets the leather.
An agreement is reached.
With a flick of the wrist,
he throws to first.
The throw is strong. Not perfect,
but good enough.
The batter is out. Probably.
Ikeyama does not celebrate.
Shortstops do not celebrate.
They exist between moments,
filling the space between action and inaction,
like punctuation in a long, meandering sentence.
At bat, he is dependable.
Not a hero, not a ghost.
A .270 hitter with occasional power,
like a vending machine that sometimes
dispenses an extra can by mistake.
One season, he hits 30 home runs.
People are surprised.
He is also surprised.
The next season, he does not.
Balance is restored.
Years pass. He plays, he fields,
he bats, he throws.
The infield dust continues to settle.
One day, he stops.
Someone else plays shortstop now.
The games continue.
The scoreboard flickers,
indifferent as always.
Somewhere, a Yakult Swallows fan
remembers his name.
Not often, but sometimes.
And sometimes is enough.
The Catcher’s Silence
In the deep pocket of the night, beneath the lights,
he waits. The mask rests in his hands,
a quiet artifact of the game.
He sees everything before it happens—
the wind shifting over left field,
the batter’s weight pressing on his back foot,
the subtle hesitation in the pitcher’s fingers
before they tighten around the seams.
Atsuya Furuta does not simply catch.
He listens. He deciphers. He reads
the language of sweat, of breath,
of hesitation hanging between the seams of a curveball.
He calls for a slider, low and away—
not because he hopes,
but because he knows.
The batter twitches, uncertain,
as if sensing the shape of the unseen.
The pitch arrives like a whisper,
slipping past his swing, vanishing
into the quiet leather of the glove.
The umpire exhales—
a fist, a call, a moment already gone.
Furuta does not celebrate.
His mind is elsewhere,
traveling through a labyrinth of probabilities,
each at-bat a novel unwritten,
each inning a slow, intricate dance
of choice and consequence.
He rises, adjusting his chest protector,
eyes scanning the diamond
like an old chess master considering his next move—
not looking at the board,
but beyond it.
The Swallows Take Flight: An Ode to the 1990s
Some nights, baseball is a quiet meditation,
a novel with no clear ending.
Other nights, it is jazz—
improvised, electric, impossible to contain.
And in the 1990s, the Yakult Swallows played jazz.
Jingu Stadium pulsed with something new,
not just the familiar hum of hopeful sighs,
but rhythm, momentum,
the sharp crack of a bat that knew its purpose.
Bobby Valentine came and went,
but Katsuya Nomura stayed,
his wisdom settling over the dugout like a good detective novel—
full of tension, full of knowing.
And on the field, the names became legends.
Takatsu, the closer with the slow-motion fastball.
Miyamoto, steady as a metronome.
The great Atsuya Furuta,
catching not just pitches, but the very heartbeat of the team.
The Swallows won in ’93.
Won again in ’95.
By ’97, it no longer felt like luck,
but like something earned,
like a story that was always meant to be told.
And through it all,
the fans sang, umbrellas in hand,
raising them skyward in a slow, rhythmic dance,
a celebration of rain, of resilience, of victory.
Because baseball, like life, is unpredictable—
but sometimes, just sometimes,
the ball finds the sweet spot,
the team finds its rhythm,
and the Swallows take flight.
The Golden Swallows: A Ballad of the 1990s
I. The Winds of Change
For years, Jingu was a temple of patience,
where hope flickered like a vending machine light—
never quite out, never quite bright.
We knew the drill:
a few good swings, a few bad hops,
and by the seventh inning,
we were just drinking to forget.
But then, something shifted.
A different kind of wind blew through the outfield.
The bats felt lighter, the gloves surer,
the crack of the ball against wood
rang like the first note of a long-lost song.
It was the 1990s,
and the Swallows had found their rhythm.
II. The Maestro in the Dugout
Katsuya Nomura, with eyes like a weathered philosopher,
stood at the helm,
muttering secrets of the game,
seeing plays before they unfolded,
reading opponents like an old detective novel.
He built the team like a writer builds a story—
slowly, deliberately, with no wasted words.
Atsuya Furuta, his catcher,
became his main character,
the kind who knows the plot before anyone else.
Behind the plate, he was a conductor,
guiding pitchers through the movements of the game,
his mitt snapping shut like the final page of a novel
you wish wouldn’t end.
III. The Years of Triumph
In 1993, something rare happened—
we won.
Not just a game, not just a good month,
but the whole thing.
The Japan Series belonged to the Swallows,
and Jingu, once a place of quiet suffering,
became a stage for fireworks.
By ‘95, the feeling was familiar.
By ‘97, it was expected.
A team once known for its almosts and not-quites
had become the team to beat,
a band of steady hands and sure swings,
turning the game into something close to poetry.
IV. The Ritual of the Umbrellas
And through it all, the fans sang.
Not just with voices,
but with umbrellas—
tiny, colorful, ridiculous things,
raised high in the air after every run,
bobbing like a field of bright flowers
caught in a summer breeze.
It was a strange sight,
and maybe that’s why it fit so well.
The Swallows were never the Giants,
never the Tigers,
never the team built for headlines and grandeur.
They were the oddballs, the jazz musicians,
the ones who found beauty in the unexpected.
V. The Echo of Victory
The 90s passed, as all things do.
The championships faded into numbers,
the players aged,
the rhythm slowed.
But if you stand in Jingu at dusk,
when the city hums beyond the outfield walls,
and the ghosts of fastballs still cut through the night air,
you can hear it—
the laughter, the cheers,
the soft patter of rain
on a sea of open umbrellas.
Because baseball is memory,
and memory never truly leaves.
The Man Who Stood Still While the World Kept Spinning
Katsuyuki Dobashi walks to the plate.
Not quickly. Not slowly.
Just the way a man should walk when he knows where he’s going.
He adjusts his cap.
Not because he needs to,
but because things should be in their proper place.
The pitcher fidgets on the mound,
shifting like a man who just realized he left his wallet in a taxi.
Dobashi does not fidget.
Fidgeting is for men with unfinished thoughts.
The first pitch comes. A fastball, slightly outside.
He watches it pass, as if considering whether to buy a used car.
Ball one.
He steps out of the box,
not to adjust anything—everything is already in order—
but simply because that is what one does.
The second pitch, a curveball.
He does not swing.
It dips below the strike zone, where lesser men might chase.
Ball two.
Somewhere in the stands, a man in a wrinkled suit
stirs his coffee, thinking about his mortgage.
Somewhere in the dugout, a rookie player watches,
wondering how a man can make patience look so dignified.
The third pitch arrives. A strike.
Dobashi nods.
Not because he approves,
but because fairness should be acknowledged.
The fourth pitch, another fastball.
He swings, clean and efficient,
the way a carpenter drives a nail.
The ball soars—not dramatically, not heroically—
but with the quiet certainty of a train leaving the station.
A single. No celebration.
He jogs to first, standing there like a punctuation mark
in a sentence he has already written.
The game continues.
Dobashi adjusts his sleeves.
Somewhere, the universe nods in quiet agreement.
How to Win a Game Without Looking Impressed
Thomas O’Malley steps in,
bat resting easy on his shoulder,
like a man who knows the punchline before the joke is told.
The pitcher stares.
O’Malley doesn’t.
Staring is for men who still have something to prove.
The first pitch—a slider.
It slides, sure, but not past him.
His eyes track it the way a cat tracks a falling leaf.
Ball one.
The second pitch, a fastball.
A little high.
He nods slightly, as if he expected nothing less.
Ball two.
The catcher shifts. The pitcher exhales.
The stadium hums like a jazz club before the solo.
Another pitch, this one in the zone.
He swings—not wildly, not dramatically,
but with the quiet precision of a man flipping a page in a book
he’s read a hundred times.
The ball leaps off his bat.
A line drive, crisp as autumn air.
No wasted motion. No unnecessary flair.
Just a base hit, exactly where it needed to be.
The runner rounds third.
The scoreboard shifts.
The Swallows pull ahead.
O’Malley jogs to first,
adjusts his sleeves,
and looks around like a man who just fixed a squeaky door hinge.
No celebration. No theatrics.
Just another at-bat, another game, another quiet victory.
Somewhere in the dugout, a rookie studies him.
Somewhere in the stands, a salaryman nods,
as if remembering the perfect cup of coffee he had that morning.
The game moves on.
Thomas O’Malley is already ready for the next pitch.
Fourteen Pitches
(Or, The Space Between Swing and Silence)
The first pitch comes.
O’Malley watches it pass.
A small white dot moving through space,
like a thought half-formed, then forgotten.
The count begins.
The second pitch.
He swings, but not completely.
A foul ball drifts into the night,
lost like a train schedule in the rain.
The count remains.
The third, the fourth, the fifth.
Fastball, curveball, fastball again.
Each one met with the quiet defiance
of a man returning a letter unopened.
The count deepens.
A pause.
The pitcher adjusts his cap.
O’Malley adjusts nothing.
The eighth, the ninth, the tenth.
Fourteen pitches is a long conversation.
Neither man is winning yet,
but neither is losing.
The twelfth, the thirteenth.
The bat makes a sound—not sharp, not loud—
but decisive.
A ball rolling, a runner moving,
a moment shifting from theory into action.
The count ends.
O’Malley stands on first base.
The stadium exhales.
The pitcher exhales.
O’Malley does not.
He looks forward,
toward the next pitch,
toward the next at-bat,
toward the next thing that must be done.
The game continues.
Dry, neutral, and abstract—like watching fourteen pitches unfold in slow motion.
Feels like a Murakami-esque meditation on time, patience, and inevitability.
The Man Who Threw the Wind
On the mound, time bends.
Seconds stretch, tighten,
hold their breath as the pitcher stands,
feet pressed against the earth,
the weight of the game balanced in his fingers.
Yasuhiro Ogawa does not rush.
He does not need to.
The ball knows where it must go.
It waits, like a story unfolding,
like a note hanging in the air before it fades.
The motion begins—
a slow, quiet gathering of force,
a coil of muscle,
a thread pulled tight.
Then, the unraveling.
The fastball does not simply move.
It cuts, it carves,
it writes something unseen into the night air.
The batter sees it but does not understand.
By the time the swing begins,
it is already gone.
Some call it power.
Some call it skill.
But it is neither, not entirely.
It is the language of the pitcher—
the silence between the wind-up and the release,
the space where thought and instinct blur,
the moment when the world narrows
to nothing but a ball, a glove,
and the sound of air breaking apart.
And when it is over,
when the last pitch finds the catcher’s hand,
when the dust settles and the scoreboard glows,
Ogawa does what he always does.
He walks back to the dugout,
adjusts his cap,
and waits for the next game,
the next wind to throw.
The Geometry of Thunder
Munetaka Murakami swings a bat.
The ball moves toward him. He moves toward the ball.
There is contact. The sound is clean,
like a door closing somewhere far away.
People cheer. Some of them stand.
A few hold plastic cups of beer.
A child points at the scoreboard,
which confirms what everyone already knows.
The ball lands in the seats.
This happens often.
Later, Murakami returns to the dugout.
A teammate nods. He nods back.
No words are exchanged, because no words are necessary.
Somewhere in the distance, a Yakult Swallows fan
lifts a paper umbrella. It is a small, almost symbolic movement.
At the postgame press conference, Murakami says something
about trying his best.
The reporters write it down.
They write everything down.
Outside, the streets hum with neon light.
A passing train disappears into the city.
Tomorrow, there will be another game.
Munetaka Murakami will swing a bat.
The ball will move toward him. He will move toward the ball.
There will be contact.
The sound will be clean.
Afterword
There are certain things in life that defy logic. Why one person prefers coffee over tea. Why a melody lingers in the mind long after the song has ended. Why a baseball team, against all odds, carves a small but indelible space in a person’s heart.
The Yakult Swallows are one of those things.
They are not the mightiest of teams. They do not always dominate, do not always command the headlines. But like the swallows that return to Jingu every season, they persist. They move through the air with a quiet certainty, playing not for spectacle, but for something deeper. Something that belongs to the spaces between victory and defeat, between the crack of the bat and the silence before a pitch.
Baseball, like life, is a long, unpredictable story. Some days, everything connects—the swing, the wind, the impossible alignment of chance. Other days, no matter how well you prepare, no matter how much you understand the rhythm of the game, things slip beyond your grasp. And yet, you still show up. You still watch, still hope, still let the game wrap around you like an old song on a late-night radio.
This collection of poems is, at its core, not about winning or losing. It is about movement, about the fleeting nature of moments, about the beauty of a team that, year after year, takes the field with the same quiet resolve.
And maybe, just maybe, that is enough.
(This poetry collection was generated by ChatGPT. And it’s a fiction and a joke or a humour, is inspired by the “Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection” in “First Person Singular” by Haruki Murakami.)
