Breiza-san Is a Hitto

Sitting in the dugout last spring, Head Coach Don Blasingame could see why the rival batters were lambasting his fastballing pitcher. Blasingame asked for time out and told the pitcher to throw more change-up pitches. The catcher, mistaking the instruction as criticism of his pitch-calling abilities, lost his temper and got into a shouting match with the coach. Fortunately, neither man could understand what the other was saying, for Blasingame was ranting in English while the catcher was raving in Japanese. The first American ever to serve as the head coach of a professional Japanese baseball team, the monolingual Blasingame usually avoids such communications problems because he uses pidgin Japanese and sign language. An interpreter sits with him on the bench for emergencies.

In any tongue, Blasingame at 41 is now enjoying his greatest success--Oriental or Occidental. His Nankai Hawks of Osaka, a last-place team four years ago, won the first half of the 1973 split season and are assured of a place in the Pacific League's playoff.

Hero status is something new to Blasingame. He joined the Hawks as a second baseman in 1967 after a dozen so-so seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals and four other U.S. teams. Like many of the 16 Americans now playing beisuboru in Japan (league rules limit the number of foreign players to two per team), he had to be rechristened so that Japanese fans could pronounce his name. Today Don Lee Blasingame of Corinth, Miss., is known throughout Japan as Breiza ("the Blazer," a nickname he earned with the Cardinals for his speed). "Breiza sounds snappy," says one of the Hawks' front-office men, "and even seems to evoke a spiritually stirring acoustical effect."

The Blazer nearly flamed out in 1969 when, after averaging .275 for three seasons in Japan, the Hawks released him. But then Katsuya Nomura was named player-manager and insisted that Blasingame be signed as head coach. "Breiza is the best teacher in Japanese baseball," says Nomura, who is too busy catching every day to concern himself with strategy. "All the play-by play directions are in his hands."

As de facto manager, Blasingame tried to learn the language but found that "my teacher only taught me strictly formal Japanese when I needed a baseball way of talking." So he has adopted a kind of baseball interlingua. It was not too difficult, for many of Japan's basic terms are taken straight from Abner Doubleday's lexicon: an out is outo, a hit is hitto, a homer is homma and a batter is a batta. Blasin game also mastered such words as massugu (straight), tsuyoku (strongly), yukkuri (slowly) and a lot of what might be called body Japanese. "A tiny gesture from Breiza," explains Hawk Out fielder Shuzo Aono, "and we more or less know what he is trying to tell us."

Err and Grin. Blasingame also had to familiarize himself with the idio syncrasies of the Japanese game. It was most difficult for him to understand why fielders smile broadly after mak ing errors. "At first," he says, "I was appalled. No more -- that's their way of concealing embarrassment." Says Nomura: "Breiza is so patient that he is almost Japanese."

Blasingame's greatest contribution to the Hawks is teaching them to play percentages. He says: "I teach the very basic stuff, like when to gamble and when to play it safe, how to think ahead of the play, how not to be picked off." "Until Breiza came to coach us," says Nomura, "we played a strictly physical game. We threw, hit, ran and did almost nothing else. Breiza has made it a mental game for us."

The rewards are handsome. Blasingame admits to getting "more than what most major league coaches are paid [average $27,500] in the U.S." But in addition, the Hawks also pay all of Blasingame's housing, travel and other expenses, except meals. He lives with his wife Sara (Miss Missouri, 1957) and their four children in a Western-style hilltop apartment overlooking the port city of Kobe. So popular is he that he has even had to learn the term narande (stand in line) to cope with the Japanese children who hound him for his autograph.

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