This a story on Don Wakamatsu, the new manager of the Seattle Mariners. I had the pleasure of working with Don when he was a player with the White Sox. He came to us as a released player with limited future because of recurrent shoulder problems. He worked his butt off to regain the ability to throw and actually made to the big leagues for a short time in 1991. Don was a player that the other players respected because of his determination and leadership. I wish him all the best in his new position.
New York Times December 26, 2008
Seattle Manager Hopes What He Does
Highlights Who He Is
By HUGO KUGIYA
As a major league catcher, Don
Wakamatsu was a footnote: 18 games for the Chicago White Sox in 1991. But he could say
proudly that he played baseball at every level.
Wakamatsu’s true distinction might
have been overlooked but for his surname. He was a minority twice over, not
just the great-grandson of a Japanese dairy farmer, but also one of the few
Asian-Americans to play in the major leagues.
“My failures put me in a position to
be where I am now,” Wakamatsu, 45, said. “One of my goals as a player was to
bring recognition to my heritage. Since that didn’t come to fruition, I’m
especially fortunate to be where I am now.”
When he was introduced last month as
the Seattle Mariners’ manager, the first of Asian
descent in the majors, Wakamatsu talked about serving as a metaphorical
steppingstone for other Asian-Americans in sports.
“I dived into my past, going back to
visit my grandma, learning more about my family,” he said by telephone from his
home in Texas. “They went through a lot of things. It meant something, and I
thought I ought to know more about it since I wasn’t exposed to it much as a
child.”
The implications of his heritage
first struck him when a government check arrived in the mail in the late 1980s,
his father’s share of reparations for the internment of Japanese-Americans in
the 1940s. Wakamatsu’s father, Leland, was born in the Tule Lake camp in
California, just south of the Oregon border.
“I didn’t understand what the check
was for,” Wakamatsu said. “You don’t study that stuff in school. My
grandparents never talked about it. I remember my dad’s reaction, that it was
all too little, too late.”
Wakamatsu’s paternal grandparents,
James and Ruth, lost their home when they reported to Tule Lake, the largest
camp. Ruth worked in the mess hall; James was a carpenter.
After the war, Wakamatsu’s grandparents
and their children moved into a pickers’ cabin, then a converted barn. James
started to build a house nearby out of salvaged panels, which he bought off a
truck from a man who said they came from the barracks of an internment camp,
perhaps even Tule Lake. They live in that house to this day.
Wakamatsu’s grandparents grew pears,
apples and cherries to supplement their incomes. James worked in a mill, Ruth
in a fruit-packing plant, putting in 30 years at their jobs. They can hardly
comprehend that their grandson makes his living from a game.
“We’ve worked ever since we were
kids,” Ruth, 91, said. “Our whole lives, we were too busy working to think
about anything else.”
Over the years, Wakamatsu’s
curiosity about his heritage has grown along with his influence in baseball,
the sport closest to the hearts of Japanese-Americans. From a friendship with
the baseball historian Kerry Nakagawa came detailed descriptions of
Japanese-Americans who played organized baseball in the internment camps.
Wakamatsu imagined the game he loved played behind coils of barbed wire, and
wondered just how little he knew about his past.
He was an all-conference catcher at
Arizona State for three seasons, but only after he left did he learn that the
university’s first baseball coach, Bill Kajikawa, was Japanese-American.
Kajikawa, he learned, served in
World War II, as did several of Wakamatsu’s great-uncles, with the 442nd
Regimental Combat Team, the mostly Japanese-American battalion that was among
the war’s most decorated units. Wakamatsu talked often about “those who came
before me,” the men in his family, Kajikawa and other forebears like his
boyhood idol, Lenn Sakata, perhaps the most successful Asian-American baseball
player. “I love the game,” Wakamatsu said, “but I’m not in the game just to
say, I was a big-league manager. I want to see how many players I can help. And
if I can be some kind of positive influence for the Japanese and Asian-American
community in Seattle, well, I have a greater chance of doing that there than in
Pittsburgh.”
He added: “I couldn’t have scripted
a better place to be. It is coming home in a sense.”
His paternal great-grandparents,
Eataro and Hisa Wakamatsu, arrived a century ago in Orting, Wash., about 40
miles from Seattle, and settled farther south in Hood River, Ore., where
Wakamatsu was born. His Irish-American mother, Sandy, a dental assistant, and
his father, an ironworker, came from families who farmed the river valley.
Although Wakamatsu grew up mostly in
the Oakland suburb of Hayward, Calif., he spent many summers and holidays in
Hood River, performing chores in his grandparents’ orchard. He watched his
relatives pound mochi, a Japanese rice cake, as they celebrated the new year.
He sat wordlessly at the foot of his great-grandmother, who spoke no English.
She addressed him in Japanese, knowing he could not understand her.
“I can still see her face laughing,”
Wakamatsu said. “What a shame, I thought, that I couldn’t speak Japanese.”
Although the number of
Asian-Americans has grown to about 15 million from roughly 1.5 million in
1960s, when Wakamatsu was born, few have become sports stars. Champion figure
skaters like Kristi Yamaguchi and Michelle
Kwan are exceptions, along with the tennis player Michael
Chang and Apolo
Anton Ohno, who has won five Olympic medals in speedskating.
The burden Asian-Americans in sports
view as their own is being perceived as not fully American. Oakland Athletics catcher Kurt Suzuki, for
instance, said fans and sometimes players assumed he was Japanese.
“It’s entertaining to see how many
fans absolutely expect me to be Japanese,” said Suzuki, 25, who grew up in
Hawaii. “I just look at them with this blank stare.”
The first two Asian-Americans to
play in the majors were also from Hawaii. Pitcher Ryan Kurosaki made seven
relief appearances with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1975. Two years later,
Sakata became the second, playing most of his 11 seasons with the Baltimore Orioles. Now 54, Sakata is a minor
league manager in Japan.
“He was the one guy that I
followed,” Wakamatsu said. “For me, there was always that issue of looking for
that identity.”
After seven seasons as a coach with
American League West teams, Wakamatsu said, he bonded with Suzuki “as soon as I
walked in the door” and served as his unofficial mentor when he was Oakland’s
bench coach last season.
Suzuki’s parents are
Japanese-American, but it was Wakamatsu who knew more about their struggles. He
is actively involved with the Japanese American Citizens League, a civil rights
organization, and well read on the history of Japanese-Americans in baseball.
“He was the reason I read up so much
about Japanese-American history,” said Suzuki, believed to be the only
Asian-American in the majors last season. “We talked more about that than we
talked about baseball.”
They immediately felt the weight of
the coincidence: two Japanese-Americans, teacher and pupil, on the same bench.
As far as they could tell, this had never happened.
“The truth is I really wanted him to
succeed where I had failed,” Wakamatsu said. “I think it’s quite a coincidence
that I ended up being the guy who came along and joined the team at that stage
of Kurt’s development. What are the chances?”
