Mr. Baseball, a 1992 comedy starring Tom Selleck, was on recently so of course I watched it, even though I must have seen this “fish-out-of-water” film dozens of times.
Similar to the saying about the game itself, whenever you watch, there’s always a chance that you’ll see something you never did before. And it’s true.
Selleck is Jack Elliot, a former All-Star slugger whose reduced productivity has rendered him unwanted by American teams. So he winds up in Japan on the Nagoya Chunichi Dragons, managed by a former legendary slugger. There are all the cliches one might expect: Japanese apartments are too small for big Americans. Team owners are only interested in making profits and saving face. Communication is difficult, etc. Fortunately, there’s another American — the ubiquitous Dennis Haysbert (Major Leagues franchise) as Max Dubois, a Warren Cromartie-type — who shows him the ropes and helps him adjust to the nuances of Japanese baseball.
Towards the end of the film, there’s the familiar “let’s all pull together and win this thing” scene. Of course, they’re playing their dreaded rival and most successful team in Japan, the Tokyo Giants. And of course the manager’s job is on the line. And of course Elliot’s chances of returning to the U.S. hinge upon how he performs, with his agent and an executive of a team that might be interested in signing him sitting in the stands.
It’s late in the season. Because he is on the verge of breaking the home run record set by his crusty manager, opposing pitchers dare not throw Elliot a strike since it would be unacceptable to have a gaijin do so.
With the Dragons trailing in the middle innings, Elliot is hit by a pitch. After some scuffling between the teams because the pitcher was late in tipping his hat as a sign of contrition, a Japanese custom, peace is restored. Dubois hits a single to put runners on first and second. The next batter, Toshi Yamashita, hits a home run to bring the Dragons within a run. Here’s where the ‘seeing something new” comes in.
There’s a shot of the dugout with all the Dragons going wild, including Dubois, who stands in the back swinging a makeshift weighted bat. Kind of hard to do that since he’s still running the bases.
You would have thought someone should have caught that in post-production.
Does it need to be said? Thanks to Elliot’s acceptance of the Japanese way — he bunts, driving home the decisive run while preserving his manager’s sacred record — the Dragons win. I don’t even think that merits a “spoiler alert.”
Just a real quick review of Mr. Baseball. Selleck, a fierce Tigers fan, plays the ugly American well, but his Japanese costars are very wooden as they struggle to express themselves in English. The love story seems superfluous, especially — spoiler alert — when the woman just happens to be the daughter of said crusty manager, thereby adding an extra element of communication issues (surprise: the manager spoke English all along, but never let on, even as Elliot was insulting him and acting out). Maybe that’s why the movie merited just a 6.1 from IMDB and 12 % from Rotten Tomatoes.
And just for fun — and still adhering to the Throwback Thursday theme — here’s an “All-Star Baseball Movie Lineup” from Bleacher Report in 2008 which includes both Jack Elliot and Max Dubois.
Tagged as:
Japanese baseball,
Mr. Baseball,
Tom Selleck
Congratulations to Brad Smith whose novel, 
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I don’t know how many times I’ve said it, but I don’t get poetry. I mean there are just so many ways to poeticize and there doesn’t seem to be any definitive right way. I can’t define it, but I know what I like. I guess I go for stuff from people like 
PRINT
The Pandemic Baseball Book Club was a way for authors to promote their books in a period where making the usual rounds to bookstores and other author events was 
is available on Amazon.com,
Rooting for clothes?
April 23, 2026 · 0 comments
Why do fans root for a specific team?
Is it a generational thing? “My grandfather and father were Yankee fans, so that’s who I root for.” “My dad was a Yankees fan, so I root for the Mets, just to piss him off.”
So if a team decides to change its look, would that make a difference? Several clubs now have City Connect togs; in some cases, more than one version. The cynic in me thinks it’s just another way to make money.
The Dodgers recently added a corporate name to their home park: Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium. That kind of rattled some traditionalists who bemoan the selling out. There are a handful of teams that have retained their fields’ names through the years, including Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, and Yankee Stadium. What team is steeped in tradition more than the Yankees?
According to this article on the Sports Illustrated website, “The Yankees are the only team in MLB to never wear names on the backs of their jerseys, and they’re also the only team never to wear a regular alternate uniform.”
Not so fast.
The Yankees are considering a new look. Which translates into a new way to extract more cash from their fans from their fans.
From the SI article:
OMG!
Naturally, not everyone is happy about this. Chris Kirschner at The Athletic believes “Yankees’ alternate jerseys would be another damaging dent to storied tradition.”
What would George Steinbrenner say? For that matter, what would Jerry Seinfeld say?
There’s a great book, Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide, by Marc Okkonen, which came out in the early 1990s, so that needs an update. (Todd Radom offers a more opinionated take in Winning Ugly: A Visual History of Baseball’s Most Unique Uniforms.)
The Hall of Fame offers this Uniform Data Base, based on Okkonen’s work, but it does not include City Connect or alternate unis.
In an amazing case of timing, I just received this: VegasInsider.com has updated its analysis of the most foul-mouthed MLB fandoms, analyzing over 1 million comments from the subreddits of all 30 MLB fandoms to find out which fans are the most polite and on the contrary, which fandoms are the most foul-mouthed. Additionally, the analysis also uncovered which MLB fandoms are the most positive and which fans are the most negative. You can find that study here.
A synopsis:
Tagged as: Uniforms
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