The Strangest Writing Retreat I Have Ever Heard Of

Last night, I got an e-mail through Facebook from a guy who says he met me at a SCBWI Carolinas conference three years ago. He's putting together a writers retreat near Charlotte next March, and he's having trouble getting guys to come, so he's inviting me. Okay, so that's not why I want to be invited to something, but I sympathize, because I also can't get guys to come to my kidlit writing retreats.

He doesn't tell me the date, or how long it is. Also, he says it will be a "combination writing retreat/Spartan Race." He says this like I am supposed to know what "Spartan Race" means. I have no idea what a Spartan Race is, so I write back: what is the date, how long is it, and what is a Spartan Race?

He writes back that the retreat will be over a particular weekend, that there will be a craft talk on Friday night, and then "the Spartan Race Saturday morning." And in case I don't know what that is, he says, here's a link.

I follow the link. A Spartan Race is a sort of traveling Iron Man Obstacle Race, a four mile run through the mud where you do things like crawl on your stomach under barbed wire, jump over burning fires, climb greased pyramids, and get beat on by very large men with padded sticks.

Then in the evening we will probably do a first pages critique.

I wrote back to the man and told him that I was sorry, but I couldn't attend because YOU COULD NOT PAY ME TO RUN A SPARTAN RACE.

But thank you very much for the invitation.

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Where's Waldo? On the US Men's Soccer Team

I think I found Waldo during last night's US v Brazil friendly...

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This one's worthy of City Confidential

I ran into a story on the internet yesterday that reminded me so much of my brief time writing for City Confidential that I had to share it here. It's got all the makings of a great City Confidential episode: a semi-famous perpetrator, a silly motive, a botched crime, and a colorful supporting cast. Truly, this story is worth bringing the show back for an encore episode.

So, first the teaser: Chef Juan-Carlos Cruz made a name for himself serving up low-calorie pastry treats on TV--but when this "Calorie Commando" tried to trim the fat by hiring two homeless men to kill his wife, his cookie crumbled.

Here's what happened, according to a CNN story:

Former TV chef Juan-Carlos Cruz faces nine years in prison after pleading "no contest" Tuesday to a charge of soliciting two homeless men to kill his wife, the prosecutor said.

The former host of the Food Network's "Calorie Commando" will be sentenced on December 13, but the plea agreement calls for a nine-year sentence, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said.

One count of attempted murder was dropped as part of the plea settlement, the prosecutor said.

The motive?

Fertility issues were at the center of Cruz's motivation in the murder-for-hire plot to kill his wife, according to sources close to the couple.

Two sources close the couple, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said their 20-year struggle to have a child overwhelmed them.

After spending a lot of money on unsuccessful fertility treatments, Cruz's wife, Jennifer Campbell, was "very depressed and talked about suicide," one source said.

The sources suggested she may have wanted to end her life but that as a devout Roman Catholic, she believed suicide was a sin.

So, I guess he was just trying to help her out then? But it's all cool:

The source closest to Campbell said she still loves her husband despite his arrest.

...

The source closest to Cruz, 48, said he was "nothing but a loving and devoted husband."

I just hope, someday, that I can do something as loving and devoted for Wendi.

The story begins to reach Elmore Leonard proportions with the supporting cast, which includes two indistinguishably Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-like homeless men named "Big Dave" and "Little Dave."

The criminal complaint accused Cruz of trying to hire David Carrington and David Walters -- homeless men who go by the street names Little Dave and Big Dave -- to murder Campbell. It was not immediately clear who was Little Dave and who was Big Dave.

The homeless men solicited to carry out the hit spoke with celebrity news and gossip website TMZ soon after the arrest. One of them called Cruz "very meticulous" but "very cheap" in his planning.

Well, you get what you pay for, I suppose.

The plan fell apart when one of the men whom Cruz allegedly recruited told Santa Monica police, Sgt. Jay Trisler said. Trisler confirmed that the men interviewed by TMZ were the chief witnesses against Cruz.

Little Dave told TMZ that he was approached first by Cruz, who asked him to kill his wife for cash, and he told his friend Big Dave.

Big Dave said he told a Santa Monica police officer about the plot after he was arrested for loitering.

"We're very fortunate that we have a relationship and rapport with some of the homeless and that they were able to give us information," Trisler said.

Yeah. Some "relationship." I've seen enough crime show episodes to read between the lines here. "Big Dave" got picked up for loitering charges, and he rolled over on Cruz to get out of it.

Santa Monica police began their undercover investigation of Cruz on May 7, Trisler said. Cruz was arrested at a dog park in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon, he said.

This had to be a sting operation at the dog park!

Big Dave and Little Dave got a place to stay while the investigation was under way. Santa Monica police put them in a hotel room to keep them out of sight, Big Dave said.

"They gave us two pizzas, a 12-pack of beer and a bottle of San Jose," he said. "I love them."

Awesome. I love the image of these two guys living it up with beer, pizza, and cable TV at the hotel.

Predictably, the Food Network was quick to distance themselves:

The Food Network issued a short statement Monday saying Cruz "has not been under contract or associated with Food Network for a number of years."

Good stuff, made all the better since there was no actual murder! I wonder if Cruz has already sold the TV rights? Or maybe I could get the rights from Big Dave for a couple of pizzas...

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Weird chicken trivia

Mental Floss recently did a post with weird facts about chickens and, since we're nominally chicken wranglers, I thought I'd pass along some of the strangest chicken facts:

3. What is pasty butt, and how do I prevent it?

Chickens have a multipurpose hole for excrement, eggs, and mating called the cloacal vent. If this hole becomes clogged with excrement—a condition known as pasty butt—a young chicken can get backed up and die. Without a mother hen to clean them, baby chicks raised by humans are particularly susceptible to pasty butt. That’s why chicken keepers must be vigilant in monitoring and cleaning their brood’s bottoms. 

Yikes.

6. How do I hypnotize a chicken?

The chicken mind is an easy thing to control, and chicken handlers have found several ways of hypnotizing the birds. Here are three surefire ways to make a chicken very, very sleepy:

• Hold a chicken’s head under its wing and gently rock its body.

• Hold a chicken upside down and wiggle a finger in circles around its beak.

• Stare intently into a chicken’s eyes.

Generally, they’ll stay spellbound for several minutes, or even hours, until a loud noise snaps them out of their trance. Scientists think this state is a form of tonic immobility, a defense mechanism in which animals “play dead” in order to shake off a predator. Hypnotized chickens can be pretty useful, though. Former Vice President Al Gore recalls using them as doorstops during his childhood days on his family’s farm.

Ten Provocative Questions About Raising Chickens...Answered!

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What pants size are you? No, really.

There's a great post on Esquire's Style Blog about the tremendous difference in men's pant actual waist sizes and the labeled waist sizes among popular clothing makers.

Check out the graphic above--Old Navy's sizes are five inches off! No wonder I have to try on five pairs of pants every time I want to buy one. Wendi tells me the women's clothing industry has been doing this for years, but with the advent of online shopping, this nonsense is going to prove disastrous...

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American Cornhole Organization

The American Cornhole Organization, and its rival (?) the American Cornhole Association.


Because cornhole needs two official organizations.

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Happy Birthday, Jo!

Today is Jo's eighth birthday. Woohoo! And here she is wearing her birthday present from us: fencing gear. It comes with fencing lessons at the New Studio of Dance in Asheville, beginning the week after Labor Day.

Jo has been asking to take fencing lessons for two years, but the only class we could find won't let you join until you're eight. She's been counting the months...

En garde, and happy birthday, Jo! Our lives are far better for having you in it.

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Something bad is going to happen between July 30 and August 2

I have a love/hate relationship with our local paper, the Mitchell News-Journal. On the one hand, I cannot abide the incredibly offensive and unsubstantiated letters to the editor they choose to print that make the entire population sound like homophobic Republican bible-bangers, nor can I stand the "Rants and Raves" column in which local nutcases are allowed to leave crazy phone messages which are then printed anonymously. Yes, yes, I understand the freedom of speech perfectly well, and I do believe that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, no matter how hate-filled or wrong-headed it is. But that doesn't mean the Mitchell News-Journal has to keep printing them, and I've said as much to the publisher. (It is a small town, after all, and I know him.)

But the Mitchell News-Journal is often hilariously (and usually unwittingly) entertaining as well, as in this priceless letter to the editor from a local resident of Spruce Pine, North Carolina:

Dear Editor,

For many years prior to embracing Jesus Christ into my life, I spent considerable time at astrological relationships to earthly events.

Upon reading the Bible it became clear to me that the good book's writers frowned upon this practice. (Horoscopes are generally looked upon as horror-scopes!)

On the other side of the ledger, however, we cannot deny that the moon affects the tides. Ask anyone in a hospital, the full moon increases activity there, as well as at police stations.

We know in retrospect there was a major planetary conjunction when 9/11 took place; when the stock market crashed in 2008, when Chernobyl blew up, and numerous other such events took place, not least many earthquakes.

We are about to experience another major event, substantially larger than any of the above. A conjunction of this magnitude has not taken place in over 10,000 years.

While the conjunction has been building up for at least seven months, the maximum force will be between July 30 and Aug. 2 of this year, ebbing off for some eight months after.

It might be a good idea to have some food, and a full tank of gas at your disposal, and a couple of $100 in cash on hand during those days. ATM's may not work.

Now, to be the most helpful, I really should have posted this BEFORE July 30-August 2. I hope none of you experienced any major Chernobyl-grade events in your lives over the weekend! (And no, Lindsay Lohan being released from jail yesterday does not count.)

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The 2010 World Cup comes to a close

The 2010 World Cup is over, and Spain are champions. The final wasn't the best game of the tournament though. In fact, far from it. It wasn't the Beautiful Game on display on Sunday. Neither team wanted to play much in the midfield. It was an up and down the field battle, each team rushing at the other like madmen. And yet there were so few real scoring chances too. It was sloppy, it was uncontrolled, it was tentative.

It was also dirty. Lots of flopping and diving. Lots of pushing and shoving and pulling. A finals-record 14 yellow cards, more than doubling the previous record from 1986, and ranking the third highest total ever in any World Cup match. TWo of those 14 yellow cards went to the Netherlands' John Heitinga, sending him off and leaving the Dutch with only 10 men for the last few minutes of play--just long enough, in fact, for Spain's Andres Iniesta to put one in the Dutch net and win the thing outright before the game went to the dreaded penalty kick stage. I was at least glad to see a new team added to the list of World Cup winners, and though the Dutch have been to the finals now three times without winning, Spain were the most successful World Cup team never to take home the cup. So congrats to Spain.

For all the disappointment of the final game, there were brilliant moments and brilliant players along the way. A new generation of household World Cup names emerged, including Spain's David Villa, Germany's Mesut Ozil and Thomas Mueller, Mexico's Giovani Dos Santos, Ghana's Andre Ayew and keeper Richard Kingson, who isn't young, exactly, but staked a name for himself on the international stage. But no player made the World Cup his own more than Diego Forlan (pictured above), the strikingly good-looking striker for Uruguay, who took home the Golden Ball as FIFA's pick for best player of the tournament. (And as bad as the final game was, how good was that third-place game between Germany and Uruguay? Game of the tournament, perhaps?)

I enjoyed every minute of this World Cup--okay, well, not EVERY minute, as there are some particular minutes in the USA's matches I would very much like to forget--but overall I loved watching all the countries compete. And I'm already thinking ahead to World Cup 2014 in Brazil, and wondering if that might not be the year to finally plan to be there to watch the games live...

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Colonel Mustard in the Library?

A 74-year-old woman in Boise, Idaho has been busted for pouring condiments into the book drop box of her local library. From the AP story:

Police said a 74-year-old woman arrested after pouring mayonnaise in the Ada County library's book drop box is a person of interest in a yearlong spree of condiment-related crimes of the same sort. The woman was arrested Sunday at the library, moments after police said she pulled through the outside drive-through and dumped an open jar of mayonnaise in the box designated for reading materials.

The woman was released from the county jail and faces a misdemeanor charge of malicious injury to property. Police did not disclose a motive.

Boise police said the woman is under investigation for at least 10 similar cases of vandalism since May 2009. Library employees have reported finding books in the drop box covered in corn syrup and ketchup.

I'm glad the police were finally able to ketchup to her.

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Nine Authors, Twelve Baseball Questions

Another interview I participated in, which was posted while I was off teaching and traveling in Japan: The Happy Nappy Bookseller's fantastic series of questions for me and eight other authors of baseball books for kids. Here's my answer to the question, "What playoff loss make your stomach churn the most?"

In 1999 I was living in Cincinnati, and had been following the Reds pretty religiously, getting down to the ballpark whenever I could. They were really great that season. Not a great team like 1927 Yankees great, just a lot of fun, with really terrific chemistry and a knack for coming back late in games and never giving up. Jack McKeon was the manager that year, a crusty old veteran who knew how to get the most out of limited talent, and the team had great years from Mike Cameron, Pokey Reese, Sean Casey, Barry Larkin, Aaron Boone, Dmitri Young, Scott Williamson, and Danny Graves. Not superstars, most of them, but guys with a lot of heart and big hits and pitches at the right moments.

At the end of that season, they finished in a tie with the New York Mets for the Wild Card spot in the playoffs, and there was a one-game tie-breaker played at Riverfront in Cincinnati. After a season of heroics and all-out play, the Reds just didn't have anything left in the tank, losing 5-0 to the Mets at home. It was devastating, but there was the hope that next year, the team might really be something special. Then, in the off-season, the Reds traded half their team to the Seattle Mariners to get Ken Griffey, Jr., and while it was always exciting to see Ken Griffey, Jr. play after that, it felt like the team lost all its chemistry from the year before. Griffey got hurt early and often, the team lost it's heart, and that was really the beginning of the end of Cincinnati's competitiveness for the last decade. But it was that playoff loss that really broke my heart.

You can read the rest of the questions and answers starting with this post. Thanks, Happy Nappy Bookseller! 

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Japan's "Knuckle Princess"

 

Dubbed "Knuckle Hime" (Knuckle Princess) by the Japanese press, eighteen year old Eri Yoshida became the first female player drafted by a Japanese professional baseball team when the Kobe 9 Cruise of the Kansai Independent Baseball League drafted her two years ago. Now she's brought her knuckleball act to the States, trying to catch the eye of scouts in Arizona winter ball.

The 5'1" pitcher started throwing knuckleballs after watching video of Major League knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, and has a fastball that tops out at 63 miles per hour. Knuckleballs are finicky things though; some days they dance, and some days they don't, and when they don't you need that fastball to get people out. Sixty-three miles per hour isn't going to blow past too many professional baseball players, but Eri is just 18.

 

Her success will depend a lot on having a pitch she can throw for a strike beyond her knuckler. In her first start for the Yuma Scorpions, she gave up five runs in two innings, allowing three hits, walking one, and hitting four batters. Her second stint was better though--she retired all three batters she faced, with one strikeout.

Japanese pro baseball used to have a rule that did not allow women from playing, but that restriction was dropped more than a decade ago, and women have been trying out and playing ever since--but none has yet broken into the all-male ranks of the highest level of Japanese baseball, the Nippon Professional Baseball League. Eri Yoshida has a long way to go before she can expect to compete there, but as Wayne Graczyk of The Japan Times says in his recent column about her, she has certainly showed a gutsy attitude and lots of heart--which will get you everywhere in Japan.

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Tragedy, justice, and the Super Bowl

You like the Colts because of their single-minded efficiency and high-energy offense. (Or, like me, because Peyton Manning played for your alma mater, and you've been a fan of him ever since.) But then there's the Saints, who represent for NOLA--and gosh knows New Orleans needs something to feel good about. And that Drew Brees, he's a pretty swell guy--and it's even easier to root for him when you think about how San Diego let him go because they wanted that prat Philip Rivers instead.

So what do you do? Colts or Saints? Who do you pull for? I posed the problem to NFL observer Paul "The Sundance Kid" Harrill, who returned this considered response:

"I was feeling a little bit of this myself. Here's what I've decided:

While I can appreciate what it would mean to New Orleans for the Saints to win, as a longtime Colts fan I have an obligation to root for my favorite team to play hard, kick ass, and WIN! Anything less is not playing -- and cheering for -- the game the way it's meant to be played.

Rooting for the Colts in this way, if the Saints win, their victory will have a lot of integrity to it. And this will make me happy, knowing that the Saints played their hearts out and defeated a great effort from the Colts.

But rooting against the Colts just so New Orleans can have their cathartic moment... that goes against the principles of sportsmanship. How can I, after the players for the Colts have brought me so much happiness, turn around and cheer against these men because of the luck of who they drew as an opposing team? What kind of fan would I be?

The agony of defeat is part of sports (and life). And, arguably, the Colts will feel agony in a Super Bowl defeat much deeper than the Saints. Their entire season has been built around competing in the Super Bowl (cf., the controversy of giving up their undefeated season to rest for their playoff run).

On the other hand, watching the scenes of Bourbon St. last night [when they clenched the NFC championship], it was clear that NOLA have already *had* a feeling of catharsis and victory. They've never been to the Super Bowl before. That alone is historic, and a victory for the city. It made me so happy for them. But now I have to say:

GO COLTS!"

I called Paul to laugh about this, and to sympathize, and it led us to an even deeper discussion concerning tragedy and justice. No matter who loses this Super Bowl, it will be a tragedy. Tragedy, as Paul defined it, is not when bad things happen to bad people. That's justice. Tragedy is when bad things happen to good people, and both teams, for many fans, are good people.

Now, there are undoubtedly some Colts haters out there. There have to be. Those fans may have loyalties that lie elsewhere, or just feel that the Colts have had an embarrassment of riches for too long, and need to be brought down a peg. (Although I'll point out that they have only won one Super Bowl in the Peyton Manning era.) But I challenge anyone to argue that the Colts play dirty, or have players who are constantly in trouble with the law the way other teams do. The Colts have been a class act for a long time now, love them or hate them. Which makes them good guys. Just like the Saints.

Tragedy is when bad things happen to good people. Thus, if there is one thing we know we'll see this Super Bowl Sunday, it's tragedy.

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NFL games = 11 minutes of action

Tired of the field goal/commercial break/kickoff/commercial break tedium of NFL broadcasts? You don't have to be a football hater to think televised pro games are boring. A few years ago, a writer for Wired Magazine took a stopwatch to a Chiefs-Broncos game, and found there were just 12 minutes and 8 seconds where the ball was actually in play--from hike to down. Twelve minutes!

Now, with the Super Bowl two weeks away, the Wall Street Journal has done an even more exhaustive breakdown. By their count, a three-hour telecast has just 11 minutes of action. Here's their breakdown:

Players standing around: 67 minutes

Commercials: 60 minutes

Replays: 17 minutes

Actual playing time: 11 minutes

Yep. According to the article, "As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps." Yawn. And can you imagine how much more boring it must be for fans who actually watch the games in the stadium, sitting through all those commercial breaks without anything else to entertain them? Cheerleaders can only do so much.

And lest you think the broadcasts are spending a lot of time on the cheerleaders, consider this: most telecasts show them for just 3 seconds. "We make it a point to get Dallas cheerleaders on, but otherwise, it's not really important," says Fred Gaudelli, NBC's Sunday Night Football producer. "If we're doing the Jets, I couldn't care less." (Sorry, New York Jets "Flight Crew.")

I'm sorry, but the next time somebody tells me baseball and soccer are boring, I'm going to have a little ammunition.

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Professional Rock Paper Scissors

 

There is, believe it or not, a Rock, Paper Scissors League. There are even world championships. Your current world champion: American Tim Conrad, who took home a $7,000 cash prize. For playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Perhaps the most high-stakes game of Rock, Paper Scissors ever played though was between auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's. Via Wikipedia:

When Takashi Hashiyama, CEO of a Japanese television equipment manufacturer, decided to auction off the collection of impressionist paintings owned by his corporation, including works by Cézanne, Picasso, and van Gogh, he contacted two leading U.S. auction houses, Christie's International and Sotheby's Holdings, seeking their proposals on how they would bring the collection to the market as well as how they would maximize the profits from the sale. Both firms made elaborate proposals, but neither was persuasive enough to get Hashiyama’s business. Unwilling to split up the collection into separate auctions, Hashiyama asked the firms to decide between themselves who would hold the auction, which included Cézanne's "Large Trees Under the Jas de Bouffan", worth $12–16 million.

The houses were unable to reach a decision. Hashiyama told the two firms to play rock-paper-scissors, to decide who would get the rights to the auction, explaining that "it probably looks strange to others, but I believe this is the best way to decide between two things which are equally good."

The auction houses had a weekend to come up with a choice of move. Christie's went to the 11-year-old twin daughters of an employee, who suggested "scissors" because "everybody expects you to choose 'rock'." Sotheby's said that they treated it as a game of chance and had no particular strategy for the game, but went with "paper".


Christie's won the match, with millions of dollars of commission for the auction house.

And for those of you for whom three options is not enough, there is always Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, immortalized on a t-shirt available from ThinkGeek:

Live long and rock scissors.

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Jack Kerouac and Fantasy Baseball

I've had baseball--particularly fantasy baseball--on the brain lately as I've been hard at work on the third draft of my new middle grade novel, Fantasy Baseball, due out in spring of 2011. Writing about fantasy baseball made me remember a story from earlier this year about beat writer Jack Kerouac and his secret preoccupation with fantasy baseball.

For the uninitiated, fantasy baseball is an umbrella term that covers most stat-based, pen and paper (now computer spreadsheet) baseball simulations. Players either use real baseball players and their actual statistics, "drafting" teams from Major League rosters and comparing stats, dropping, adding, and trading players all season long, or they use statistics from previous seasons to provide a mathematical basis for ability, and play out an entirely new season on paper using dice and modifiers. Sound geeky? It is. And for geeky sports enthusiasts like me, they are incredibly addictive. In fact, the real irony for me is that to make more time for writing books like Fantasy Baseball, I had to drop my fantasy baseball addiction cold turkey.

 

But apparently I'm not the only writer to have had an addiction to fantasy baseball. Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats, a new book by New York Public Library Jack Kerouac Archive curator Isaac Gewirtz, reveals Kerouac's obsessive hobby, which he pursued privately from childhood until two years before his death. From an article about the book in The New York Times:

Among other things, Mr. Gewirtz has learned that Kerouac played an early version of the baseball game in his backyard in Lowell, Mass., hitting a marble with a nail, or possibly a toothpick, and noting where it landed. By 1946, when Kerouac was 24, he had devised a set of cards with precise verbal descriptions of various outcomes (“slow roller to ss,” for example), depending on the skill levels of the pitcher and batter. The game could be played using cards alone, but Mr. Gewirtz thinks that more often Kerouac determined the result of a pitch by tossing some sort of projectile at a diagramed chart on the wall. In 1956 he switched to a new set of cards, which used hieroglyphic symbols instead of descriptions. Carefully preserved inside plastic folders at the library, they now look as mysterious as runes.

Kerouac's fantasy baseball league was of the made up variety, with teams like the Boston Fords, New York Chevvies, and Cincinnati Blacks. For each team, Kerouac invented managers and twenty-five man rosters, and he chronicled his players' exploits in newsletters and broadsides meant for his eyes only. He even invented a fictional sports writer, "Jack Lewis," an Anglicization of Kerouac’s French first name, Jean-Louis.

 

In his introduction, Gerwitz suggests that Kerouac perhaps invented the elaborate fantasy league to "escape the pain and confusion he suffered from the death of his older brother, Gerard, when Gerard was 9 and Kerouac just 4." Whatever the case, it was an exercise that let Kerouac practice his writing chops at an early age.

According to the article, the book is only available from the New York Public Library gift shop. Next time I'm in New York it'll be at the top of my "get" list!

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Amazing Baseball Bat Tricks

Meet Josh Womack, outfielder for the Long Beach Armada minor league baseball team. Josh has some pretty amazing bat-handling skills! Check out the video above, then watch the one below for even better bat tricks.

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Looks like it's going to be a hot one

Either our weather widget is on the fritz, or we're due for some unseasonably warm temperatures today.

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This is how we roll

We had our first Mouse Guard role-playing game on Tuesday, and by all accounts it was a success. We still have a few minor bumps to hammer out--it's a new rule system for me, and Wendi and Jo have never role-played before so it's all new to them--but we were excited enough when we finished to talk about creating our own characters next week. (We used stock characters the game provides this first time to get our feet wet.)

The folks who created the game have an active online support forum, and I'm off to post a couple of questions we need answered. Until next week, brave mice!

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Japanese baseball managers, shame, and "kyoyu"

Wayne Graczyk, sportswriter for the English-language Japan Times, explains Yokohama BayStars manager Tatsuhiko Oya's decision to take a "kyuyo," beginning yesterday.

[W]hat is a kyuyo?

Well documented in Robert Whiting's 1977 book, "The Chrysanthemum and the Bat," a kyuyo is truly a Japanese concept, whereby a manager takes a rest with the theory being the team members are ashamed they played so poorly, their manager had to step aside.

The interim manager jumps in to revive the team and, if all goes according to plan, the players suck it up, perform much better, and the original manager returns from his "rest" period to lead the team and continue its winning ways — even as far as winning a championship — and everyone supposedly lives happily ever after.

It's an odd concept. In America, a Major League manager would just quit--or be fired. The idea of taking a break from the team until they can turn things around by themselves is an odd one. And what about the poor fellow hired as interim manager who turns the team around, and then has to give up his job when the old manager decides he's ready to return?

It does not always work out that way, of course, and often the manager never returns from his "rest." It is likely Oya is done as the Yokohama skipper and, if Tashiro does a halfway decent job over the remainder of the season, he may be retained for 2010. If not, the BayStars will just get somebody else.

Well, there's some justice in that, at least.

Read the full article here.

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