In baseball, globalism is king. If it hasn’t ruined the game, it’s altered it almost beyond recognition for this long-time fan.

The American Major League season is set to begin tomorrow in Japan at the Tokyo Dome when the Boston Red Sox will play the Oakland A’s.

Who could ever have imagined such a thing?

With a Tuesday 0300 PDT start, the A’s—my sort of hometown favorite—will play the World Champion Red Sox who are verging on surpassing the New York Yankees as the sport’s most obnoxious team. More on that in a few paragraphs.

Readily acknowledging that I am completely out of step with today’s baseball scene, I nevertheless recall with fondness that opening day, when I was a young man starting his professional career in New York, meant Yankee Stadium sitting in the spring sunshine, eating hot dogs and peanuts.

Had you told me forty years ago that baseball would throw its first pitch of 2008 in an indoor stadium in a foreign country with takoyaki (battered octopus nuggets) as the featured snack, I would have recommended you take a long rest.

The opening day mania centers around one of baseball’s most overrated and overpaid players—Japanese hero Daisuke Matsuzaka, the $100 million pitcher who failed to get past the fifth inning in four of his five post-season starts last fall. And in his fifth appearance, Matsuzaka could only went 5 1/3.

Enthusiasm for the local hero is understandable but any rational fan would have to admit that Matsuzaka’s rookie season in the U.S. fell far short of expectations.

Despite his obvious shortcomings, the local media refers to Matsuzaka as a “national treasure” and some reporters predict that the “gyro-ball expert” may no-hit the rebuilding, starless A’s. But baseball is a funny game. The A’s starting pitcher, Tennessee-born Joe Blanton, had a better 2007 than Matsuzaka, with his 14-10, 3.95 ERA (Matsuzaka, 15-12, 4.40) And the A’s, predictions of doom aside, won twice as many games as the Sox during spring training.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the A’s pull off a surprise victory? The Red Sox deserve to be embarrassed.

Even though the Red Sox has fifteen players who earn more than $2 million annually and has the second highest payroll in baseball, the team tried to cut the players, coaches and trainers out of a $40,000 bonus–chump change to them–they insisted upon for themselves as inducement to go to Japan.

This chintzy behavior from the same Red Sox that gave the overweight and over-the-hill Curt Schilling a $2 million “weight incentive” on top of his $8 million contract if he can keep his bloated bodyfrom ballooning out of all proportion.I haven’t figured out how fans can actually root for these guys–and the hundreds of major league players like them.

Most of you won’t be watching or listening to tomorrow’s game. But coincidentally I’ll be making a long drive to and from the airport early tomorrow morning so I’ll be following the action live. And my fingers will be crossed that the youthful and rebuilding A’s bomb Dice-K.

That might bring the Red Sox down to earth, at least for a few days.

The “racist rant” (Ann Althouse’s term) that I discussed earlier has come in for some more discussion.[It's at Instapunk.com-- The Old Guy Perspective, Thursday, March 20, 2008]Kathy Shaidle discusses it here, with the suggestion that the author should have used the term “low-lifes” to refer to “young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees — and jeans belted just above their knees,” rather than the term he did use.

Nicholas Stix, who always has something interesting to say, talks about it here, [Racial Dialogue in America: The “Racist Rant” That Almost Everyone is Condemning, but Will Not Link to] He quotes a commenter who says

tell me, have you ever, you know, talked with any african-americans? i don’t mean someone you’ve seen on tv… a real, honest to goodness black person… a real conversation? i know it sounds scary, but you might learn something (another scary thought, indeed) i feel sorry for you.

I get mail from guys like that from time to time–they keep saying “I feel sorry for you” and “I pity you.” Guess what–they don’t actually feel sorry for me. They feel morally superior to me, (as Stix points out)but they sense somehow that sending mail that says “I feel morally superior to you” will make them look stupid.

Instapundit, who you may recall was condemned for linking to post next to it, has this thought, in a post he updated about fifteen times:

I hadn’t actually read the post in question until Greenwald started yammering about it — I thought I was just linking a nice Easter item — but Collins is right that it’s kind of “ugly.” However, I suspect that it accurately reflects how a lot of Pennsylvania Democratic primary voters are responding to the Obama/Wright scandal, which is probably what’s really got Greenwald upset.

And finally, the author of the post writes a response to some of the comments: OldPunk Responds to Individual Commenters (& Other Saints) .

Whenever the winter drags on, political reporters start getting interested in Barack Obama’s warm-weather upbringing, so Newsweek now has a long article focusing on his youth: “When Barry Became Barack.”

Keith Kakugaa was a close friend of Obama’s at the Punahou School. (He appears in “Dreams” as a revised character named “Ray” who may be a composite of more than one Obama friend.)

In the book, “Ray” is one of Obama’s only black friends at Puhahou School and he’s very sensitive to anti-black discrimination. But the real Kakugawa, who appears to be the main (and perhaps only) model for Ray is, as you might guess from his name, half Japanese as well as half black.

He says that Obama, being a dark-skinned kid growing up in a white household, sensed that something was amiss. “He felt that he was not getting a part of who he was, the history,” says Kakugawa, who is also of mixed race. He recalls Obama’s reading black authors —James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes—looking for clues. Keith didn’t know at first that Obama’s given name was Barack. “We were in the library and there was a Malcolm X book,” Kakugawa tells NEWSWEEK. “He grabbed it and looked at it and he’s checking it out, and I said, ‘Hold on, man. What you gonna do? Change your name to something Muslim?’ He said, ‘Well, my name is Barack Obama.’ And I said, ‘No it isn’t.’ And we got in an argument about that in the library and they had to tell us, ‘Shhh’”.

Back in Hawaii in the 1970s, it could seem that everyone was some kind of a minority. The fact that Obama was half-black and half-white didn’t matter much to anyone but Obama, Kakugawa says: “He made everything out like it was all racial.” On one occasion, Obama thought he’d gotten a bad break on the school basketball team because he was black. But Kakugawa recalls his father’s telling the teenager, “No, Barry, it’s not because you’re black. It’s because you missed two shots in a row.” (Here, Kakugawa’s memory is different from Obama’s. The Ray character in the book is the one obsessed with being discriminated against.)

I wouldn’t trust Kakugawa’s word because he’s an ex-con, but what he says is much more in line with what his non-jailbird classmates say than what Obama writes in his autobiography, so the evidence suggests that we should trust the low-life’s word over the Presidential candidate’s in this case.

There’s a reason Obama leaves Ray’s mixed heritage out of the book. In general, Hawaii’s high degree of racial mixing is an unwelcome complicating factor in the story Obama is conjuring up about himself as a black kid in a white world. It’s an easy story for most Americans to understand, but it doesn’t make much sense to Obama’s Hawaiian friends. Dreams from My Father tries to ignore just how common non-white and mixed race kids were in his privileged social circle at Punahou. I looked at one of Obama’s class pictures, and of the 21 children at this expensive private school, at least 7 and perhaps 10 weren’t wholly white.

Darin Maurer, another buddy of Obama’s in Hawaii, never noticed any internal struggle. The two met in seventh grade, drawn together by a shared interest in basketball. Both Darin and his mother recall Obama as very integrated. Suzanne Maurer recalls that Barry and her white son, who had very curly hair, both sported Afro-style haircuts at one point. Mostly, both Maurers remember how smart Obama was. “He could whip out a paper that was due the next day the night before, while all the other kids were spending weeks writing,” recalls Suzanne. Darin remembers some racial tensions in Hawaii at that time—expressed by Native Islanders against both whites and blacks. There were derogatory native words for both races. “I wouldn’t be very surprised about any sort of derogatory stuff about a black person,” says Darin, a pastor who now lives in Texas. “I knew that’s what you had to accept … It wasn’t like it was debilitating. It was just a challenge.”

Interestingly, Barack Obama Sr. mentioned anti-white discrimination in Hawaii in a newspaper interview when he was a college student there, but the topic doesn’t interest Obama Jr. Just as the anti-black beatings he suffered at the hands of Indonesian boys don’t show up in his memoir. They just don’t fit in his black and white mental universe.

The absence of his father taught Obama the importance of stories. These tales helped him make sense of who he was. (At least two acquaintances in his postgraduation years thought he was on a track to become a writer.) Stories made the murkier aspects of life coherent, or at least gave him confidence—that he could author his own life story, and thus become a master of the tale and not a victim.

As I’ve frequently noted, Obama is much more interesting than the typical politician, in sizable part because he’s a creative artist, perhaps best described as an “identity artist” reminiscent of David Bowie in his ability to mold and change his own persona. For example, here’s a wonderful video of Obama giving a 2007 speech to a conference of black clergy, where he has a much different accent and body language: languid, cocky, florid, and Southern. Here, Obama sounds and looks like the preacher who has the biggest church and the biggest Cadillac in Tupelo, Mississippi. (He does a shout-out to Rev. Wright between 1:00 and 2:00 of the 36:00 video).

I like this alternate persona of Obama’s quite a bit. I hope he does his 220 pound Baptist minister who loves his BBQ ribs number for visitors to the White House just to freak them out.

(I wonder what other impressions Obama does? Maybe that’s the secret part of Obama’s diplomatic strategy of personally meeting with rogue foreign leaders. He’ll invite Ahmadinejad to a summit conference, then do Borat the whole time they’re negotiating. Or invite the Castro Brothers and do Ricky Ricardo: “Fidel, you got some ’splainin’ to do!”)

Still, it’s a little disconcerting to see a potential President of the United States suddenly morphing into a different person. It’s too reminiscent of the great 1996 “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Kodos” Simpsons episode where at the Presidential debate, Clinton and Dole rip off their masks to reveal they are the space aliens Kodos and Kang:

Kodos: It’s true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It’s a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.

I remember years ago watching an old TV show (this one, I think) in which a story about a series of fixed boxing matches ended with the hero getting tickets to a professional wrestling match, because at a professional wrestling match, you never have to worry about whether it’s fixed or not. Well, I can predict the outcome of this one:

Pin pals grapple for a cause - Los Angeles Times
Wrestler Super Mojado takes on INS Man in a fundraiser for recently arrested [Illegal] immigrants.
By Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 23, 2008
More than 300 Latino immigrants gathered in a sweltering Panorama City lot on Saturday to witness the birth of an unassuming hero — a compact, dark-skinned man wearing a T-shirt, jeans, running shoes and a garish silver-and-blue mask.

They call him Super Mojado, or Super Wetback.

He was the star of a main wrestling event where bad guys in stretch pants worn under brightly colored underwear were supposed to get their lumps to raise funds for 130 illegal immigrants waiting to be deported. The immigrants were arrested during a recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at the Van Nuys headquarters of Micro Solutions Enterprises, a manufacturer of computer imaging supplies.

Tickets went for $10 a person, or whatever a customer could afford.

Super Mojado strode into the ring and climbed up on the ropes to declare his mission — “I’ve come to fight against discrimination and for [illegal] immigrants of all ethnic backgrounds!” Moments later he was confronted by a grimacing white foe whose affiliation was announced in the huge letters sewn onto the legs of his orange-and-black stretch pants: INS, the former acronym of the U.S. Immigration Service.

It was classic lucha libre, or Mexican “free fight,” which is a popular form of teatro do los pobres, or poor man’s theater, in which the good guys get beaten senseless and trampled while on their backs and gasping for breath. Then, as the referee is about to slap a open palm down on the mat for a third time, they rally and take care of business.[More]

Note the “grimacing white foe” and see here for a caricature of white and black Americans arresting a Hispanic illegal. And I see the “good guy” in this is using the common Mexican term mojado, which we mere English speakers aren’t allowed to use, no matter how wet the Rio Grande gets.

But…we know how the wrestling match will turn out, and why. What I’d like to know is this–how are the Federal Government’s enforcement efforts going to turn out? Are they fixed?