PHOENIX – The Oakland Athletics will travel nearly 11,000 miles in the next week to play two regular-season games in Tokyo.
Their internal clocks will go haywire thanks to the 16-hour time difference, and they are sacrificing eight days of spring training preparation.
So what was the A’s collective reaction when Major League Baseball asked them to play the Seattle Mariners in Japan?
Sign us up!
“I don’t see anything negative,” general manager Billy Beane said. “It’s just a great lifetime experience.”
The A’s fly to Tokyo on Thursday and open the regular season with a two-game series against the Seattle Mariners that starts Wednesday. First pitch is at 7:10 p.m. in Tokyo, and 3:10 a.m. in Oakland.
The A’s made the same journey in 2008, splitting two games with the Boston Red Sox at the Tokyo Dome.
But two trips in five seasons begs the question: Why do the A’s, whose roster is anonymous to many fans in the Bay Area, get chosen for the international stage not once but twice? MLB has held two other opening series in Japan, and the A’s are the only team that has gone twice. In both cases, the games played in Tokyo counted as A’s home games.
Paul Archey, MLB’s senior vice president of international business operations, pointed to several factors why the A’s are targeted.
“Since ’08, their popularity has been on the rise (in Japan),” he said. “They had Hideki Matsui last year, which increased their broadcasts dramatically. And, of course, the movie ‘Moneyball’ has given more exposure to the A’s.”
But Archey also acknowledged that the thought of a matchup pitting Matsui vs. the Mariners’ Ichiro Suzuki — Japan’s two most famous baseball exports to the United States — proved very enticing.
The A’s did not re-sign Matsui, who remains a free agent.
“We were hopeful perhaps he would be there another year,” Archey said. “But we also knew he was in the last year of his contract.”
Catcher Kurt Suzuki is the only A’s player from that 2008 trip who is going this time, speaking to how much roster turnover the A’s have had since then. First baseman Daric Barton and pitcher Dallas Braden also made the ’08 trip, but they’re staying back for injury reasons.
Suzuki, the A’s only player of Japanese descent, was struck by the passion of the fans in Tokyo.
“You’ve got guys beating drums, blowing horns,” Suzuki said. “Autograph people hanging over the wall with strings, balls attached to the strings. It’s something I think is pretty cool and should be experienced.”
Although the A’s are losing two home dates, MLB is paying them an equivalent amount of what they would likely draw for two weekday games against Seattle.
A’s officials would not reveal how much money that is, but it isn’t likely to be a big figure. The A’s averaged just 15,403 fans over their only weekday home series with Seattle last season.
While the A’s will technically be the “home” team in Tokyo, one longtime member of the Japanese baseball media predicted the A’s will feel like the visitors.
The Mariners feature not only Ichiro but two other Japanese players — pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma and shortstop Munenori Kawasaki — both of whom played in Japan as recently as last season.
“Because of Ichiro, Iwakuma and Kawasaki, most Japanese fans will cheer the Mariners,” said Gaku Tashiro of Sankei Sports. “If the A’s had Matsui, the atmosphere would be completely different.”
The A’s nearly crossed the Pacific to open the 2003 season, but MLB scrapped the plan because of the war in Iraq. That series also would have been against the Mariners, whose manager at the time happened to be current A’s skipper Bob Melvin.
Nine years later, Melvin is getting his trip to Japan. His daughter, Alexi, is joining him on the team charter. His wife, Kelly, is flying in from New York.
“I am looking forward to this trip,” Melvin said. “In ’03, I was supposed to go, and it would have been my first game as a big league manager.”
There’s also a humanitarian tie-in to the trip.
A group of A’s players will take a bullet train ride from Tokyo to Tohoku, conducting a baseball clinic in a region that was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Another group will travel via helicopter to Yokota Air Force Base to visit troops.
As for the baseball, it’s a bizarre itinerary.
The A’s play exhibitions against the Yomiuri Giants and Hanshin Tigers over the weekend. After playing two games against the Mariners, they return to the Bay Area and play four exhibitions — against Triple-A Sacramento on March 31 and the Giants from April 2-4.
In other words, the A’s play two games that count, then play four that don’t, before “reopening” their season April 6 against the Mariners.
“It’s kind of weird,” Braden said.
The pageantry of the Japan trip also takes some getting used to, as former Red Sox manager Terry Francona found out while managing against the A’s in 2008.
Francona said the treatment his team received in Tokyo was first class, but he found the nonbaseball events took his mind off the task at hand.
“Most of us are creatures of habit, probably me more than anybody,” Francona said. “Opening day, you want to talk to the team and instead of talking to the team, you’re at the American Embassy shaking hands. I got edgy.”
That spring, the Red Sox flew from spring camp in Florida to Tokyo, spent a week there and flew to Los Angeles for an exhibition series with the Dodgers.
Then they traveled Oakland to play a two-game set with the A’s before flying cross-country to play the Toronto Blue Jays, who swept them.
“We were dead,” Francona said. “You don’t see too many Fort Myers-to-Tokyo-to L.A.-to San Francisco-to-Toronto road trips.”
The Red Sox went 16-11 in April 2008, on their way to a 95-67 finish and trip to the ALCS. So playing in Japan hardly took the steam out of them.
Beane does not view the extensive travel as too much of a burden for the A’s.
“Listen,” he said. “The way they treat you and the way you travel, if you can’t (make the adjustment), there’s something wrong with you and you’re spoiled.”
