But this great and entertaining tradition is colliding with another: the tiresome habit of ignoring pitchers' overwork in Japan.
Pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, the hardest-worked pitcher in baseball, is forced to miss the summer showdown with a bum elbow. Fans anxious to see the right-hander gunning for the best hitters the Central League can muster will have to wait until next year at the earliest.
The series, which starts tomorrow at Tokyo Dome and concludes Saturday at Botchan Stadium in Matsuyama, will be without the 21-year-old because his rehabilitation is not complete.
The fact that he has been excused is in itself a positive note that conflicts with the tradition o the star rising from his sick bed to lead his team to victory. Lions manager Haruki Ihara is to be congratulated for not pressuring his young star to pitch when he's not ready.
In the second of three All-Star games last year, Osamu Higashio, then Matsuzaka's manager with the Lions, had the 20-year-old face 14 batters in one-plus innings, throwing 50 pitches when he was utterly ineffective. One has to wonder what the logic behind that was.
Two years before that, Kazuhiro Sasaki, currently with the Seattle Mariners, was coerced into putting off elbow surgery so he could pitch in the summer series.
"I don't know who decides these things," said Sasaki later that summer. "I didn't want to go, but it wasn't up to me."
And while the damage to Sasaki's elbow that robbed him of the movement on his best fastball was probably already done, why risk it?
It's said that Japanese managers baby their pitchers, since most starters work on five or six days rest. But the overseers make up for it by letting their best starters routinely throw 150 pitches.
"Matsuzaka used to throw 150 pitches all the time. That's Higashio," said New York Mets scout Isao Ojimi on Monday at Tokyo Dome. "(Former Yomiuri Giants ace) Saito Masaki, (former Chunichi Dragons star Shinji) Imanaka, they (frequently) had to throw 150 pitches.
"(Chunichi's Shigeki) Noguchi threw 200 pitches (in 1998). I thought he would be gone in a year. The managers are killing them."
The problem is the practice of "nagekomi," or throwing all out. This is the dogma that says pitchers can only realize their peak form through virtually endless repetition.
It begins in practice and extends into games, where tradition says a starting pitcher should be willing to put his arm on the line for an important game.
This dogma cannot be publicly challenged without implying that its advocates--many of yakyu's greatest legends both living and dead--were wrong. For a manager or media analyst to attack the tradition would be to risk attack from former players who have been spouting the dogma for years.
And while the practice goes unchallenged, no manager is taken to task for overworking his pitchers. If you don't win, that's a problem, but if you destroy the arm of a star pitcher now and then, no one seems to notice.
And high school players, if they want to have a pro career, don't complain to their coaches.
"Coaches are very old fashioned," said Ojimi. "The problem is for the private (high) schools, they have to win or else they'll lose their jobs. So they force the players to work and force the pitchers to throw so much."
Take Tsuyoshi Wada. The Waseda University pitcher is now being sought after by pro teams on both sides of the Pacific.
"You know how much he pitches?" asked Ojimi. "I'm worried about him.
He was in the states (with the Japanese collegiate all-star team),
and the manager Mr. (Toshio) Uchida from Asia University let him throw
180 pitches in one game."
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .