Since American umpires take less guff than their Japanese counterparts, Di Muro tossed Taiho out of the game. That touched off a melee. The crowd jeered at the American, and coaches and players charged him. Taiho repeatedly shoved Di Muro in the chest. Of all the U.S.-Japan disputes over the years, concerning everything from auto shipments to whaling, this latest dustup may be the hardest to comprehend.
Baseball is, after all, an American game.
The answer may lie in Japan's typically ambivalent attitude toward opening up to the rest of the world. While Japan limits the number of foreign baseball players it imports, the country still wants to reach U.S. standards, so that a Japanese team could someday meet the American champs in a real World Series. That goal finally seems plausible, now that Japan's Hideo Nomo has become an All-Star in the U.S., and New York Yankee farmhand Hideki Irabu is mowing down American batters with 99 m.p.h. fast balls. But the convergence of baseball and besuboru apparently hasn't gone far enough to let an American umpire in Japan. Those who thought that possible underestimated how difficult it would be to penetrate the Japanese game, which is run by a cabal of players and managers as protectively as the Finance and Trade ministries are captained for the good of the economy.