Every superstar has an origin story nobody was watching. Before Shohei Ohtani was a household name, before Munetaka Murakami was launching home runs in Jingu Stadium, both of them were grinding through games in near-empty stadiums, scored by hand, broadcast to almost nobody. That’s the world underneath Nippon Professional Baseball — Japan’s farm system — […]

Baseball wears the stars and stripes better than any other sport. It’s the American pastime — hot dogs, seventh-inning stretches, a slow Sunday afternoon at the ballpark. But somewhere along the way, baseball packed its bags. It crossed oceans. It picked up new accents. Japan built a religion around it. The Dominican Republic turned it […]