Ron Kantowski on baseball games, and their heroes, that were played behind barbed wire

Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2007 | 7:22 a.m.

For all its warts, baseball is still an amazing game. It can keep you on the edge of your seat for nine innings or knock you out of it in an instant - especially if you're sitting in the boxes behind the Yankee dugout and A-Rod turns on a Tim Wakefield knuckleball that doesn't knuckle.

But during World War II, baseball, this American pastime that has been immortalized and glamorized and rhapsodized and trivialized, at least by Chicago Cubs fans during October, served a much greater purpose for Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned by their own government.

It gave them a reason to get up in the morning - something to look forward to on warm days when the sun was shining and a gentle breeze was blowing out toward left field on a makeshift diamond surrounded by barbed wire.

"We looked forward to it every day," said George Tanabe, a catcher for one of the teams that formed at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho.

Tanabe was 15 years old when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and life, as he knew it, changed forever. He was among the 9,397 Japanese-Americans who were sent to Minidoka by President Franklin Roosevelt, who decreed the Japanese-Americans living in peace and relative harmony on the West Coast were a threat to the only homeland most had ever known.

A few dozen of the dwindling number of Minidoka detainees held a reunion in Las Vegas last week where they were treated to a screening of the movie "American Pastime," celebrating the role of baseball in the 10 West Coast relocation camps.

I asked Victor Ikeda, Tanabe's brother-in-law (they married sisters after the war) and an outfielder on one of the Minidoka teams, whether he felt further discriminated against because Americans of German and Italian ancestry were not detained.

"The Italians and Germans didn't bomb Pearl Harbor," he said. "We looked like the enemy. There was hysteria. Times were different then."

In some ways, they aren't that different now. Race relations, or lack of them, continue to pull Americans of different backgrounds apart, while sports can push us back together. For nine innings or four quarters, the games we play become a giant bottle of Coca-Cola and we, as a nation, become the Hillside Singers.

Then the game ends and we go back to mistrusting the same guy we slapped high fives with because while we're growing apple trees and honeybees, his snow-white turtle doves are making a mess on the back porch.

The theme of "American Pastime," which uses the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah as its backdrop, is that if Americans and Japanese-Americans aren't all that different when it comes to baseball, why can't we all just get along after the final out is in the books?

Ikeda was 14 when his family was sent to Idaho in August 1942. They were released in June 1944. The only time a prisoner was allowed beyond the barbed wire was to harvest beets and potatoes or to shag fly balls, if he was good enough to make the traveling team that would provide opposition for high school and semipro teams in the area.

Ikeda, 80, said that outside of a little basketball, "there was nothing else as far as sports were concerned.

"Baseball, that's the thing that kept a lot of young people from getting into trouble."

In 1964, about 20 years after the war and 17 years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, Masanori Murakami become the first Japanese baseball player to pitch in the major leagues, for the San Francisco Giants, preceding Hideo Nomo by 30 years. Today, Japanese players such as Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners and Diasuke Matsuzaka of the Boston Red Sox are major league superstars.

But when I asked Ikeda who his favorite players were, he said Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. Those were the guys his father cheered for along with those who came up with the old Seattle Indians of the Pacific Coast League.

I suppose it wouldn't be any different from expecting me to be a Carl Yastrzemski fan just because our surnames sound a little alike.

"I didn't know anything about Japan," Ikeda said. "I was born in Seattle."

Ikeda was 16 when the internment camps were boarded up after the victory in the European theater and he and his family were allowed to return to Seattle.

A year later, with the war still going on in the Pacific, he joined the Army and spent the next two years serving his country.