From Russia With Glove

Looking ahead to his eighth season as the head baseball coach at Jamestown Community College, Kerry Kellogg will be using some new techniques he learned while coaching at a tournament last month. But it wasn’t just any tournament.Kellogg, a former pitcher for Southwestern Central School, the University of Florida and the Jamestown Expos of the New York-Penn League, has experienced baseball in Europe when he played in Germany and Greece while in the Air Force. But last month he had a new out-of-the-United States baseball experience when he was a member of the coaching staff for an all-star team representing the State University of New York for a tournament in Russia.

Twenty-one players from 11 SUNY campuses took part in the eighth annual Matsumae Memorial International Baseball Tournament, hosted by Moscow State University from June 26-29. The head coach for the SUNY squad was Cortland State’s Joe Brown and Kellogg was a first base coach.

The games were played at Matsumae Baseball Stadium, a gift from the late Dr. Shigeyoshi Matsumae, a Japanese industrialist, politician and higher education leader who worked for years for a more peaceful relationship between Japan and Russia, its one-time enemy.

Everything about the event was like a tournament anywhere else, except perhaps the playing field.

“It was so hard and so fast,” Kellogg said about the surface that was indoor-outdoor carpeting laid over concrete.

In addition to the SUNY and host Moscow State teams, the tournament had one other Russian team, one from Ukraine, one from Korea and three from Japan.

“The Japanese and Koreans were better than I thought they would be” was Kellogg’s assessment.

He compared the three Japanese teams to NCAA Division I programs.

“The Russians were not as good as they could have been,” he said, and rated them at about the NJCAA Division III level, which is JCC’s classification.

However, it was the Japanese teams that really made an impression on Kellogg.

“All five Japanese pitchers we saw could play minor league baseball,” he said. They were throwing it by our batters at 88 to 92 miles-per-hour.”

He also noted that unlike in the U. S. where players will copy the style of other players, all Japanese players copy the style adopted in their country. As an example, Kellogg said, “Ichiro (Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners) is a product of their philosophy. It is a philosophy of how they pitch and how they hit. You could see it in all their players.”

Also, unlike in the United States where umpires are often verbally and even physically abused, Japanese players bow to the umpires. Kellogg noted, “They would bow to everybody. They were so respectable to baseball.”

The Japanese even impressed him before the games.

“They way they took pregame was a sight to see,” he said. “Everything was orchestrated to a tee. I try to be rhythmic in how I do things, but it would be hard to mimic their style.”

He also noted, “They were up at 7:30 a. m. on game days doing calisthenics.”

The hosts were no where near the level of the Japanese.

“All three Russian teams including the one from Ukraine were similar,” Kellogg said. “They didn’t have the pitching yet, but they are getting there. They had athletes.”

And they also had something else after the SUNY team left.

“We gave them all of our equipment we brought,” Kellogg said.

The tournament officiating also impressed Kellogg.

“The umpires were very good and they were Russian,” he said. “I was surprised to see their knowledge and how they hustled. They kept the game moving. There was never more than 90 seconds between innings.”

Tokay University from Japan won the tournament for the second straight year. The SUNY squad played the eventual winners in their second game and led 3-2 late in the game, but errors resulted in a 6-3 loss.

The SUNY team’s opening game was a 4-2 win over Budd University from Japan. The third game was against Haiang University from Korea, which led 6-3 in the bottom of the ninth when the SUNY team scores four runs for a 7-6 win and third place.

Between games there were two days off and the SUNY contingent spent its time visiting downtown Moscow and Red Square. Included was a performance by the world-famous Moscow Circus.

Also in Moscow the players found a couple of things to remind them of home – an up-scale McDonald’s and Sbarro Pizza franchise.

It was an experience none of the players or coaches will ever forget, especially Kellogg. He mentioned that he’s often heard baseball veterans say, “Baseball owes nothing to me.”

After his trip to Moscow he said, “I can see why they say that.”