Inside the Mind of a … Genius?

Manuel was a mustang of a young man, untamed, easily inflamed. He tended to fight, on and off the field. But he did hit well. So well that he made the Twins’ big-league team in 1969. That first year in the big time, though, an awkward slide into second base shattered his left ankle.  

Manuel’s hobbled major-league career never quite stood up again. Finally, in 1976, he joined a new team, a team that wanted him around: the Yakult Swallows.

In Japan.

His airplane touched down first in Tokyo, where he stepped out to find a sea of Japanese fans and photographers. His handlers swept him into a hall where more people awaited the promised American, and he was  presented with his new uniform.

Manuel was petrified. For all his swagger and spit — he still loved to fight, ­wherever — he felt lost in Japan. In Japan, the final aim in Taoist philosophy is emptiness, the state of “no mind,” where thoughts only distract. This may explain baseball’s popularity there; it’s a game of stillness and quiet, until the singular moment when a batter swings at a ball. Deliberation and doubt only get in the way. There is no room for self-regard.

Manuel’s first day on the island changed the way he saw the game, forever:

The night he arrived, he lay down about 3 a.m., on a bed made from cinder blocks and plywood. At 5:30, someone shook him: Wake. Time to walk.

Manuel staggered up and joined the other Swallows, who pulled on matching jumpsuits and walked for an hour, then did formation exercises, then enjoyed a breakfast of noodles, rice, and a warm, uncooked egg in its shell.

Then the team rode in a bus up a mountainside. Near the top, they disembarked and stood facing 169 steps. The Japanese players sprinted toward the top. Manuel huffed his way up 39 steps before he had to walk. At the top of the mountain, the team assembled for formation jogging. They practiced hitting, and Manuel hit the ball twice as far as the Japanese, pounding it clear off the mountaintop and into a forest. But then they formed up for more synchronized running, and he suffered.

At the end of the day, Manuel collapsed on his block-and-board bed, still wearing his clothes, more sore than he’d been in his life. He began to hatch a plan to escape from Japan, but realized he didn’t even know where he was. And he couldn’t move.

His translator — a Japanese man with the unexpected name of Luigi — entered his room. “You need to come take a bath,” Luigi said.

Manuel resisted, but Luigi explained: “This is for you. This is very special.”

Luigi and another player helped Manuel down some stairs, where he found a vast rippling bath with hot water pouring over a wall of rocks into a pool. The water steamed. Manuel felt too weak to protest, so he eased in, and the water seemed to boil the flesh off his bones. “Acchhhhhhh,” he cried, crawling into a corner of the bath to wait in solitude for a nude and water-logged death. After a while, exhaustion won its battle with pain, so Manuel laid his head back and closed his eyes. In his half-sleep, he heard distinctly feminine giggling. He lifted his head to see 40 or 50 naked Japanese women padding toward him.

Was this the “special” bath?

The women started playing with his reddish hair and muscular arms, laughing. Manuel lay there in a horror of paralysis, unable to lift even a hand. He thought, You’ve got to be kidding me.

And so life went in Japan: unendurable punishment followed by baffling exaltation. He gave in to it, partly because he had nowhere else to play baseball, partly because these Japanese clearly knew what they were doing. But it was more than that: Charlie was forced to stay focused, to move from moment to moment, because any intrusive thought — any self-regard — would have left him unbalanced. The Japanese taught Manuel a quiet sort of discipline, and he taught them to swing the bat like madmen. They taught him Japanese language — Manuel still speaks a little ­Japanese — and culture; he took his team to the Japanese World Series three times in six years, and smashed 189 home runs.

The Japanese surprised Manuel with what he calls, in his paradoxical way, “extraordinary common courtesy,” outside and inside their baseball stadiums. A manager there would never publicly berate a player, for instance. “Not only did I learn a lot about myself,” Manuel told me in spring training, “but I learned a lot about other people.” And this, a simple yet surprisingly elusive skill: “I became a better listener.”