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HANAMAKI, Japan - Synchronized cheers reverberated through the bowels of the stadium, the sounds of a tournament in progress. The noise reached all the way to an indoor batting cage down the left-field line, where the hero of an earlier ballgame was dutifully ushered to a makeshift news conference.
Though at 6-feet-2 he was an entire head taller than anyone else in the room, Rouki Sasaki was nonetheless asked by a tournament official to stand on a wooden box that was placed on the dirt floor. He obliged, removed his cap and bowed.
The elevated platform was necessary to make the lanky right-hander visible to reporters on the outer rings of the semicircle that formed for his post-game address. More than 100 journalists had been dispatched to the backwoods of northern Japan's mainland to chronicle the first
