Friends Right Off the Bat

Home run? High five. Strike out? Bow from the waist. Game over? Bow again, this time to show respect for the other team, win or lose.

Those are among the lessons the boys from Cypress have taught and learned this week in Williamsport, Pa., where baseball is the only language they share with teams from four other countries.

Despite cultural differences, the Cypress Federal all-stars have forged a friendship with the Far East champion team from Japan, a touching display of international fellowship rarely seen at the Little League World Series.

Nick Cioffi, one of two Little League hosts supervising the Cypress team during the series, said the boys’ friendship with the Japanese players is unusual and refreshing.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Cioffi, a Williamsport native who has taken care of visiting teams for the last 31 years. “There’s usually a little interaction in the beginning, but then the teams tend to keep to themselves. Nothing like this. They’ve become quite the little buddies.”

The teams first connected when they arrived last week, a meeting that consisted mostly of hand signals and broken sentences until--some three hours later--they were able to communicate well enough to trade team pins.

Their verbal skills have hardly improved since then, but that hasn’t stopped the group from mingling during meals, palling around in the stadium and cheering for each other from the stands. They hold chicken fights in the swimming pool and nightly Ping-Pong tournaments in their dormitory recreation room.

From their dorm Tuesday, the Cypress team watched Japan’s game against Canada on television and groaned when their new friends lost, 10-5, after being ahead up to the last inning.

“We were cheering for them,” second baseman Cory Campbell said.

“They are so cool,” said shortstop Zach Wingo. “They say ‘Good morning’ to us every day and bow. They’re just so polite and confident and cool.”

So eager was Nathan Lara, a Cypress center fielder, to hang out with players from Japan that he cut short his first telephone conversation with his mother immediately after arriving in Williamsport last week.

“He says, ‘Hi, Mom, I’m learning how to speak Japanese, so I’ve got to go,’ and then off he went,” Nathan’s father, Rudy Lara, recalled. “It’s really neat stuff. It’s what this is all about, right?”

Besides learning a few words of Japanese and figuring out when and how to bow, the Cypress boys have done some teaching. They have showed their Asian friends the fine points of the high-five technique and what time “Baywatch” comes on TV.

Through an interpreter, 12-year-old Tetsuya Furukawa said he learned how to say the word “cool.”

“They taught me that ‘bad’ isn’t always ‘bad,’ ” he said. “It can mean ‘good’ too.”

Sayaka Tsushima, the team’s center fielder, said of the Cypress crew, “We like them because they laugh a lot. They all have fun.”

Though he wouldn’t allow his players to leave the dorm Tuesday night, Japan manager Atsushi Okawa said he did let them watch on TV as the Cypress team beat the Central Regional champions from Michigan, a win essential for the Orange County boys to stay in the tournament.

The support the boys have given one another is especially sweet considering the pressure they are all under, Okawa said through an interpreter.

“We can all learn from these children,” he said. “Everybody connects through baseball, but they are reaching further than that. They are connecting as young men.”