By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 10, 1997; Page A1

The Yakult Swallows pitcher spun on the rubber and faked a throw to first base. The umpire had rarely seen such an obvious balk, so he called it, enraging the pitcher and his manager and setting off the latest trade spat between the United States and Japan.

This time the troublesome import is a native New Yorker: Mike Di Muro, the first non-Japanese umpire ever to work in Japan's professional baseball leagues.

Japanese baseball officials say players and fans have lost faith in their home-grown umpires. So they recruited an up-and-coming American for this season to "stimulate a renaissance among Japanese umpires with his fair and strict and lively conduct."

Di Muro, 29, an umpire in American Class AAA baseball, one step below the major leagues, already is causing grumbles with his American brand of umpiring, which some here see as another foreign threat to Japanese culture and tradition.

After Di Muro's balk call, Swallows manager Katsuya Nomura stormed onto the field with an interpreter, screaming, "Why?" Why?" and insisting that his pitcher had done nothing wrong. While Japanese and American baseball have the same balk rule on paper, Japanese umpires enforce it less strictly. Still steaming after the game, Nomura told anyone who would listen: "This American umpire is going to completely mess up Japanese baseball."

The Japanese and American versions of baseball are as different as sushi and a McDonald's fish sandwich: the same basic ingredients, but adapted to suit two extremely different cultures. The American major leagues are filled with strong personalities and flashy individual performances. Japanese baseball is cautious and dominated by group behavior, with lots of sacrifice bunts, endless on-field conferences and plodding strategy in games that routinely last four hours.

For an umpire, there are more subtle differences. The Japanese strike zone is generally a ball's width higher, lower and wider than the American one. Japanese umpires tolerate verbal and occasionally physical abuse that would automatically get an American player ejected, suspended and fined. Umpires sometimes reverse controversial calls after conferring among themselves. Those conferences can last 30 minutes or more, and usually end with the chief umpire using the public address system to make an explanation and apology to the fans.

League spokesman Kazunori Oogaki said group decision-making by umpires fits the Japanese character: "Maybe we have a stronger tendency to pursue the truth; Japanese people don't like the idea of one umpire having the final say."

There is also harmony and teamwork in the stands. Fans in the bleachers cheer and bang their little plastic megaphones in unison when they are instructed to do so by a head cheerleader, a man wearing white gloves and tasseled loafers. It makes the Wave look like anarchy. When the opposing team is at bat, they sit politely silent while the other cheering section has its turn.

Baseball is Japan's most popular spectator sport, with two professional leagues drawing millions of fans every year. The Yomiuri Giants sell out virtually every game in the 50,000-seat Tokyo Dome, and other teams have equally loyal fans who fill huge stadiums across the country. While player salaries are not as high as those in America, star athletes still make well over $1 million a year and are celebrities here.

Like so much in Japan, baseball is changing to suit a younger generation. Hideo Nomo, now of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has blazed a trail to the U.S. major leagues and others are following. Ichiro Suzuki, a batting phenom with a matinee-idol face, is colorful and brash. There are still no Dennis Rodmans here, but an all-star nicknamed Godzilla threatened to expose himself in center field last year if his team failed to win the pennant.

Even so, the world Di Muro is entering is nothing like what he knew growing up in American baseball. His father, Lou Di Muro, was an American League umpire for 20 years, and his brother is also an umpire on the cusp of making the majors.

Di Muro laughs and shrugs off the barbs from Nomura and players who have complained that his calls are "dreadful" and have demanded that he "behave properly."

"I told [league officials] that if they wanted me to come over here and become a Japanese umpire, I wasn't interested," he said. "If they don't want me to call the game right, that's their problem.

"I don't think I'm going to save Japanese baseball or Japanese umpiring over here in one season. This is probably a first good step. Maybe they're recognizing that they need to change."

This week, Di Muro found himself umpiring in the Tokyo Dome, the holy temple of the Japanese big leagues. Scrub the beer and tobacco stains off Yankee Stadium, dress it in a tuxedo, put a roof on it and teach it some manners, and you have the Dome.

After a hit, the center field scoreboard lights up with the English words: "Nice Batting!," which are shouted out by an announcer with a game-show-host voice, who also encourages the crowd to: "Clap your hands, everybody! Hi! Ho! And away we go!"

The stadium, known as "The Big Egg," is as clean as a hospital. The slate gray paint on the floor shines, and throughout the game, men with large garbage bags patrol the aisles collecting trash. In the Dome, guys in suits relax with plastic cups of Chivas Regal from the snack bar, or a $7 beer and a bowl of shrimp tempura or rice balls.

As Kazuyuki Ishii, 35, a city employee in a gray suit, tucked into his rice balls with chopsticks during this week's game between the Giants and the Chunichi Dragons, he said he understood that some people opposed having foreign umpires, but he supported Di Muro: "Until we have the same application of the rules, baseball will never be a world game."

Many Japanese fans said American umpires seem more professional. U.S. major league umpires spend an average of eight to 10 years in the minor leagues. Many Japanese umpires are former players who get little more than a five-week course in the United States as training – although Japanese league officials did hire a radio announcer recently to give the umpires shouting lessons.

Atsuko Kimoto, a kimono saleswoman who spends her evenings banging a huge bass drum in the Giants' right-field cheering section, said she wishes Di Muro well. But Kimoto, who has attended more than 1,000 games in 10 years of drum-beating, warned that, "If you go to a new village, you have to obey the customs of that village. So on things like Japan's strike zone, he's going to have to adapt to our customs."

Those customs include what happened in a game last May between the Nippon Ham Fighters and the Seibu Lions: A Lions player hit a fly ball that struck a handrail atop the outfield wall and bounced back onto the field. The umpire closest to the play called it a home run. The Ham Fighters' manager ran onto the field, manhandled the umpire and disputed the home-run call. All four umpires working the game held a conference on the field. After much discussion, the chief umpire ruled the ball a ground-rule double.

Enraged by that reversal, the Lions' manager then charged onto the field and hit the chief umpire with his forearm. A long discussion ensued, in which the Lions' manager suggested a compromise: Call it a triple. The umpires agreed.

The chief umpire told the crowd: "We apologize for the mishandling of this case and the delay in the game." No one was ejected, and no one was fined.

Di Muro said he's already run into behavior by Japanese players that he'd never see at home. During one exhibition game when he was umpiring at home plate, he called a pitch a ball and the catcher fell to the ground groaning in mock agony.

"I told him that if he wanted to stay around to see the rest of the game, he'd just take the ball and throw it back to the pitcher," Di Muro said. Di Muro doesn't speak Japanese and the catcher didn't speak English, but they understood each other.

Robert Whiting, an American author of two best-selling books on Japanese baseball, said Japanese umpires wouldn't do that. He said they are easily intimidated by star players and managers, so they tolerate even physical abuse.

Di Muro said watching his father umpire in the majors made him immune to being star-struck. "When I was growing up it was hard to look up to the players and want them to be my heroes, because they were always hollering at my dad," he said.

For Di Muro, Japan is a one-year stop he couldn't refuse. The pay is better than in Class AAA, and he's getting exposure to the big crowds and national media attention he'll face in the majors. But after less than a month of being Japan's first foreign umpire, Di Muro had a prediction: "I'll probably be the last one, too."