Pitching staff goes international

Author: Livingston Burgess

Let no one say that Middlebury's baseball minds are insensitive to the winds that guide the direction of the sport. After watching the Boston Red Sox, briefly removed from a league title, add Daisuke Matsuzaka to their staff and win another World Series, the Panthers find themselves with a comparable gem on the roster in Nao Tomiyama '09.

With an overseas perspective on the great American game, an unorthodox delivery and a wicked repertoire, Tomiyama, an exchange student, stands to help turn an already imposing rotation into a potentially unstoppable force that just might propel the team back to a NESCAC championship.

Tomiyama says his deceptively consistent-looking delivery angle and arm speed were not the results of training from his coaches in Japan. Though he gained a deep scholarship of the game from them, the broader strokes of his pitching repertoire came to him without instruction. He throws a good fastball - disproportionately quick for his 140-pound frame - along with a well-disguised slider and split-finger.

"It's just natural … I don't know why," he said, struggling to explain the provenance of his talent. Part of the answer may lie in the single-minded focus on pitching he maintained from the beginning of his Little League days, which began at the age of five.

"In Japan, every player has to concentrate on his position," he said, as opposed to the American system, which encourages a little more movement and experimentation. "I've never experienced catcher or infielder or outfielder," he added.

Tomiyama is not simply at Middlebury to play baseball, of course, and he pursues his academic true love - economics - with the same devotion he gives to sport. By the end of his two semesters here, he will have taken six courses in economics, and he thinks this will allow him to blend his passions into a career. This summer he will intern at a Japanese investment bank, but in the long run he hopes to work for the Red Sox, or another Major League team, in some capacity, as a liaison to his native country.

"I want to be a bridge," he said, "between Japanese and Major League Baseball." His experiences as an exchange student - crossing barriers on and off the field - should serve him admirably in that regard. Tomiyama struggled at first to adapt to a new educational system, but he conceded - with some prodding - that he is finally getting the hang of the brand of discussion Middlebury professors try to elicit.

Japanese scholarship tends to center on memorization and mastery of concrete theory, making students, in Tomiyama's view, much more academically shy. Coming to a liberal-arts school, he was thrust into a more dialogic world that not only wanted, but demanded his input. While some difficulties remain, he readily applauds the method.

"To learn economics, it requires me to learn from different perspectives," he said in praise of the more engaged form of discussion. And just as he has learned much from his professors, his coaches have also helped him develop as a ballplayer and transition to American life and sports.

In particular, pitching coach Jim Neidlinger - who started 12 games for the Dodgers in 1990 - has been helping integrate some elements of American technique into Tomiyama's delivery. The two have worked on adding some vertical motion to his highly rotational style, and have managed to add even more zip to a fastball that already reached 85 mph.

Tomiyama's relationship with his coaches is much more collegial here than in Japan he said. There, a strong tradition of deep respect for elders leads to a more authoritative coaching style. Before coming to America, he had never seen a coach carrying equipment or setting up L-screens. Differences notwithstanding, he has great respect for Neidlinger and for head coach Bob Smith.

"I've never seen Coach Smith get angry," he said, detailing how amiably the coach helped him through the paperwork and bureaucracy that comes with being an exchange student. He always felt welcome, on the team and at the school.

When the season begins, Tomiyama will join a pitching staff whose three returning starters had a combined 2.43 ERA last season, putting them in excellent position to make another run at the NESCAC title, a summit the team last reached in the 2006 season. With his addition, Neidlinger's tutelage and the continued maturation of younger pitchers, that staff stands to be one of the league's elites.