My friend Kosuke has been an interpreter for Japanese baseball players in America for fourteen years. Four teams. Eleven rookies. Thousands of press conferences. He keeps a notebook he has never shown a reporter. On the cover, he wrote: "Things American teammates did that nobody asked me to translate." He let me read it. 1. A relief pitcher from Arkansas, six-foot-five, asked Kosuke how to say "We've got your back" in Japanese. Kosuke did his best. It came out closer to "Your back now belongs to us." The pitcher wrote it on a strip of athletic tape and stuck it inside the rookie's locker. The rookie laughed for ten minutes. He still has the tape. 2. A catcher from Ohio learned to count in Japanese so he could call pitches. He learned it wrong. "Ichi. Ni. Sushi." The rookie never corrected him. They won eleven games that way. 3. A veteran outfielder took the rookie to buy his first pickup truck. The rookie lived three blocks from the stadium. He did not need a truck. He has the truck. 4. A first baseman from Alabama called the rookie's mother in Japan after every win. "Ma'am, he did good." He doesn't speak Japanese. She doesn't speak English. They talk for about four minutes. Kosuke has no idea what about. Neither of them will tell him. 5. The players' wives threw a baby shower for the rookie's wife, who spoke no English. Forty-one women learned the Japanese word for congratulations, "omedetou." Most of them said it like a sneeze. She cried anyway. 6. The night the rookie gave up a walk-off home run, nobody said a word. The whole bullpen just came over and sat next to him. Eleven grown men on a bench, looking at their shoes, for half an hour. Kosuke says it was the easiest thing he has ever translated. There was nothing to translate. The last page is about the rookie's mother. She came to America once. Her first time out of Japan. She sat in the family section, very small, very quiet, holding her purse on her lap with both hands, the way Japanese mothers sit at school ceremonies. In Japan, mothers don't yell at games. They clap. Politely. The other players' mothers took one look at her and moved in. Somebody wrapped her in a team blanket. Somebody put a foam finger on her hand. A woman from Texas named Crystal sat down on one side of her, a woman from Georgia sat down on the other, and they did not leave her for nine innings. In the eighth inning, her son came up with the bases loaded. Thirty American mothers stood up and screamed his name. So she stood up too. And he struck out. Kosuke says the whole section went quiet for one second. He watched her face fall. In Japan, this is the moment you sit down and look at your lap. Then Crystal cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled at the field: "THAT'S OKAY, BABY! SHAKE IT OFF!" And all thirty mothers yelled it with her. At a grown man who had just failed in front of forty thousand people. The rookie's mother didn't know the words. She watched their mouths. And on the third time, she yelled it too, in her best English, one word at a time. "SHAKE. IT. OFF." She is 68. She had never yelled in public in her life. Last month, at her grandson's Little League game in Osaka, he struck out looking. Every Japanese parent clapped politely. One grandmother stood up and yelled, in English: "SHAKE IT OFF, BABY!" The other parents are still talking about it. America, you think it's just baseball. It's the only place I know where a stadium full of strangers will stand up for you right after you fail.