SAN FRANCISCO — There’s plenty to be said for the language of baseball being universal, but don’t tell that to interpreter Kenzo Yagi — at least not when it comes to launch angles, zone coverage and other technical hitting concepts.
It’s an entirely new vocabulary that Yagi didn’t know he’d have to think about this time last year, much less have to translate between Japanese and English for international superstar Munetaka Murakami and his White Sox coaches.
So Yagi has done the things that launched him to the successful corporate career he gave up when a life-changing opportunity presented itself last fall: he’s hitting the books, asking the right questions and building connections.
“It’s been a learning curve,” Yagi said. “I’m just trying to raise my level up so that I can communicate at, at least the minimum standard of what is required here in MLB. We’re still not there, obviously, but it’s just day-to-day growing.”
Yagi’s most visible day-to-day role is delivering Murakami’s message to American fans who have quickly fallen in love with the rookie first baseman’s prodigious bat.
While Murakami is improving his handle on a second language — “Perfect,” the slugger graded Yagi’s latest media translation for him after Wednesday’s game in Seattle — it’s a 24/7 job for Yagi making sure the first baseman is on the same page as his teammates and coaches.
“I’m using all the tools as much as possible,” Yagi said. “I’m using the PlayStation for ‘MLB The Show,’ just to see other players, how they throw, how they hit and the statistics and such. Reading magazines, a lot of articles — just anything to do with baseball, so that I get familiar with it and try to accelerate that speed as much as possible.”
For anyone wondering if the message is getting through, Murakami’s numbers heading into the Sox’ series opener on Friday in San Francisco said it all: .244/.382/.552 with an American League-leading 17 home runs.
“I would say we’re not currently missing anything in that translation,” said manager Will Venable, who commended Yagi for diving deep into the baseball weeds while Murakami played for Team Japan in the World Baseball Classic.
“Kenzo spent a ton of time around the cage, talking to the hitting guys about terminology and thought processes with approach and game planning, and has continued to do that throughout the season here,” Venable said. “That’s a big concern, that these ideas and thoughts are lost in translation, or are potentially lost in translation.”
The jargon’s not all new for Yagi, 32, who was born in Kyoto and grew up a Diamondbacks fan after moving with his family to Arizona at age 5.
Yagi had lost a fair amount of his Japanese fluency by the time he returned to his native country for university, but he rebounded with the help of teachers who inspired his initial career trajectory toward education.
Instead he ended up in business, climbing the corporate ladder for a decade as an executive at Rakuten, an international data infrastructure company. Yagi was working in Germany when he got the call last year from a former employee who passed along an MLB interpreting opportunity.
Yagi didn’t know the agency he interviewed with was representing Murakami en route to his two-year, $34 million deal with the Sox, and Yagi was “incredibly nervous” when he had his final interview with a player who’s a massive celebrity in Japan. But they hit it off.
“It was not about how I’m able to do interpreting,” Yagi said. “It was more like how I am as a person, what my family background is like, what my favorite food is, all this kind of basic kind of human-to-human talk.”
Yagi said there was a moment of hesitation before his dramatic career change, but sharing the experience with Murakami has left no doubt about his choice.
“He’s just a great person, personality-wise,” Yagi said. “I can respect him in tons of ways, not just about baseball, but how he is as a person. So it’s just good to be around him and spend time with him a lot.”
