My Secret Career 17: Sadaharu Oh, 1998

1998.

I was apartment sitting. This temporary transplant left me shaken somehow, as if the removal of everything familiar to me had left an actual hole in my life, a week long cliff I had come upon so suddenly I couldn’t avoid falling over the edge.

My other careers were roaring. I was churning out weekly tongue-in-cheek investigative articles about urban legends on this newfangled thing called the internet. I would get off the phone with the head of the New York City sewer system, having asked if albino alligators were really down there, pop out of the ping pong table/bean bag chair office, hit two commercial auditions and two tv/film ones, then write the copy promoting my latest AOL Urban Legends scoop on the subway ride back to the office.

Someone’s cat needed to be fed though so I was going to be living in Manhattan for a brief spell. Alone. I packed my 4-track and my acoustic guitar up and trekked over. 

And the void that opened up in front of me resulted in the following song.

Named after Japanese great Sadaharu Oh who played his whole career with the Yomiuri Giants. Oh hit 868 home runs, still by far the most home runs by any professional baseball player in any league ever.

But over here, all we knew was Babe Ruth. Hank Aaron. Willie Mays. Ted Williams. This guy outdid them all but viewed from a certain perspective it didn’t even count because it wasn’t in the Major Leagues.

The name popped into my head and it seemed the perfect way to describe where I was at in my life. I should have been on top of the world. By any metric I was a success. I should have been resting on my laurels. Instead I was sweating on a white leather couch and wrestling demons that had won a long time ago.

There in that strange apartment, mimicking a life that wasn’t mine, I wrote and recorded this song at three in the New York morning. If you listen all the way to the end, and you might be the first other than me to do so, you will hear a yell from way below, out on the street, a faint intrusive voice that perfectly reflected how far away from myself I had gotten.

This song was about me and a couple of people but I could barely look myself in the mirror because my soul was out roaming empty desolate streets. 

Proud of the song itself but listening to it is like stepping off into the void over and over and over and o-

Sadaharu Oh.