Hon. Bums

The war had not dimmed Japan's great love for baseball. Now, with 140,000 G.I. fans in the islands, newspapers carried daily stories of the World Series; the editor of Tokyo's Daily Sports News (circ. 50,000) announced that a study of Ted Williams' batting technique was just the thing for local players.

Last week, in a gesture reminiscent of the kamikaze spirit, three sumo wrestlers quit their traditional calling to join the Greenbergs, a ball team named in honor of Hank Greenberg of the Detroit Tigers. To dramatize their renunciation of wrestling, they had their samurai-style topknots clipped by Enoken, onetime circus clown who is Japan's foremost comedian, in a special home-plate ceremony.

As ballplayers, the rookies proved fine wrestlers. Despite two months of training in which they picked up oval-shaped "go" stones from a tin can with chopsticks (to make their fingers more nimble), they were woefully clumsy. In right field, Tadao Nakayama, who wrestled under the name of Ryugasaki, was a wandering minstrel boy: when he let a grounder dribble through his legs, the fans shouted "Donsai no shito!" (blockhead) and "Throw out the big fool."

Sportswriter Koichi Yamaguichi was so disgusted that he left in the seventh inning, snorting: "These ex-wrestlers are so bad they are not even amateurs; all they have is a lot of brawn." The Greenbergs lost 2-to-0.

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