TOKYO TO TORONTO: Baseball journeyman Todd Betts brings it all home

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“Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It’s 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at-bats is 50 points, OK? There’s 6 months in a season, that’s about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week — just one — a gorp… you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes… you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week… and you’re in Yankee Stadium.”
— Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), Bull Durham

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Baseball has been Todd Betts’ life since he was “six or seven,” playing T-ball for the Agincourt A’s.

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Like a lot of other sports parents, his mother and father, Doug and Jill Betts, supported him all the way.

There has been little else in his life, a fact he sometimes regrets.

Long stints in the minors with the Yankees, Indians (picked in the 14th round of the 1993 MLB draft), Red Sox, and Mariners. A more exotic flourish is his tenure in Japanese big leagues with the Yakult Swallows and the La New Bears of the Chinese pro league in Taiwan.

Rounding out the CV are stints with Canada’s national junior and senior teams at the world championships and the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

Now, Betts, 50, has come full circle back to where it began. The only thing missing on his diamond CV is a game in the MLB.

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“If I wrote a book, it would be called All Betts Are Off,” he told The Toronto Sun. “I’ve never been able to figure out why I never made the big leagues. I had better numbers than a lot of guys who made it.”

Betts has now opened the Total Baseball Training Centre at 1550 Birchmount Rd., where he is passing on his vast knowledge of the game to the next generation of stars.

During his long sojourn in minor league baseball, Betts clocked in more than 4,000 at-bats with a .995 OPS and a bucket of MVP awards.

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“Playing in Japan and Asia was the best part of my career,” Betts said. “They treat you like a god. If I had to do it all over again, I would have spent my entire career there.”

Baseball in Japan is different.

When Betts was flying into Tokyo after he was signed with the Swallows, a gaggle of photographers surrounded an out-of-shape white guy coming off the plane. One said to the Canadian: “Are you Todd Betts?”

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“He then said something in Japanese and all the photographers started snapping pictures of me, CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! For some reason, they thought the fat guy was me,” he laughed. “It was all over the papers the next day.

“The positivity of the players there was so refreshing compared to over here.”

While the game itself is essentially the same, there are differences when it comes to playing in Nippon Professional Baseball. For starters, in the summer, temperatures can soar into the 40s.

His first season in the Land of the Rising Sun, he hit .295.

“It’s a fantastic league. They don’t throw as hard as in the MLB, but the pitching is more controlled, more pinpoint,” Betts said.

The season is shorter too — 120 games.

“They don’t play every day. You’ll play three games and then get a day off, and there’s a practice day,” he said. “It’s rainy the whole month of June, so you don’t play then, although there are a few domes.”

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He likened his time in the NPL to Tom Selleck’s 1993 comedy Mr. Baseball. In the movie, Selleck plays a New York Yankees star who is traded to the Nagoya Chunichi Dragons of the NPB’s Central League. Cultural guffaws and faux pas ensue.

“That movie is about 90% true, and they still use it for training guys who are going over to play in Japan,” Betts added.

Each team is allowed three foreign players and everything is first class. Five-star hotels, and Betts said all the players were given cellphones that had videos, flip-up Oakleys, with built-in headphones.

“You got the best of everything and in Japan, you never saw a cop. It was more civilized,” he said.

However, going to the ballpark in uniform for away games is a bit out of the ordinary.

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And there were the stints in the minors, the bus leagues.

“I was in the minors so long I think I have PTSD,” Betts said, rattling off towns like Akron, Buffalo, Watertown, Kinston, Pawtucket, Columbus and Tacoma.

“You’d get one day off a month, eat like crap. They give you a $30 per diem, but that doesn’t go far. And there were those long, long road trips on a bus.”

One of the problems he had in his career, Betts said, is that he always seemed to be behind “The Guy” — the great hope, the next big thing, the bonus baby.

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BoSox great Ted Williams was always ready to pass on his knowledge of the game to kids, rookies and struggling vets. Betts is following in the Splendid Splinter’s footsteps.

“I want to make kids better and give something back to the community. My facility is my baseball church, and I’ve spent my whole life doing what I do. It’s the only thing I know.

“I’ve never done anything else. After all these years, I still love it.”

Betts is available for private and team instruction at the Total Baseball Training Centre.

[email protected]

@HunterTOSun

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