Through His Art, Ben Sakoguchi Used Baseball To Understand America

When Ben Sakoguchi was growing up in San Bernardino, Calif., fruit trees of every variety blanketed the region. His parents owned a small grocery store that catered to the laborers who worked the fields, and he recalls riding his bike through groves of oranges, enveloped in their sticky sweet perfume.

It was here that Sakoguchi first encountered the inspiration for much of his life's work: the multi-hued orange-crate labels that were pasted on the wooden boxes that fruit growers used to ship their product to market. The labels themselves were small, measuring 10-by-11 inches, but their vibrant colors and idyllically rendered subjects glorified the Edenic abundance of Southern California: the sunshine! the soil! the bounty!

Years later, as the citrus fields of his youth vanished beneath the inevitability of urban sprawl and housing tracts, Sakoguchi moved to Pasadena, became an acclaimed artist, and taught in the art department at the local college. He never lost his fondness for orange-crate labels, which were re-surfacing as (not inexpensive) collectibles at flea markets; it occurred to him that juxtaposing their imagery of feel-good boosterism with his own editorial commentary would make for a disarming, yet pointed way to express himself.

"People don't want to be lectured about politics or race," he once related, "so I use images and colors that soften the blow."

Sakoguchi first adapted the template for a series of paintings about slavery and the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II. He then turned his attention to baseball, another boyhood love from the days when the Pittsburgh Pirates held their spring training in San Berdoo. The sport held another deep connection: During World War II, when the Sakoguchi family and other Japanese-Americans were incarcerated at Poston, Arizona, playing the game provided a welcome respite to the drudgery and humiliation they faced daily.

The series of diamond-themed paintings that Sakoguchi has created are, at once, biting and ribald, socially relevant and personally touching. In 2006, he had completed approximately 140 of them; today, the number totals 273. Sakoguchi, now 77, retired from teaching art at Pasadena City College a decade ago; PCC, he's quick to point out, was the alma mater of Jackie Robinson.

The topics he chooses are as unorthodox as anything Bill Veeck ever devised. In "Pitchman," Sakoguchi pokes fun at the sport's commercial interests with a rendering of Jim Palmer pimping for Jockey underwear. "Chaw" probes the danger of chewing tobacco by featuring a portrait of former outfielder Bill Tuttle, whose habit disfigured him and later caused his death from oral cancer. Does anyone remember Roy Gleason, who had a cup of coffee with the Los Angeles Dodgers before becoming the only Major League ballplayer to be wounded in Vietnam? How could anyone forget the breakthrough of Emmett Ashford, the first African-American umpire in the majors? These comparative obscurities, too, get the Sakoguchi treatment.

"Ben is a fan of the game, but he's always looking at the political and sociological side of the game," said Terry Cannon, a longtime friend and the executive director of The Baseball Reliquary, better known as the "People's Hall of Fame."

Sakoguchi enjoys a symbiotic relationship with The Reliquary, a non-profit organization that celebrates the rebels, reprobates, and twisted geniuses that have snuck into baseball history. In Cannon's opinion, Sakoguchi's baseball series ranks as the most imaginative, incisive, and important artistic statement ever made about the national pastime—or any sport, for that matter

"If you look at the collection of paintings as one conceptual artwork, it's the greatest piece ever done about baseball," he said. "Here you have in this body of work every major issue that baseball's dealt with: economics, race, steroids, gender issues, and so on. There's nothing remotely like it." The (sorry!) fruits of this labor will be on display this summer at two institutions in Los Angeles. The Skirball Cultural Center is presenting a massive exhibition entitled "The Unauthorized History of Baseball in 100-Odd Paintings: The Art of Ben Sakoguchi."

"It's absolutely stunning in its scope," said historian-archivist Albert Kilchesty, who authored the accompanying gallery text. "There's a subversive quality to this work that touches upon areas underserved by baseball historians or ones that have been completely ignored."

In addition, four works will be featured in "Peloteros in Paradise: A Los Angeles Beisbol Story," an exhibit at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, next to Olvera Street. "So much is going on in each individual painting," curator Erin Curtis said, "that it takes time to unravel every part of the story. Each painting is like an encyclopedia article or a book chapter. They're so inescapably rich and dense."

Curtis notes that, as an internment camp survivor, Sakoguchi "directly experienced this terrible instance of discrimination. It's unsurprising that he would take on a topic like baseball and then begin to unravel those issues through the lens of his own experience. A lot of the name-calling that was directed at him, and the way that he transformed those painful experiences into his art, becomes part of the message of the whole body of work."

Sakoguchi likens his masterwork to Ball Four, the season-in-the-life memoir written by former New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton. The book is the "literary version of what I'm trying to do," he said, because they both approach baseball "from a different angle. The paintings are about baseball, but they're really not."

That is one of the secrets behind Sakoguchi's approach, according to Kilchesty. "Yes, it touches upon the nastier aspects of baseball history, including exclusion based on race and gender," he said. "But the work stands as a monument to the idea of equality. In other words, if we can find common ground in a game that has meant so much for so many different people, that gives us hope that we can find common ground in other areas of life."