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Nashua Community College baseball goes international

By Staff | Apr 17, 2013

NASHUA – Nashua Community College baseball coach Justin Mongue did a double take about a year ago when he saw the email.

It was from someone who was interested in playing for him this spring, but that someone was from Japan.

“I thought this has to be one of my buddies knowing I started the team here playing a joke,” he said. “Who in Japan would hear of Nashua Community College for baseball? Especially since we started the program a month or two ago (at that time). So I didn’t respond.”

He never heard anything again until a couple of months ago when he set up a table for sign ups, handing out flyers to students, hoping to recruit some players.

And then a student, about 6-foot-2, 180 pounds, approached him and said, “Hello, I’m Sam, and I’m from Japan.”

Then it clicked. He asked Sam Doyle if he had sent him an email a year ago, and Doyle nodded.

“I asked him about four times,” Mongue said. “I just couldn’t believe it was him. We kind of laughed about it a little bit, and now, he plays for me.”

“I just want to play baseball,” the 19-year-old Doyle, whose father is from the United States, said. “I played every day in Japan and here I did nothing.”

Doyle, who hails from the city of Himegi, has been in the United States for more than a year, arriving in March, 2012. He has family in Manchester and decided he wanted to make the move from Japan. His twin sisters, Mary and Lisa, attended NCC and his grandmother lives in Nashua.

“I wanted to learn English, and I want to go to college,” he said.

Doyle played outfield in the Japan high school equivalent, which is where Mongue is using him. But he also may be used as a third baseman.

“He’s amazing,” Mongue said. “He’s very well disciplined. Any time we practice he’ll listen and take any ground ball like it’s a game-time scenario, which is important. I asked him if the coaches were hard on them (in Japan) and stressed discipline a lot and he said yes. I could tell the way he plays the game. It’s very fundamental.”

That is spreading, Mongue said, to the other players. Doyle doesn’t think he’s a good hitter, but he had a double and two RBIs in a recent loss to New Hampshire Technical Institute. That was his first American game, and he was understandably nervous beforehand.

“He hit the double like it was nothing. I give him a lot of credit,” Mongue said. “He put in the hard work in the off-season that led up to this season.”

Doyle, who says his Japanese baseball idols are Major League stars Ichiro Suzuki and Yu Darvish, admits he’s feeling more and more comfortable.

“My teammates are very kind to me,” Doyle said. “I’m having a very nice time. I’m doing what I’ve wanted to do.”

Doyle said English is a challenge. He’s understands it well when he hears it, because his father always speaks English.

He works part-time at a local Italian restaurant, and loves to eat roast beef. He’s becoming Americanized, for certain.

The cultural difference is one thing, but what about the difference in the game? Doyle said there’s “a lot more running” in baseball practice in America, “and defense is more important here” than in the Japanese version. The pitching, he said, is the same.

Doyle said the team he played for in Japan was “a strong team, a good, big team.”

Doyle likes Nashua. But winter started to wear on him.

“The first time I saw snow, I was excited,” he said. “And then it was, well, too much.”

Many would agree with him. Mongue feels the fact he has an international player bodes well for his program. To offset the language barrier, he asks Doyle a lot of questions, “just because I want to make sure he’s doing OK. I can only imagine how tough it would be, coming over and having a lot of English words thrown at you.

“I want to make sure he’s doing OK, that he gets it and he’s not feeling left out in anything that we’re doing.”

After he’s done at NCC, Doyle wants to continue at another college. He still has family, mainly cousins, back in Japan. He feels he’d like to play baseball back in Japan some day. But right now, is he having fun?

“Yes!” he said with a resounding voice.

After all, baseball is baseball.

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