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Horace Wilson took his Japanese students out to play in 1872 and planted a love of baseball

By STEVE SOLLOWAY, Staff Writer May 20, 2007

GORHAM — Miriam Johnston, 86, is an avid Red Sox fan and, like many others, is pleased that Daisuke Matsuzaka has pitched so well this season. Unlike many, she can feel a certain attachment, a sense of fate if you will.

If it weren't for her great-uncle Horace Wilson, who grew up in the part of North Gorham known as White Rock, the baseball world might never have had the man more commonly known as Dice-K.

Or so the story goes.

"I think it's very interesting," said Johnston. "Don't you?"

Horace Wilson, a Gorham farm boy who returned from the Civil War only to go west to California and eventually across the Pacific, is the man the Japanese say introduced baseball to their country. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003.

Who would have thought?

"The Japanese needed a beginning," says Scott Balcomb. "They wanted an Adam and Eve and created this Adam. It was Horace."

Don't misunderstand Balcomb, who is married to Abigail Sanborn, a great-granddaughter of Elbridge Wilson, Horace's youngest brother. The family takes great pride in who Uncle Horace was and what he accomplished.

On a day in 1872 or a year later, depending on who's telling the story, Horace Wilson decided his students at the First Higher School of Tokyo needed to get away from their class lessons. A little physical exercise in the form of hitting a ball, throwing it and running would get the blood pumping.

He took them outdoors and introduced them to baseball, a game he had enjoyed, maybe from his time serving with the 12th Maine Regiment fighting Confederates in Louisiana. Weeks or months after Wilson's students took their swings, there was a seven-inning game between the Foreigners, with Wilson playing left field and scoring two runs, and a team of Japanese players.

The box score doesn't list a Matsuzaka, Hideki Matsui or Ichiro Suzuki, although someone named Sasaki played second and batted last, after the pitcher. The Foreigners won, 34-11.

Wilson returned to America in 1877 and lived in San Francisco. He came back to the family farm on Wilson Road for reunions once or twice before he died in 1927 at age 84.

Outside his family, Uncle Horace was a footnote to history, if that. He was one of thousands of so-called foreign experts called to Japan to help the country shed its samurai past and rush into the 19th century. Wilson, a graduate of Kents Hill, went to teach English and math. That he taught his students to play baseball wasn't part of the stories he told cousins that became part of family lore.

A century passed before a representative of Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's national newspapers, showed up at the Wilson farm, now owned by Abigail Sanborn and Balcomb. "We didn't have any idea what he wanted," said Balcomb, who teaches calculus and contemporary math, among other classes, at Saint Joseph's College of Maine.

The Japanese weren't satisfied with the notion that baseball just happened to take root in their country. They wanted the man responsible for planting the seed. Their evidence pointed to Horace Wilson. To honor him properly and promote baseball in Japan, his family had to be found.

In June 2001, a small delegation arrived at the farm to formally invite Wilson family members to Japan. The newspaper, along with Japanese baseball federations, planned a ceremony to recognize Uncle Horace before the 83rd National High School Baseball Championship Series at the famed Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya. Dice-K had pitched his Yokohama team to the championship at Koshien three years earlier.

"It was a terribly hot day," said Balcomb of the second visit. "We were haying. I was in the barn, up to my knees in manure, milking, and one of the Japanese came in to watch. He didn't speak English."

The Japanese were in suits and ties and fighting jet lag. Miriam Johnston and Patricia Sanborn, Abigail's mother, tried to entertain the men through a translator.

"One of them fell asleep," said...