John Bowker’s second chance presented itself one morning in late April. Bowker was just sitting down for breakfast at his apartment in Campeche, a port city on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, when his telephone rang.
He answered the call to find a scout from the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles on the other end of the line offering him a path back to Japan.
Bowker had been waiting for a call like that since the end of the 2013 season and, once the particulars were ironed out, he was finally back in NPB in early May as a member of the Eagles.