Some projects start with a sketch. This one started with a feeling in the bottom of the tenth inning.
Toru Urakawa, a researcher at The Asahi Shimbun’s New York bureau, became a baseball fan almost by accident. One quiet weekend back in Japan he wandered into a game, watched his home team win on a walk-off, and was hooked. But what stuck with him wasn’t the final score. It was the shape of the game itself — the way a stadium holds its breath pitch after pitch, anticipation building and releasing, inning after inning. An atmosphere that’s vivid while you’re there and gone the moment the game ends.
He wanted to give that feeling a form you could hold. And the material he reached for was acrylic.
Turning anticipation into an object
Urakawa started with data. Baseball has a stat called Run Expectancy — a number that captures how likely a team is to score from any given situation. Bases loaded, no outs: high. Two outs, nobody on: low. In other words, a measurable version of that held-breath feeling in the stands.
First he drew it, plotting each half-inning’s biggest scoring chance against the runs that actually came of it. It worked, but a flat image vanished as easily as the game had. He wanted something with physical presence — something that simply exists in a room. So he turned to sculpture, and to a rule-based way of building it: one stack of small acrylic discs per team, two discs for every half-inning, the color of each disc set by the data.
Clear discs for quiet innings. Brighter colors as the tension climbed. A red disc every time a run crossed the plate. Stack them in order and a whole game rises up off the table — a quiet early stretch giving way to a burst of color at the finish.
When the right material is hard to find
Urakawa’s first discs came from a craft shop in Tokyo. Back in New York, he hit the problem every maker eventually meets: he needed more pieces, cut to the same precise size, and he couldn’t find them anywhere off the shelf.
After some searching, he found us.
He came into our shop on Canal Street, walked the racks of acrylic sheet in every color we carry, and placed a custom-cut order at the counter for discs in two shades of blue — one light, one dark. We were busy that day. He picked them up about two hours later.
That’s exactly what custom cutting is for. Not every project fits a standard size, and the most interesting ones rarely do. Whether it’s a single run of precise discs for a sculpture or a complex multi-part build, the goal is the same: get the right material, cut right, into a maker’s hands fast enough to keep the momentum going.
Color doing the heavy lifting
With the new blues, Urakawa rebuilt the sculptures — cool tones for the rising tension of run expectancy, warm reds for the runs themselves. He even tested the palette for color-vision accessibility, so the story the stack tells stays readable to as many people as possible.
Set the two teams side by side and the whole arc of the game snaps into focus — one team that looked out of it pulling off a comeback, the other building chance after chance only to fall short. No scoreboard, no commentary. Just color, stacked in order, replaying the feeling of being there.
It’s a small piece — discs that sit on a fingertip. But as Urakawa points out, imagine it scaled up to the size of a person, or a stadium. The atmosphere it could hold might be something else entirely.
Why we love seeing this
Projects like this are the reason we’ve been on Canal Street since 1963. Acrylic shows up in display cases and signage and storefronts every day, and we’re glad for all of it. But every so often someone uses it to make something invisible visible — to take a feeling and give it weight and edges and color — and those are the projects that remind us what this material can really do.
If you’ve got an idea that needs a precise cut, in a color you can’t find anywhere else, bring it to us. We’ll help you give it a shape.
Read Urakawa’s full account of the project: “Sculpting Baseball Games” on Medium. Photos courtesy of Toru Urakawa / The Asahi Shimbun Media R&D Center.