Matsuzaka and the International World Series

It appears that Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka is headed back to the DL again, for a fatigued shoulder due to overwork in the World Baseball Classic. While other pitchers were at Spring Training in Florida following a managed program to prepare for the season, Matsuzaka pitched 14 2/3 innings to help Japan win the WBC Championship for the second time. Named MVP of the tournament once again, Daisuke’s efforts for the Japanese team are appreciated far more in his country than here in the US.

This is partly due to the fact that Japan, unlike other countries with major league players, has a long history of baseball beginning in 1867. After the 1934 season, Babe Ruth and 13 other major leaguers toured Japan playing exhibition games against Japanese teams in front of enthusiastic fans. Most of the terms used in Japanese baseball like shikyu for “walk” were developed by the Meiji era poet and baseball lover Shiki Matsuoka.

Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame opened in 1959, just twenty years after Cooperstown as they helpfully point out on their site.

Matsuzaka himself is a legend in another of Japan’s baseball institutions, the annual High School Baseball Championship (natsu no koshien) watched by a large part of the population. In 1998 he helped his team to the championship by pitching a 250 pitch, 17 inning game (!) then came back as a reliever the next day, followed by a no hitter several games later.

If Matsuzaka overcomes his arm problems and returns to the starting rotation, perhaps it will be due to his use of the mysterious pitch known as the “Gyroball”. A video of Matsuzaka supposedly throwing the gyroball and interviews with one of the professors who invented the pitch can be seen here.

The prominence of players like Matsuzaka and Hideki Matsui in the US has created a nationalistic groundswell among Japanese players and fans for a “true” World Series, matching the winners of the Japanese and American games. Robert Whiting, the well known writer on Japanese baseball makes the interesting observation that the migration of Japanese stars to Major League Baseball paradoxically makes such a confrontation less likely as the Japan League teams will steadily become less competitive.