All posts by Jim Allen

sports editor for a wire service in Tokyo
Baseball, Commentary, Paid Content

The old boys of spring

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Hurt pride requires extra ice

On Saturday, Hiroki Kuroda and Takahiro Arai resumed their preseason, simulated-game, WWF-style rivalry. A year to the day after he vowed to break teammate Arai’s bat in a simulated game — only to be taken deep the next day, Kuroda gave up a liner back through the box off Arai’s bat. The right-hander spoke the media with an outrageous amount of ice on his glove hand.

“It’s being iced for now, but we’ll just have to wait and see,” Kuroda said with a straight face.

“I was worried there,” Arai said. “If it was my ball that hit him and he got hurt, people would all be blaming me.”

Kuroda, who turned 41-years-old this month, showed amazing reflexes to spear the ball with his glove and explained that he was trying to cut the 39-year-old Arai some slack

“It’s not good to hit guys with pitches, so I threw something fat down the middle. Who’d have thought his bat control was that good?” Kuroda said.

A year earlier, when Arai homered off him on Feb. 28, Kuroda feigned disdain for his teammate’s antics.

“He held his fist pump too long. Do that in the majors and the next pitch you see will come at you.”

A day after saying that Daisuke Matsuzaka will not be in their season-opening five-man rotation, the SoftBank Hawks have revealed that Tadashi Settsu will start on Opening Day for the fifth straight time.

Speaking of starters, Scott Mathieson, who hasn’t started a regular season game since he starting 12 in 2011 for the Triple-A Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, is being stretched out to start this season and gave the Yomiuri Giants five innings in their preseason home debut against the Swallows.

Baseball, Commentary, Paid Content

Samurai Japan? More like the NPB indentured servants

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Junichi Tazawa, the man without a national team

We’re a a little more than a year from the start of the 2017 World Baseball Classic group stages, and Japan is beginning its final year of preparations with games against Taiwan on March 5 and 6. Yet, the team doesn’t deserve to wear Japan’s emblem, the hinomaru, on their uniforms.

As long as manager Hiroki Kokubo is not allowed to choose stars who exercise their individual right NOT to play in Nippon Professional Baseball, then the team can’t truly represent Japan. The example is Junichi Tazawa. While Kokubo has said he’d like to have him on the team, Tazawa can’t be picked because NPB won’t let him.

Tazawa is banned from playing in Japan or for Kokubo’s NPB Indentured Samurai. The pitcher broke no law or contract. He failed no drug test. But he’s an outsider because he chose a career path NPB didn’t approve of. We’re not talking about organized crime or some other group that will get you banned from NPB, but rather a major league team. Before Tazawa signed with the Red Sox as an amateur, there were no rules against it. But after he signed, NPB’s teams agreed to ban him. Should Tazawa desire for any reason to return to Japan he would have to wait three years after he stops playing abroad.

Since Tazawa is currently ineligible to play for an NPB team, he is ineligible to play for NPB’s facsimile of a national team.

It wasn’t long after Tazawa was banned that Shohei Otani said he wanted no part of indentured servitude in NPB. Otani stayed in Japan, but only after the Nippon Ham Fighters drafted him persuaded him that NPB was his best option. But Toshimasa Shimada, the Fighters’ top executive said Otani’s asking teams not to draft him was proof that the Tazawa rule had failed and is now only hurting the teams as they pursue a path of segregation — who will not be able to sign players who don’t put NPB’s wishes ahead of their own.