The New Age Of Japanese Baseball-Player Media Coverage

While Kuroda was good, Dice-K was even better. After his ridiculous performance in the 1998 Summer Koshien, he obviously had infinite possibilities. Major League teams, the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks, heavily recruited him. However, Dice-K wanted to go to a big market team in Japan, exclaiming before the Japan pro draft that he did not want to play for any team besides his hometown team, the Yokohama BayStars, or possibly the Yomiuri Giants.

When the Seibu Lions drafted him, Dice-K was prepared to turn them down and enter a university to delay his entrance into the league for another year or two. That changed however, when the manager of the Lions, Osamu Higashio, an accomplished pitcher for the team in the '70s and '80s, met with Matsuzaka for dinner and gave his winning ball for career win number 200 to Dice-K. This honorable gesture won over Matsuzaka, and Dice-K joined the team.

Just as his high-school baseball career was highlight filled, so too was his first season as a pro. In his first game, he threw a pitch high and inside to an opposing batter, who then began charging the mound, thinking Dice-K was trying to show him up. Teammates stepped in and quelled the situation, but it was evident from day one that people had Daisuke “The Monster” Matsuzaka on their radar.

His next big test of his rookie year was on May 16, 1999, against the Orix Bluewave, and its star player, Ichiro Suzuki. He got Ichiro to strike out three times: the first on a fastball looking, the next on a high slider swinging, and the last on a high fastball swinging. Matsuzaka states that this game was the moment he started to believe that he "belonged" in pro baseball.

He wasn’t the only one who believed he belonged. "He was essentially a god over there," says Scott McClain, who played with him in Japan for four years. "Whenever Daisuke pitched, there were 20,000 people extra in the stands." ''In Japan,'' Scott Boras, Matsuzaka’s agent said, ''he's the equivalent of Michael Jordan.'' In his eight seasons playing for the Lions, he was voted an All Star six times, won the Sawamura Award (equivalent of the Cy Young) in 2001, and led the Pacific League in strikeouts and wins three times each.

As a prime-time baseball star in Japan, one is held up to very high standards. Traditionally, the stars of a team are the highest revered in the region, have billboards with flashing lights around them proclaiming their glory, and are treated in the same fashion as Americans treat their rock stars. Another tradition is the romantic relationships between these players and journalists/hosts/figures of network television, usually of whatever network covers his team’s games. Ichiro Suzuki married Yumiko Fukushima, a former TV announcer for NHK.

Former Dodger Kazuhisa Ishii met his wife through the Fuji TV network. Hiroki Kuroda and Daisuke Matsuzaka are no exceptions to this tradition. Hiroki Kuroda’s wife, Masayo, was a television persona for NTV.

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