Regarding Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka; Yesterday I drove down Edison Avenue in Fort Myers, drawing the hopeful, and subsquent disgusted, looks of a half a hundred Japanese media members. They wanted me to be Matsuzaka. Heck, I wanted to be Matsuzaka. I couldn’t deliver. But it did allow for a dose of enlightenment — if there was ever a player who needed to be covered 25 hours a day, eight days a week it was this guy. That’s where this blog thing is going to come in handy.
It is because of this blog that I can sit here after a morning of picnic table-sitting over at the Red Sox minor league complex and unleash whatever information cyberspace deems worthy.
If it wasn’t for this space you might never know that Jonathan Papelbon’s father has been hired by the Ted Williams Museum. Discovering that top prospect Clay Buchholz has decided his out-pitch is a recently-mastered change-up, not a well-publicized 95 mph heater might have had to wait. Or how about the offseason-related knowledge that Josh Beckett’s prize catch was a six-point buck, while Kyle Snyder went fishing in Costa Rica with Bronson Arroyo, and Craig Hansen spent hours winding up in front of a mirror trying to close up a delivery which exposed the ball to hitters a few seconds too early.
Heck, if we just had this a little earlier we could have charted former Sox reliever David Riske’s quest to secure every model of Air Jordan sneakers in Size 11.
And just in case you thought I forgot, here’s your Matsuzaka update: Press conference, 5 p.m., in the third base dugout at City of Palms Park. And a bit of not-well-known, potentially useless information: His translator, Masa Hoshino, is a Canadian resident who, at last check, was still stuck in his home country due to weather issues. Oh, and potential closer Joel Piniero showed up and dropped his stuff off in the Sox locker room when nobody (at least not the media) was looking.
Good times.
One more thing … if anybody has any questions over the course of the day please put them under comments and I will devote a post to answering them at the end of the day.
Clck here to read today’s column “All Matsuzaka, all the time”
