At the start of the year, no Asian ballplayers were appearing at the back end of MLB bullpens, but now that September has dawned, no fewer than three Eastern imports are finishing games for their teams. Their varied paths emphasize the different ways that pitchers find themselves as the ninth-inning man, [...]

Of all the disappointments on this year’s Los Angeles Angels, Hideki Matsui’s rough start had to be up there. It’s not quite the same as losing your first baseman for the season to a postgame celebratory Hokey Pokey, but it’s still a bummer when your biggest offensive free-agent signing is hitting .249/.329/.393 [...]

My column focuses on the exploits of Asian-born major leaguers, but I’m often reminded of the success of Asian-American players, who are just as rare as their foreign-born teammates—but often just as talented. And with the awful year that many Asian players are having, it seems a good time to take a look at MLB’s [...]

In a move that some had predicted, and few think is truly fair, today the Seattle Mariners fired manager Don Wakamatsu, who had gone from team savior to team goat. Wak had taken a miserable, disjointed Seattle team that had gone 61-101 in 2008, setting a record as the first $100M team to [...]

While a writer can make a career responding to Ozzie Guillen’s various rants, I generally refrain from responding to his inflammatory remarks. I know they’re largely made either from legitimate passion or cunning manipulativeness, but I couldn’t ignore his latest cracks about Latino players playing second fiddle to Asian players.
After all, now he’s picking on [...]

One of the frequent themes of my column is the success of Asian relief pitchers instead of starting pitchers—unlike the long-running debate on the absence of left-handed catchers in MLB, there are some rather plausible and well-accepted theories for why this isn’t true.
The best theory is that Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) is a breaking-ball league; [...]

No matter how you slice it, Boston has to view their $100M signing of Daisuke Matsuzaka as a huge overpayment—whether it’s a huge mistake depends largely on how he performs in the final half of his six-year contract. Dice-K’s time with the Sox has been marked by injury and inconsistency, problems that have also plagued [...]

We find ourselves at midseason, and now that the minor-league Futures Game is done, it’s a good time to look back at my Asian prospect list to see how they’re doing.
The Futures Game itself featured just two Asian players (though MVP Hank Conger of the winning US team is Korean-American), one of whom flew under [...]

If someone gave me the power to create the ultimate ballplayer—the way you can in so many videogames—he’d probably look something like Ichiro Suzuki. He hits, runs, fields, and throws with the best of them. He plays smart, he rarely loses his cool (last year marked his first career MLB ejection, in his 1,419th [...]

One of the dramas of the Yankees offseason swirled around what they should do with Hideki Matsui, the first DH (and first Asian player) to earn a World Series MVP. Although his balky knees had left him unable to play the field, Godzilla had put up his best season since 2004, hitting .274/.367/.509 [...]