Our of Left Field: More fun with Japanese media
Just when you thought the Daisuke Matsuzaka circus was calming down a little bit, the whole world reminds you that, well, there’s more to the world of baseball than America.
Dice-K’s loving the Pan-Pacific spotlight, even when it involves bizarre mascots.
That’s right Red Sox Nation, your Japanese contingent still sees Dice-K as a universal savior, to the point that they’re entrusting him to knock down attacking villains. Or at least annoying, attacking game show mascots. As first brought to you by our friend - and uber-YouTube scourer Dan Lamothe over at the Springfield Republican’s Red Sox Monster - feast your eyes on this:
You’ve GOT to be kidding me.
First, the facts: Evidently the mascot is named Carrasco. And if you freeze-frame his introduction, he’s wearing a shirt that pledges his allegiance to the Manutes Eagles, We couldn’t find any team matching that name, but try and read the black t-shirt for yourself. If you can get anything more out of it, you have better eyes than us.
But that’s about all we have as facts. If there are any loyal, fluently Japanese Sox Nest readers out there that would be willing to translate the whole transcript (Hideki Okajima fans? Anyone?), that would be great. Otherwise, uhh, we’re really not sure about anything else.
That, of course, leads to the postulating of a lot of questions. Like these:
1) What the hell is that thing? We’re going with the un-healthy love child of a catfish and a baseball, with a lot of purple artificial food coloring. Thoughts?
2) Whoever is inside that suit is crazy agile. Did you see the dugout dancing? Ridiculous. Somehow we find it hard to believe that a single Matsuzaka chop could fell him. And couldn’t he have gotten out of the way? It’s almost as if foreign game shows - any game shows, for that matter - were contrived novelty pieces. That couldn’t be, could it?
3) There is absolutely no way that Wally would have just acquiesced to the Catballfish like that. Wouldn’t have happened. And wouldn’t a giant, furry green monster have a prohibitive size advantage over a catfish-baseball? Something seems lost in translation here.
4) Say what you will about the guy and his consistency on the mound, but Dice-K is a full-out character. Watch his reaction to this entire stunt … he’s loving it. It just shows how unflappable this guy has been. You can’t faze him. Even with a cantankerous catfish-baseball.
Yeah, we don’t get it either.
And maybe that’s the only lesson to truly be taken out of this video: part of the reason why the Sox were willing to shell out $103 million and invest five years of the starting rotation in this guy is because he’s cool as a cucumber, under absolutely any conditions. It’s amazing. In fact, put him in the dugout next to Julian Tavarez and Jason Varitek - the players he’s seemed closest to so far - and you get the feeling you could get that reaction out of him any day. Perhaps even while he was pitching. While that might have seemed troubling before he’d pitched on this side of the left-coast pond, now it has to feel like a comfort.
So, we’ve learned that Red Sox fans should look at Matsuzaka with comfort, knowing he’s not going to clam up for a big game. Oh, and we’ve also learned that Japanese TV executives are absolutely insane.
But we knew that already, right? I thought so.
– Cameron Smith
Discussion
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