Japan's Starry Gems of the Diamond

'Big 3' Homegrown Heroes in the Big Leagues Turn American Baseball Into a Major Import

TOKYO, March 25 -- Baseball opened its season here Tuesday with an extra-inning corker of a game that showed off hometown hero and Boston Red Sox pitching ace Daisuke Matsuzaka, one of three Japanese superstars who have made the American big leagues part of people's lives across Japan from April to October.

By staging its third season opener in Japan since 2000, Major League Baseball paid tribute to what has become a golden era of Japanese players in the United States.

The credit goes largely to three of Japan's greatest-ever players. They are Matsuzaka, Ichiro Suzuki, a center fielder and hitting phenomenon for the Seattle Mariners, and Hideki Matsui, a slugging outfielder for the New York Yankees.

"Major League Baseball is now at the zenith of its popularity in Japan because of the Big Three," said Akira Hirakata, a senior manager at Dentsu, the Tokyo advertising firm that sells American baseball to broadcasters and advertisers in Japan.

Because of the Big Three, 550 American baseball games a year are broadcast on television here. About 300 of them are carried without commercial interruption, allowing Japanese viewers to gaze between innings at their beloved stars as they sit quietly in the dugout or stand around on the field. These players, unlike their American counterparts, are rarely caught on camera spitting, picking their noses or scratching themselves in manly places.

Because of the Big Three, American baseball -- that is, coverage of what Japanese stars did that day in the United States -- usually appears first on the evening news here, before coverage of Japan's own professional baseball.

And because of the Big Three, Japanese-language advertising signs now adorn major league stadiums from Seattle to Tampa.

The signs are unintelligible to most Americans, but when viewed by a growing audience on Japanese TV, they are selling everything from bulldozers to eyeglasses to weight-loss massages.

The annual sale of America's pastime to the Japanese got off to a rousing and satisfying start in Tokyo on Tuesday night, unless you are a fan of the Oakland Athletics.

Matsuzaka, who helped the Red Sox win the World Series last fall but looked nervous here in front of adoring fans, gave up two runs in the first inning to Oakland before settling down to pitch four scoreless innings.

The Red Sox tied the game with a solo home run in the ninth and won it in the 10th on a two-run double by Manny Ram¿rez. Another Japanese player, winning pitcher Hideki Okajima, helped seal the game for the Red Sox with scoreless relief pitching in the bottom of the ninth inning.

The golden era of Japanese players in the United States might have only just begun, according to Robert Whiting, an American journalist and author of "You Gotta Have Wa," a book about Japanese baseball.