Hanshin The Tigers lineup isn't intimidated about facing Hiroshima ace Hiroki Kuroda in the regular season's opener. First baseman Andy Sheets, a former teammate of Kuroda, owns the righthander to the tune of a .517 clip (.647 in 2006) and leftfielder Tomoaki Kanemoto scalds him at .407. Moreoever, catcher Akihiro Yano did Kuroda for a .438 last year. Nevertheless, while taking those torpedoes from Hanshin, Kuroda racked up a 3-0 record against them with a 1.58 ERA. That may have been emblematic of the Tigers not hitting well with men in scoring position more than anything else because in 2005, he had a 4.68 ERA when facing Hanshin, which isn't good. 

Kanemoto needs 154 more hits for 2,000 and entrance into the Meikyukai. 

Kentaro Sekimoto won the second base job and will start on Opening Day batting eighth. Sekimoto batting eighth? Yikes! If shortstop Takashi Toritani can improve his power numbers that will be a fornidable 8-1 combination in the order and Toritani's RBI production could swell substantially. . 

Yomiuri Shortstop Tomohiro Nioka started at DH in the Eastern League Thursday and went 1-3 and he comes back from a leg injury. He is hoping to be back with the Giants top team on April 3rd.

Bad news on the Jeremy Powell front. He will have an arthroscopic knee procedure Friday. It hasn't been announced what the problem is that necessitated the surgery.

Koshien Tournament Teikyo High School put up a niner in the second inning to win it in a laugher against Ichikawa High 12-4. However, Teikyo ace Atori Ota was hit in the right thumb by a pitch during the rally and was taken to hospital for x rays. No fracture was found and he was diagnosed with a bruise. He even returned for the end of the contest. Teikyo moved into the quarterfinals for the firs t time in 15 years as a result of the victory. 

The plate umpire in the above game pulled a calf muscle in the above game in the first and he departed, leaving it to continue an official short. 

Muroto High continued its Cinderella run, besting a solid program in Ube Shogyo High 4-1. It was tied 1-1 after seven before they got one in the eighth and two in the ninth to pull away.

Kumamoto Kogyo High is a vaunted program, but it has been 20 years since it has reached the quarterfinals of the spring Koshien tourney. They did that Thursday, as they rallied for three runs in the 12th inning against Chiba Keidai Fuzoku High for a 6-3 triumph. Kumamoto's ace went all the way on 177 pitches after giving up the tying run in the bottom of the ninth and getting some defensive help in the 11th when a man was thrown out at the plate. Chiba's ace threw 194 pitches in a losing effort. 

Osaka Toin High's club practice at a nearby university Thursday and outfielder Sho Nakata belted 12 homers in 52 swings. He will start on the hill Saturday in Toin's next tourney battle and he said that he intends to strike every hitter out. He will face Kenjiro Tanaka, the ace of Tokoha Gakuen Kikugawa High, who struckout 17 in his last start. Former Hanshin manager Senichi Hoshino enthused that Nakata is the type of talent you see only once every 30 years, asserting that he has more potential than Hideki Matsui had when he was coming out of Seiryo High. 

Miscellaneous For those of you living in Korea, Munwha Broadcasting's join venture with ESPN in that country has acquired rights to broadcast road games by Yomiuri and Hanshin. More stuff about that Here. It doesn't work in Firefox, so you will have to use Internet Explorer to read it. 

Boston reliever Hideki Okajima tossed a perfect inning against Tampa Bay Thursday. 

Daisuke Matsuzaka, meanwhile, threw 49 pitches in the bullpen, using his entire repetoire. A writer for MLB.com has chosen Matsuzaka as his favorite for the Cy Young Award just ahead of Johan Santana. 

Here's another Matsuzaka-related item that ought to engender a lot of eye rolling: a history professor at Harvard, Andrew Gordon (I hope I have transliterated that correctly), is taking a paid sabbatical so that he can follow Matsuzaka around this season with the aim of eventually issuing a thesis about how Matsuzaka brings about changes in Japanese and American culture. He will look into such questions as, "how has the Japanese image of the majors evolved," and "how has Japanese players coming to MLB changed American conceptions about Japanese culture?" 

Gordon was a guest professor at Hosei University at one time while he studied labor and management relations in Japan. He also worked as a Japanese translator at the Montreal Olympics. His family are rabid Red Sox fans dating back five generations. Talk about mixing business with pleasure! I only hope that taxpayers aren't funding any part of this stuff since Harvard is a private school that nonetheless eats up a lot of government grant money. 

This reminds me of when I was teaching english in South Korea and one of my students was a Korean college professor. She hadn't published anything in a while and was in a bit of a panic for topics to write on and asked me to brainstorm with her. Unfortunately, I knew little about her field and couldn't help her much. This project by Gordon reeks of the same kind of desperation to publish something just to satisfy criteria set down by Harvard's administrators. 

I would further posit that while baseball has had something (very very small) of an impact on how Americans think of Japanese culture, I would argue that things such as anime and manga have been much more salutary, leading, for example,  to the so-called "wapanese" sub trend among some American teenagers. And, of course, there have been all the books published over the last 20 years or so by Chalmers Johnson, et al, detailing how Japanese society works, how it sees the world and how Americans should take it on, not to mention the explosion of focus on Japan in international business departments at colleges all through the land. That is before you get to what the internet has done with the variety of websites dealing with Japan and its culture. 

Baseball is a fun subject to write about, but it just hasn't done anything by itself  to make Americans understand Japan better.It is a tiny part of a larger picture that ties economics, politics and media together. So unless Gordon just has amazing lightning bolt insights into baseball and Japan, this strikes me as largely academic masturbation endeavoring to conceal glorified fanboy behavior. And besides, I personally believe that Matsuzaka is just kind of the backwash of Japanese players accompanying the wave begun by Hideo Nomo and Ichiro Suzuki, both of whom are more historically significant baseballwise than Matsuzaka in the marketing of the sport and how Americans see Asian athletes. 

It's probably not a good idea for a working class suburban dipshit like me to take on a Harvard professor, whose I.Q. is up around my high school weight, but there it is FWIW. 

Seattle centerfielder Ichiro Suzuki saved his team three runs with a running, lunging catch of aliner up the rightcenter gap with the bases loaded in the bottom of the first against San Francisco Thursday at Big Brother's Helper Phone Company Field. At the plate, he was 1-2 with a walk. 

Rays third baseman Akinori Iwamura was 0-3. 

Cardinals outfielder So Taguchi was 0-1 with a walk Thursday against Florida. 

Colorado second baseman Kazuo Matsui was 1-3 Thursday against the Chicago White Sox. Sox second baseman Tadahito Iguchi was involved ina B game against Birmingham and went 0-2. 

Eric Gagne was supposed to be Texas' closer, but he will begin the regular season on the disabled list and so last year's game finisher, Akinori Otsuka will reassume that position for now.

Yankees lefty Kei Igawa threw 46 pitches in the bullpen Thursday as a warmup for his scheduled start against Detroit Saturday. Thursday, Bombers leftfielder Hideki Matsui was 0-3 against Toronto. 

Even though he was a little shaky in recent proactice games, Yuki Saito made the final cut for the Waseda University varsity. He is wearing number 16, which was also previously donned by Lotte pitcher Satoru Komiyama and ex-Nippon Ham hurler Naoki Takahashi when they were at that school. 

However, Waseda canceled a practice game against Tokyo Gas that was scheduled for the 30th before the Seibu scouting scandal broke. Since both teams had players who were at the center of the controversy, they apparently felt that for appearances sake they should forego it.