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TOKYO: US Major League Baseball has pulled in sold-out crows to the
Tokyo Dome as it opened its regular season in Japan, but hometown
teams aren’t sharing the enthusiasm.
Nearly 45,000 people crowded into the stadium
for the two showdowns between the Oakland Athletics and the World
Series defending champion Boston Red Sox, starring the Japanese
pitching duo of Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Okajima.
But even with a disappointing performance by
Matsuzaka, the US games forced coverage of the Pacific League, one
of Japan’s two divisions which started its own season just days
earlier, into the back pages of the country’s newspapers.
Senichi Hoshino, coach of Japan’s national
team for the Beijing Olympics, was not amused.
“Japanese baseball has entered its own season.
So why are they allowing our business rivals to play their
season-opening games?” Hoshino said on his website.
It is not just the Japanese who are upset.
Bobby Valentine, a former manager of the Texas
Rangers and New York Mets who led the Pacific League’s Chiba Lotte
Marines to the 2005 Japan Series title, accused the Japanese
commissioners of poor management decisions.
Valentine said the timing of the face-off
between the Red Sox and A’s was “ludicrous” since Japanese
teams were trying to renew interest in games at home.
-- AFP
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