Baseball On My Brain

If you go back to one of my earlier posts, I had a bit of an awakening as to how people watch the game differently.

This past weekend, I had another, thanks to Brad Lefton of the New York Times. Lefton penned an intriguing article on the way Japanese fans and media watch the game a bit differently than some of us do stateside; in particular, he highlights the matchup between the Mariners’ Ichiro Suzuki and the Red Sox’ Daisuke Matsuzaka.

Now being from Seattle, I’ve gotten a bit of a taste of what it’s like to watch baseball through Ichiro’s eyes, as he’s known to give sometimes cryptic postgame comments and analyses of a game that definitely does not fit the Western protocol for sound bytes.

Lefton expands on that in a way that was pretty eye-opening to me. Jason Varitek’s analysis of it was particularly noteworthy, since he’s been on the other end of almost all of Matsuzaka’s pitches, yet approaches the game from a Western angle.

Read the article and share your thoughts –