KND Report: Dice-K hits DL

June 21, 7:36 PMAsian-American Sports ExaminerMichael Street

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In a move that surprised no one outside the organization, Boston put Daisuke Matsuzaka on the disabled list today.

When they announced the move, they indicated he would be lucky to return in the 25-day minimum.

The one surprise was that yesterday's MRI revealed no structural damage to his shoulder, a good news-bad news situation.

Had there been damage, at least the team would have known why his arm—and pitches—have been so weak this season. Now, there's no indication of why.

The team thinks it knows the ultimate cause of his problems: the WBC. As I discussed in yesterday's post, they don't think he had the time to build up his arm properly.

Playing in ultra-competitive games so soon put too much strain and possibly prevented him from getting into a groove. "He was pitching in these games trying to get outs before he was ready to do that," Francona explained.

If other WBC pitchers, particularly ones on the American team, haven't experienced the same problems, it could be that other countries (and players) don't take the competition as seriously as Team Japan.

It's hard to understand in America how much Asian players and fans follow the WBC—both Japanese and Korean papers were rife with extreme commentary about each game.

After losing to Korea two games straight (one of them a meaningless first-round game), Ichiro said, "Today is the most humiliating day in my baseball life." Rather dramatic, given that Japan wasn't eliminated.

In Korea, the LG Twins of the KBO printed T-shirts analogizing Jung Bong's shutting down of Ichiro to the assassination of Hirobumi Ito, an agent of the Japanese occupation, by a Korean rebel, An Jung-geun (whose name is similar to Bong Jung-keun's).

This, in turn, was a response to Ichiro's comments after the 2006 WBC that Team Japan should beat Korea, China and Taiwan so badly that they wouldn't forget it for thirty years.

As much as I like Ichiro, comments like this are clearly out of line. Those countries all have a contentious history (to put it mildly) that show the emotion behind these WBC games that are, at best, an afterthought for most American fans (and, to a lesser degree, Team America MLB players).

But the point is that the WBC means far more to Dice-K and the other Japanese players, so it's not surprising that he would pitch his arm off in the games. Now it's Boston—who paid $100 million for Dice-K's services—who must pay the price.

They're going to pay that price for a while. Terry Francona said, "This is not going to be a two-week DL. We're going to have to figure this out. We have a lot of work ahead of us trying to get him back to being Daisuke."