{"id":119,"date":"2007-03-03T12:09:22","date_gmt":"2007-03-03T12:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=119"},"modified":"2009-09-26T10:59:08","modified_gmt":"2009-09-26T09:59:08","slug":"matsuzaka-pitched-apparently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=119","title":{"rendered":"Matsuzaka pitched, apparently!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Matsuzaka-mania is off and running after he made his first unofficial pitching appearance last night.\u00c2\u00a0 I thought I would point this out in case you hadn&#8217;t heard already.<\/p>\n<p>The headline on MLB.com worries me a little, boldly stating that &#8220;Matsuzaka dominates BC in Sox debut&#8221;.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 It bothers me because the BC they refer to are Boston College.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure this Boston College team contained a number of good young athletes and I don&#8217;t mean any disrespect, but wouldn&#8217;t any reasonable person expect Matsuzaka to dominate them?\u00c2\u00a0 Why is that the big story they are going with surrounding his first appearance?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m excited like everyone else at the prospect of seeing Matsuzaka pitch in the Majors.\u00c2\u00a0 I don&#8217;t support the Red Sox but I would love to see him have a great rookie season (except for his starts against the A&#8217;s of course).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 By all accounts he&#8217;s a big talent and it&#8217;s a neat story for the Media to write about this Japanese star coming over to take on America, but give him a break.<\/p>\n<p>The way some people are building him up, he&#8217;s going to have to get fifteen strikeouts (or more) and a win every time he pitches to avoid being a disappointment.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s completely unfair on the guy.\u00c2\u00a0 By all means get excited about him, but give him the chance to be great rather than burden him with the expectation of being super-human.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe I&#8217;m being overly sensitive.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s standard British practice to build people up just so you can knock them back down again.\u00c2\u00a0 Hopefully that&#8217;s not the case with the treatment of Matsuzaka and it&#8217;s just people getting wrapped-up in the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matsuzaka-mania is off and running after he made his first unofficial pitching appearance last night.\u00c2\u00a0 I thought I would point this out in case you hadn&#8217;t heard already. The headline on MLB.com worries me a little, boldly stating that &#8220;Matsuzaka dominates BC in Sox debut&#8221;.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 It bothers me because the BC they refer to are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4274,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/4274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}