FanHouse Hideki Okajima

Starting Five is our wrapup of the previous day's baseball action, with a quick nod to what is ahead.

You Oughta Know ...
That it's quite a luxury to have a dependable setup reliever with closing experience such as J.J. Putz or Carlos Marmol. Just ask the Royals or the Tigers or the Astros or the Red Sox.

Kansas City's Kyle Farnsworth, right, Detroit's Brandon Lyon and Houston's LaTroy Hawkins -- all signed to contracts in the offseason -- each allowed a tying or go-ahead homer in the eighth inning of his game. Boston's Hideki Okajima gave up a pair or runs to turn a 5-1 game into a tight one.

From now until the regular season begins, Fantasy Flings is where you'll find interesting story lines about your favorite teams from Spring Training. If there is a position battle, a nagging injury, a comeback story or a youngster making a surge for the "big club" we'll let you know the fantasy implications.

Boston Red Sox
What's the strength of this Red Sox club so far in spring? By looking at the numbers, it's their bullpen. The seven projected relievers in the bullpen (Jonathan Papelbon, Takashi Saito, Ramon Ramirez, Justin Masterson, Manny Delcarmen, Hideki Okajima and Javier Lopez) have combined to give up only one run on six hits in 13 innings of work. Last season the Red Sox bullpen produced 34 wins and these seven pitchers struck out 456 batters. What does all of this mean for your fantasy club? It means that Paps is still a solid, lock down closer. It also means that if you're looking for cheap wins, strikeouts, low ERA's and WHIP's you should start by scouring the Red Sox pen. And if your fantasy league uses holds, the value from this list just went up.

When drafting in fantasy baseball, I often find rankings are a lot less useful than using the tier system. Simply group guys together with others who will perform similarly, and you won't focus on single players. Being frazzled when that single player is taken immediately before your pick is a good way to ruin your draft.

We're definitely not proponents of drafting closers high, but getting the last member of a tier at good value could work in the right situations.

As former President Andrew Johnson reported earlier this week, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are not, in fact, the same team. I've never thought of them as an autonomous unit, but rather a set of bookends. Between them lies history, science, geography.. all of the important stuff, everything you need to know. Everything outside of them is just crap on your shelves.

As Andrew pointed out, the teams are run very differently. The Yankees have unzipped their, uh, coin purse and put their dense, cylindrical wrapped coins on the table, scooping up the available big names in a grand fashion that leaves nothing but a cloud of smoke and gold-laced footprints in the faces of the competition.

The Sox have responded by holding up a picture of Dustin Pedroia and trying to find every free agent who looks remotely like him. It's been a running gag in our strip for a while now, but the Red Sox need to sign Delmon and Dmitri Young to keep me from going snowblind next season.

The whitest Dugout u'know is after the jump.

Most of the baseball world was in Las Vegas this week for the winter meetings, but not Hideki Okajima. The Red Sox reliever was in Hawaii so that he could run in the Honolulu Marathon. Okajima finished in just over six hours, almost four hours behind the winners, but a hearty congratulations from all of us to Okajima for his accomplishment.

Just note that "all of us" does not include any members of the Red Sox organization. The team was unaware that Okajima was going to participate in the marathon until Friday and a team official told the Boston Globe that they would have encouraged him not to run if they had known.

The Red Sox have every right to be cheesed off about Okajima's choice. Standard player contracts include clauses forbidding all sorts of activities that could lead to injuries. Motorcycling (remember Jeff Kent's, ahem, car-washing injury?), skydiving, lion dentistry ... that sort of thing.

Marathon running may not seem like quite as dangerous a pursuit, but there's certainly a high risk of injury from the run as well as the training process. There was rain in Honolulu and the slick roads could have led to a fall that would've cost the Red Sox dearly. It seems like Okajima's fine, but it wouldn't be a surprise to see marathons added to the prohibited list in future Boston contracts.

As if you needed more proof that the Red Sox have become the dominant major league team in the Far East, Boston appears poised to acquire another Japanese pitcher in the wake of the successful transition of Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Okajima to the United States.

According to two Japanese news organizations -- Mainichi Daily News and Nikkan Sports -- Junichi Tazawa will reveal by the beginning of next week that he has chosen the Red Sox over the other Major League teams that were interested in his services.

The list also included the Texas Rangers, Atlanta Braves, Seattle Mariners, Detroit Tigers and perhaps a few others.

The anticipated signing of Tazawa is interesting for a couple of reasons, first and foremost because the 22-year-old right-hander circumvented the NPB, Japan's professional baseball league, entirely.

Tazawa, who played for a semi-pro team in Japan this year, warned NPB teams not to draft him so that he could jump directly to American baseball and avoid the costly posting system, in which NPB clubs sell their players to the highest major league bidder. The move threatens the long-standing gentlemen's agreement between the NPB and MLB, opening the door for other Japanese players to go directly to the major leagues, possibly watering down the talent pool in Japan, but also enabling Japanese teams to potentially go after the elite amateur talents on this side of the Pacific Ocean.

It's also interesting because the Red Sox continue to spread their roots in the Far East like no other team. They have plenty of scouting resources devoted to the region and Tazawa is just the latest instance of the club harvesting elite talent from there.

Tazawa is far from proven, even in Japan, and because of Boston's deep rotation he'll probably head to advanced Single-A or Double-A to start 2009, but he represents another talented arm for one of the deepest stables of pitching in baseball, an arm that might enable the Sox to move one of their other pitching prospects for the young catcher they covet.

The ALCS begins tonight. With the Red Sox and Rays getting ready to face off, the MLB FanHouse crew took some time to discuss the important issues of the series. Are the Rays too inexperienced? Does it matter that they don't have a closer? Do they stand a chance against the defending world champs?

Pat Lackey: This really is about as David and Goliath as baseball playoff series gets, isn't it? I know the Rays weren't intimidated by the White Sox, but I think there's more of a potential for them to be starstruck in this round. Not to use a gratuitous hockey/Pittsburgh comparison, but this match-up reminds me a lot of the Stanley Cup Finals in June where the young Penguins blew threw the Eastern Conference without serious challenge and met the experienced Red Wings in the Finals. The Pens played the Wings even for the final four games of the series, but they were starstruck and got blown off the ice in the first two and by the time they pulled it together, it was too late. There's certainly the potential for that to happen here, isn't there?

The season is almost over, and we're finishing up with the Yankees and the Red Sox. And hey: I'm glad to be rid of at least one of them.

So begins our annual switchover to playoff-themed Dugouts. Or, if you want to be specific, "How Hard Is It To Do Four Dugouts A Week About The Angels."

Tonight's Dugout (chock full of new and seldomly used screen names) is after the jump.

The idea that a major league team in this day and age would consider race when putting together its roster seems laughable to me -- it's hard enough to get into the postseason without limiting yourself to only a portion of the talent pool.

Nevertheless, that's a complaint being lobbed in the direction of the Red Sox by the Boston Globe, which based a story around the fact that a handful of Latino fans have noticed that there are fewer players who look like them in prominent roles:

"I've always been a Red Sox fan. That's not going to change. I want to be a Red Sox fan," said Javy Fernandez, a 22-year-old Dominican-American who owns a market in Dorchester. "But I get more excited when I see my people - people of my ethnicity - play on my team. It makes you feel like you're playing on the team also."

Red Sox assistant GM Jed Hoyer insists the front office is "completely colorblind" when making moves, and given the team's track record of playing deep into October, it's hard to doubt him. Even Mike Lowell, one of two Latino players in the regular lineup, doesn't think this is a discussion worth having.

Our MLB editor provides weekly dispatches from major league games in Notes From the Clubhouse.

Bad news for Boston fans Monday night. The Red Sox will place designated hitter David Ortiz on the disabled list after an MRI revealed the slugger had a torn tendon sheath in his extensor carpi ulnaris -- a muscle in the wrist. Ortiz is certain to miss at least a few weeks, though the Boston Herald has reported that he will miss at least a month and could face season-ending surgery.

Manager Terry Francona did not indicate the injury was quite that serious, though he will confer with Ortiz, GM Theo Epstein and the team's medical staff tomorrow in Boston.

Big Papi struggled in April, but he was his usual slugging self in May putting up a line of .318/.409/.617 (AVG/OBP/SLG) over the last month. No team in baseball is prepared to replace that kind of production, but the Red Sox are deeper than any other organization in the game and are prepared to make do while Ortiz gets healthy. Francona said after the game that reserve first baseman Sean Casey would likely see additional time while Ortiz is sidelined, but the most likely lineup Francona will put out there will probably feature Manny Ramirez at DH and Jacoby Ellsbury, Brandon Moss and maybe even Bobby Kielty or Kevin Youkilis splitting time in left field.

When asked about seeing more time as a designated hitter, Ramirez said "I love it. I love to DH," though he then went on to joke that if he played there too much it might hurt his chances at getting the Gold Glove he so covets. "It's nice to give him a blow and still keep his bat in the game," said Francona of playing Ramirez at DH.

If the Red Sox were merely losing Ortiz for a few weeks, there wouldn't be much to worry about, but Big Papi's injury is just at the top of a long list of concerns for the reigning champs.

Boston will miss Ortiz, but they'll do a very good job of filling the void in the short-term