FanHouse Junichi Tazawa

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NEW YORK -- The Red Sox jersey of John Smoltz, shelled Thursday night by the Yankees, hung in a locker Friday at Yankee Stadium.

But Smoltz was not there. He was designated for assignment by the Red Sox, possibly ending his likely Hall of Fame career.

"He worked extremely hard," Boston general manager Theo Epstein said. "The results just weren't there."

Smoltz was 2-5 with an 8.33 ERA in eight starts after he recovered from shoulder surgery. Opposing batters hit .343 off him, including a .444 mark by lefties.

"It got to a point where we thought we needed to make a change to help our team do better," manager Terry Francona said.

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.

Baltimore entered the offseason with exactly one rotation spot filled, so to say it needs pitching help would be an understatement of epic proportions. The Orioles signed journeyman Mark Hendrickson last week. Now they've erased another of the question marks after Jeremy Guthrie by agreeing to two-year deal with Japanese pitcher Koji Uehara, according to Dan Connolly of the Baltimore Sun.

Uehara, who will be 34 on Opening Day and who has an outstanding international resume, will be the first Japanese player in franchise history -- a strange thought considering the impact talent from the Far East that currently resides in the AL East.

The signing certainly could pay future dividends, as Peter Schmuck writes, but the question in the short-term is just how he'll fit in at Camden Yards and how he'll cope with pitching in the toughest division in baseball.

His agent thinks he'll be outstanding:

"I have a lot of confidence in this guy. He'll take the ball every fifth day and can be a No. 2 or 3 in a very difficult division," [Mark] Pieper said. "This will be a challenge for him but he is clearly up for it."

Of course, agents are paid to think and talk like that about their clients.

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.

On the heels of the news that Red Sox had offered Junichi Tazawa a $6 million deal, word coming out of Tokyo today says that Tazawa has received another "lucrative" offer, this time from the Texas Rangers, and that the 22-year-old expects to decide on a Major League team soon.

It's also reported that he's leaning towards the Red Sox (who wouldn't be?), though he's spoken with the Rangers, Braves, and Mariners as well. Of course, it was also reported that Rangers' GM Jon Daniels said he wouldn't meet with Tazawa, so who knows?

If you've been following this whole saga, you already know it's an incredibly sticky situation. Tazawa is supposed to be eligible for the Japanese draft, after which he'd have to play long enough in Japan to qualify for free agency or ask for his team to post him and make him available to Major League suitors. Instead, by avoiding the draft, he's creating a loophole in which any major league team can sign him without the posting process.

There have been a lot of players to make the jump from Japan to the major leagues, but Junichi Tazawa is a special case. Unlike players like Ichiro Suzuki or Daisuke Matsuzaka who proved their worth by playing in Japan's professional ranks for years, Tazawa is a 22-year-old amateur who requested he not be drafted by any of Japan's teams, allowing him to make the jump directly across the Pacific.

As far as major league teams, this is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, Tazawa is eligible to be signed just like any other free agent and won't require a hefty posting fee on top of his contract. (By comparison, the Red Sox had to paid $51 million to Dice-K's former team a couple of years ago simply for the right to negotiate.)

So what's the downside? Just like signing any untested prospect, there's no guarantee Tazawa will actually pan out. If Tazawa had any professional experience, at least MLB teams would have a frame of reference for how well he might perform in the states.

International Pastime looks at baseball's influence outside the U.S.

You've probably noticed over the last few years there have been a lot more players in MLB with names that are hard to pronounce, or just sound dirty. Yes, Japan is quickly becoming the new Latin America as just about every team these days is adding a Japanese player to their roster.

It's hard to blame them for it, as guys like Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Hideki Matsui, and Akinori Iwamura are proving themselves to be pretty good players. It's also nice to have a Kosuke Fukudome around for a fan base to blame for everything.

Of course, on the flip side of this equation is Japan. Due to the amount of Japanese players crossing the Pacific for the honor of facing off against John Lannan and the Washington Nationals, it's leaving the Japanese league a little thin. Which is why they've decided to implement a new policy in hopes of keeping players from leaving the island.

An executive committee representing Japan's 12 professional baseball teams have agreed to introduce a ban on players returning to Japanese baseball after turning down rookie draft nominations in Japan and signing with overseas pro teams.

International Pastime looks at baseball's influence outside the U.S.

For years major league teams have honored a handshake agreement with Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) not to sign Japanese amateur prospects. Once a player signs in Japan, he's not eligible to test free agency for nine years, meaning any player who hopes to jump across the Pacific to play in the majors before then must go through an expensive posting process which compensates his Japanese team.

It's a system that has allowed Japanese baseball to flourish, but from a player's perspective, it's obviously quite limiting. As Peter Abraham of the Journal News describes, Junichi Tazawa, a 22-year-old right-handed pitcher, hopes to buck the system by skipping the NPB and signing with a U.S. team.

Tazawa has been heavily scouted by several MLB teams (Abraham mentions the Red Sox, Braves, Mets and Dodgers, and another report puts the Tigers in the mix, as well) and last week asked the 12 teams in the NPB not to draft him so that he'd be free to sign a major league contract. Not surprisingly, NPB quickly went into freak-out mode, issuing the following press release last week:

"The initial rules for amateur player acquisition was created back in 1962 by the Commissioners from the Majors and the NPB," the release said. "Since then, no amateur players have signed with MLB teams and it is this fact that indicates that this was more than just a gentleman's agreement, but rather an implicit understanding that the Majors would do no such thing," it said. "That a handful of clubs from the Majors is trying to break this gentlemen's agreement is truly regrettable."