Feeling his way

Matsuzaka has handle on job; work remains

September 30, 2008|Amalie Benjamin, Globe Staff

The baseball rolled across his fingertips, around his palm, and over his skin. He touched it, judging by weight and by feel, smooth hide and raised seams. Daisuke Matsuzaka knew the differences, had felt them every time he pulled his right arm back to throw. The baseball in Japan was smaller, lighter, fit in the hand in ways these new baseballs, these American baseballs, didn't.

He had felt it every time he touched the ball in his first season in the United States, jarring and uncomfortable each time, the dusty ash left over from the way the balls are prepared not fitting with the tacky feel he was used to, from sand used in Japan. He had learned to accept the feel by the end of last season, but it wasn't enough. To be the pitcher he wanted to be - the pitcher he was back in Japan - that would need to change.

"I just made sure that I had a ball around wherever I was, whether that was in the house or in the car driving back and forth from my workouts, even playing with my kid I used the baseball," Matsuzaka told the Globe, through translator Masa Hoshino, in a rare one-on-one interview. "For me it was important to touch the ball, sort of get a natural feel for how it slips off the hand, and be able to feel and manipulate the ball as I was able to do in Japan."

So it was different this year, when he arrived in spring training, and when he arrived in Boston. There was a fusion with the ball, a sense of what it would do and where it would go. It didn't always give Matsuzaka the needed control - witness the 94 walks in 167 2/3 innings - but it gave him what he needed to be his type of pitcher.

"The reason you can throw six pitches with control and movement is because you have feel for the baseball," said Bobby Valentine, former major league manager and now manager of Japan's Chiba Lotte Marines, by phone from Japan. "And when the ball lays in your fingers, the energy that's imparted from different parts of the baseball is going to make it go in different directions and different speeds."

Matsuzaka did that, and more. It might not have always been pretty. And, in fact, it was often messy. Messy and ugly and frustratingly slow. But Matsuzaka, in his second season in the major leagues, his second season facing the best of what baseball has to offer, his second season of the glitz and the glamour of the Red Sox, fashioned himself into a pitcher with Cy Young Award credentials. An underappreciated pitcher.