This blog has moved! Yes, already!
As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
New features: Bigger type, more graphics, comments that load 10 times faster and a larger and more recent photo that makes me look pretty doggone old. I think you’ll like it (the blog, not the photo). But I am, as we know too well, often wrong.
Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2009 > February > 16 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USKawakami media mania is culture shock for Braves
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lake Buena Vista, Fla. — In other American cities, the phenomenon is old news: A Japanese player signs with a major-league team and the Japanese media congregates. It happened in Los Angeles with Hideo Nomo, in New York with Hideki Irabu, Kazuo Matsui and Hideki Matsui, in Seattle with Ichiro Suzuki, in Boston with Daisuke Matsuzaka. But for those of us in the Atlanta, it’s brand new.
Kenshin Kawakami has taken part in two workouts as a Braves pitcher. The first, on Sunday, was documented by 30 Japanese journalists. Eight still cameras and one minicam captured his brief bullpen session.
On Monday the Kawakami watch dwindled to a still-substantial dozen. To serve the apparently rabid audience back home, he has been holding two daily briefings — one before the workout, one afterward. Intrigued, an American reporter listened in and, through the translation offered by Daichi Takasue, the UC-Santa Barbara student the Braves hired to act as Kawakami’s interpreter, learned this:
The Japanese media is fixated on fitness.
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By MARK
February 17, 2009 6:55 AM | Link to this
Im going to make it easy for everyone now lets just call KawaKami “Kawa” it will be interesting to see if he can consistantly get major league hitters out, we have really invested a lot of moolaugh to test this guy..I wish him well! Go Braves in 09
By MARK
February 17, 2009 6:56 AM | Link to this
Im going to make it easy for everyone now lets just call KawaKami “Kawa” it will be interesting to see if he can consistantly get major league hitters out, we have really invested a lot of moolaugh to test this guy..I wish him well! Go Braves in 09
By Chris Broe
February 17, 2009 12:22 PM | Link to this
R U suggesting that this Pitcher puts in a brief bullpen session and then a half hour later he has to put in another? Wont that ruin his arm?
By Skeezix
February 17, 2009 5:03 PM | Link to this
The Japanese media machine is over the top when it comes to their sports heroes. I was at the British Open a few years ago and Aoki, who had no chance of winning, was there. The Japanese media was all over the guy all the time —-even off the course at the hotel where he was staying. You didn’t see many of them following the top players. We (my brothers and I) got a real grin out of watching it.