Season-Ending Notes: Asian Baseball Players in the News!
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Asian baseball players are grabbing some interesting headlines!

Baseball season has ended but there are still a couple of Asian-related baseball news bytes making their rounds that have caught my attention for the last couple of days.

First of all, congratulations to the New York Yankees on their 27th World Series Championship. It’s been a couple years since they’ve been on top and they always seem to put together the best team that money CAN buy. And being from the east coast, I have an appreciation for the bronx bombers. I grew up watching Derek Jeter and Co. take the World Series year by year. It also helps they were stomping on the Philadelphia Phillies, the most-hated team to any true blue Dodger fan.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand. First off: Hideki Matsui winning the World Series Most Valuable Player award. Wow. Hats off to him. I didn’t see that coming at all. Who could? He wasn’t even starting! He’s been injury-prone. He was playing in a designated hitter capacity, not something he was happy with but realized he had to do. He’s in the last year of his contract so he’ll be a free agent next year. And he wasn’t as dominating as he used to be. I half-figured he’d be on his way back to Japan if he couldn’t get a starting outfielder job in the United States, but with his legs filled with liquid as they are, I’m not sure any team would go through the trouble of acquiring him.

And then again, he proved why he’s nicknamed Godzilla this World Series. In a pinch-hitting/designated hitter capacity, he batted .615 with 3HR and 8 RBIs, 6 of them being on the last game. He almost singlehandedly won the series-clinching game for the New York Yankees. He deservedly won the MVP award, and he was the first Japanese player to win it. It was odd for me to see a Japanese player require a translator in his MVP interview. This is America’s game but it’s going international fast.

Another Asian player in the news: Tim Lincecum (his mother is Filipino). Timmy’s been the best thing going for the San Francisco Giants. An unlikely ace, he’s undersized but still able to throw 98 MPH when he wants to. He was the NL Cy Young award winner last year and a frontrunner for the NL Cy Young award winner this year and he just got caught with a dollop of marijuana and drug paraphernalia in his car on a routine traffic stop. Not sure if this will adversely affect him much, but Lincecum’s been one of the brightest athletes the MLB has to offer. Who knows? Being from California, maybe it was medical. ‘Chronic’ back pain perhaps? His violent throwing motion must take a toll on him physically.