The story was supposed to go something like this: After the Boston Red Sox paid $51.1 million for the right to sign Daisuke Matsuzaka to a six-year, $52 million contract, he would win the Cy Young Award while leading the Red Sox to their second world title in four years. More than that, the 26-year-old virtuoso would inspire a revolution in pitching technique; his vaunted arsenal of nearly a dozen distinct pitches, his unorthodox training methods, and his break with calcified pitching patterns would expose the American style as stale and unimaginative.

As is, the opposition has had its vote, and Matsuzaka is just another great starter in a great rotation. Alternately brilliant and quite hittable, he’s left no doubt that he deserved his hype, but he hasn’t shown the consistency one would expect from a world class ace. One suspects it will eventually come — moving all the way around the world to a strange new country is difficult enough without the involvement of big league hitters — but for now he might not even be the best Japanese pitcher on his own team. The competition is Hideki Okajima, the wiry left-handed reliever who has partnered with closer Jonathan Papelbon to form perhaps the most effective late-inning tandem in baseball.

No one really expected this — not just because Okajima lacks the overpowering pitches you’d expect of a pitcher who rang up a 0.83 ERA and 29 strikeouts in his first 43.1 American innings — he was also no star in Japan. In his last three seasons with the Nippon Ham Fighters and the Yomiuri Giants, Okajima earned only nine saves. He was a good pitcher, but a setup man, more a Mike Stanton type than someone likely to pitch like Mariano Rivera on his first exposure to the American League East. Bobby Valentine, manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines, is willing to go further than that.

“Every team had a better lefty than Okajima,” he told me recently. “Every one.”

Okajima isn’t, of course, the only or even the best Japanese reliever dominating in the majors. Takashi Saito of the Los Angeles Dodgers is pitching about as well as Eric Gagne did in his prime, while Akinori Otsuka of the Texas Rangers is enjoying another fine season. Three pitchers doing well halfway into the season is just three pitchers doing well halfway into the season, but what these three, and past successful Japanese relievers, have in common goes well past their shared nationality. In fact, that’s probably both the least interesting and the least telling thing about them. The most interesting? As Valentine puts it, “They weren’t special here. They were pretty good pitchers, but they weren’t the allstars, or dominant pitchers.”

You could dismiss that as provincialism; Valentine may be the best baseball manager in the world right now, but he’s also given to strong claims about the caliber of Japanese baseball, as when he claimed in 2000 that Ichiro Suzuki was one of the five best players in the world, or when he flatly said of Japan in 2005 that “the level of play is equal.” The problem is that Valentine is just stating a fact. The odd thing isn’t that Japanese relievers are doing well; it’s that they’re doing better than they did in Japan.

Saito, for instance, posted a 4.62 ERA in his last three seasons in Japan. He struck out 7.12 batters per nine, walked 2.26, gave up 1.41 home runs, and allowed 9.8 hits. In America, he’s struck out 12.05 per nine, walked 2.11, given up .55 home runs, and allowed 5.48 hits, all adding up to a 1.88 ERA in 108 games. Even allowing for the fact that Saito was a starter in Japan, and that a lot of his improvement probably just comes down to being able to focus on throwing his best pitches in short stints, these are remarkable numbers— especially as, contra Valentine, the level of play in Nippon Professional Baseball is probably somewhere between Class AAA and the majors.

Otsuka similarly improved on his way across the Pacific. His 8.42 K/9 doesn’t match the 12.23 mark he posted in his last three seasons in Japan, but he’s cut his home run rate in half, and his 2.44 ERA in the States is a tick better than his 2.61 mark with Chunichi and Kintetsu. Of the five NPB veterans who have thrown at least 90 innings in relief in America — Saito, Otsuka, Kazuhiro Sasaki, Shigetoshi Hasegawa, and Shingo Takatsu — only Sasaki pitched better in Japan than he did in America. Junkballing Takatsu saw his strikeout rate climb by a third; Hasegawa cut his hit rate by 10%.

How can this be so? There are two possible explanations. The first is that there’s some quirk about the styles these pitchers employ that makes them exceptionally difficult on the best hitters in the world. The second is that they’re just good pitchers — and that, by implication, Japanese baseball might be even better than we think.

The first theory certainly has a bit of weight to it; it’s almost certainly true that scouts are simply doing a good job identifying pitchers with unique deliveries or pitches. Otsuka, for instance, has an unusual pause in his rather spastic delivery; Takatsu was notoriously shameless about throwing the eephus pitch; Okajima unwinds like a corkscrew while firing the ball. There’s more than a hint of dismissiveness here, though, one that even plays into old stereotypes of the crafty Japanese, in the idea that these pitchers aren’t actually all that good and are just relying on sly trickery. This just isn’t true. Pitchers, even relievers, can get by for a while on deception and novelty, but eventually they get drummed out of the majors. Takatsu, for instance, posted a 1.30 ERA in the first half of 2004, and a 3.58 ERA in the second half; in 2005 he ran up a 5.97 mark as hitters caught on to his schtick, and he was eventually released after losing his job as closer. Otsuka, meanwhile, has run up a 2.51 ERA through 236 major league ballgames. If he’s just fooling people, hitters are a lot dumber than anyone thinks they are.

A more sophisticated variant of this theory has to do with approach. As Ted Heid, the Seattle Mariners’ director of Pacific Rim operations, puts it, “You’ve got a whole league of Ichiros or Jojhimas that never strike out. Now, they’re facing half of the lineups that don’t care if they strike out. They lick their chops facing American hitters — they’re just ecstatic coming over here.” This has concrete effects. “Okajima,” says Heid, “never would have thought of throwing his curve in Japan. It would have been too big.”

Most major league relief pitchers lack either a good breaking ball or command; if they didn’t, they’d be starters. By contrast, the idea goes, Japanese relievers actually pitch. Saito, Otsuka, and Okajima all throw excellent breaking balls for strikes, and are more aggressive than most pitchers. Saito, for instance, has thrown a strike on the 0–2 count 27% of the time in his major league career, against a league average of 18%, while Okajima throws a strike in the same situation 21% of the time. This is somewhat tautological, though; relievers with good breaking balls who throw strikes tend to be pretty successful. There’s nothing uniquely Japanese about the idea of pitching the way pitchers are supposed to pitch.

Acey Kohrogi, the Dodgers’ director of Asian operations, thinks that Japanese pitchers are successful for the same reasons other players are. “You’re looking for the stuff,” he says. “Velocity, movement, a secondary pitch. In Saito’s case, he had that slider.” He also stresses the importance of knowing the player. “In Japan, they pitch a lot at a young age — five days straight, 200 pitch bullpens the first day of spring training. I knew that Saito was a pitcher from the sophomore year of college, though, rather than from when he was 12. He was a 30-year-old pitcher, physically.”

What Kohrogi describes is the same process that produces successful players here in America — scouts looking for physical ability, monitoring health, and personal character, the simple desire to do well. He describes a scene inspring training last year, when Saito looked to be ticketed for Class AAA. “I looked at him and I said, ‘You know, if you want I’ll talk to [Dodgers GM] Ned [Coletti], see if he’ll give you a release.’ Saito said, ‘Just because I’m in AAA doesn’t mean my dream has ended. It’s just beginning.'” There’s nothing mysterious at all about this kind of pitcher succeeding.

This leads us back to Valentine’s theory.” In1995, when I was here,” he says, “I made a statement that every left-handed relief pitcher in this league could pitch in the major leagues.” He has a nice story that backs the point. In 1997, as manager of the Mets, he made a proposition to Yomirui Giants manger Shigeo Nagashima that they reverse the pattern by which fringe American players go to Japan and enjoy success by sending a couple of Nagashima’s castoffs to New York. Valentine picked up Takashi Kashiwada, a 25-year-old lefty reliever who’d pitched 33 undistinguished innings for the Giants, in the deal, and Kashiwada became the third Japanese reliever to pitch in the majors. He wasn’t half bad, posting a 4.31 ERA in 35 games as a left-handed specialist. The Mets, who won 88 games that year, certainly had worse relievers on staff — and this is, again, a pitcher who couldn’t crack a roster in Japan.

How well would Japan’s truly elite closers do in America? Pretty well, one would think—and one would also think that, given the value the Red Sox have received on their $2.5 million investment in Okajima as compared to their $103 million investment in Matsuzaka, we’ll likely find out.

tmarchman@nysun.com