TORONTO — What a difference six weeks can make. On June 4, Hideki Matsui was scuffling along with a .250 batting average, a paltry three homers and 33 RBIs. Since that low point in the season, the New York Yankees rookie outfielder has hit ...

TORONTO — Godzilla paid immediate dividends for the New York Yankees. In his much-anticipated major league debut Monday night, Hideki Matsui hit the first pitch he saw for an RBI single, sending New York on its way to an 8-4 victory over the Toronto ...

TORONTO — Seven years after Hideo Nomo’s debut with the Los Angeles Dodgers, seeing a native of Japan play Major League Baseball is no longer a novelty. But one who speaks to the media in English? Now that’s something different. Shigetoshi Hasegawa, the newest ...

TORONTO — The Ichiro Show has played to rave reviews in the U.S. for the first six weeks of the baseball season. This past weekend, it was a smash hit in its Canadian debut. During a three-game sweep over the Blue Jays at the ...

As I’ll be heading back to Canada next month, this will be my last Sports Scope. I thought I’d write some sort of reflection on what covering sports in Japan has meant to me, but all I kept coming up with were buzzwords and ...

The Yankees are sleeping with the devil. The Red Devils, to be exact. The news last week that baseball’s New York Yankees and soccer’s Manchester United were forming a marketing alliance caused quite a stir. Within an hour of the announcement, United shares shot ...

LONDON — Mark Spitz is widely regarded as the greatest Olympian of all time. The American swimmer captured seven gold medals at the 1972 Munich Games — still the most ever by an athlete at one Olympics — and broke world-record times in all ...

Watching Mario Lemieux as he made his rounds in Japan this past October, one could sense there was something very wrong with the picture. At various functions in Tokyo leading up to the National Hockey League opening games, here was this strapping 6-foot-5 man, ...

A great deal of space in columns like these — and I’m one of the culprits — is devoted to all that’s wrong with the sports world and the people who make their livings in it. Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., but ...

Hisanori Takahashi found major league hitters tougher to get out than Fukuoka Daiei Hawks. The rookie Yomiuri southpaw, who threw a two-hitter for the eventual champion Giants in Game 5 of the recently concluded Japan Series, was roughed up for six runs in three ...

So much for the home-dome advantage. The Fukuoka Daiei Hawks rode a six-run fifth inning and solid relief pitching Sunday night to rally past the Yomiuri Giants 8-3 and take a 2-0 lead in the 2000 Japan Series before 43,850 at the Tokyo Dome. ...

Yujiro Nakajimaya, captain of the Kokudo Bunnies and a member of Japan’s national team, is not your average Japanese professional hockey player. In four teenage years spent at Notre Dame College, a high school in Wilcox, Saskatchewan, the Hokkaido native gained more than just ...