Kazuo Matsui saw firsthand the damage caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami when he and the rest of the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles visited Sendai on Friday.
On Tuesday morning at QVC Marine Field, where he was preparing for his first game in Japan since 2003, the images still hadn't left him.
"We all knew what kind of situation they were going through and we wanted to go to Sendai as soon as possible," Matsui said. "It took us a month to actually do it, and it was worse than we imagined. No words can describe what we actually saw."