quote from Bobby V back in Dec that got me thinking
http://boston.redsox.mlb....ey=news_bos&c_id=bos
http://boston.redsox.mlb....ey=news_bos&c_id=bos
The two have spoken to each other, interestingly enough, in their second languages.
"Well actually, when I saw Dice-K, I spoke Japanese and he spoke English. How about that for a conversation? Yeah, but everything was communicated that had to be communicated at the time," Valentine said. "To be very truthful, watching Dice-K from afar, I felt that he tried to use his fastball too much. I felt he limited his selection of pitches from what I had seen from a few years ago -- that he had become a fastball-slider pitcher, basically.
"When I saw him on TV, he was nothing like the pitcher I saw when he was being one of the best pitchers in Japan. I'm going to try to get him to pitch the way he understands he can be successful, and not the way either guys on the TV, on the radio, guys in the clubhouse or even maybe some guys on the coaching staff might envision him to be. I want him to just be as good as he can be, and I think that's not being a fastball pitcher. I think that's using a fastball so the rest of his pitches can excel."
Could the reason for Dice-k's failures as a Red Sox be because the Red sox were forcing him to pitch the "American way" as opposed to the "Japanese way" he was so conformable and successful with back in Japan? Now that we have Bobby V as manager do you think it will help Dice-k to pitch the way he is conformable with when he was in Japan and not being forced into pitching a way that causes him to fail?