By now, it has become a familiar sight. Hit, walk, agonizingly long strikeout, hit batter, walk, 40 pitch innings...just another painful Dice-K Matsuzaka performance. Fans and coaches complain that Dice-K tries to be too perfect, that instead of attacking batters with his impressive array of pitches, he nibbles at the plate and makes things worse. Now, Call of the Green Monster has learned that the practice of nibbling at the plate has plagued Matsuzaka since childhood.
"He drive me crazy, so many years," said his mother, in a recent interview with COTGM in Japan. "He sit at table for hours, taking little baby bites. One piece sushi, and he's eating each little piece of rice one at a time, and so, so, slow."
While the Red Sox have used every technique they can think of to change the habits of Matsuzaka, nothing has really worked. The Red Sox recently brought in Mrs. Matsuzaka, who promised she had a very simple solution to the problem. "When he nibble too much as boy, I whack him upside his head," she explained. "Two or three whacks, and he like lion eating gazelle."
Terry Francona is sold. "I'm all for it," he told COTGM. "Now, when he starts to nibble, we don't need twenty interpretors trying to communicate with him. We just bring in his mom, she whacks him upside his head a few times, Dicey starts attacking hitters. It's revolutionary!"
