Importing success

Last night, Marty Lurie and Shooty Babitt had a winter version of their Inside Baseball Saturday night program; during said program, Lurie mentioned that the A's were going to talk to a pitcher from Japan. When I first heard that, I thought 1. That means that newly-acquired Dan Meyer is going to start in the minors and 2. This is the type of image change that the A's needed.

Acquiring a Japanese player would help the A's in many ways. The most obvious is by being successful thus helping the team; another is that the media and fan coverage would bring in revenue in all sorts of ways. In the beginning, the Japanese media would cover this player's every move seeing as he would be the first Japanese player ever with the A's. That media needs to stay somewhere, thus the hotel and restaurant business gets a boost. The coverage from this media gets back to Japan where A's merchandise as well as broadcasting rights become sold. Finally, the local Asian community would come to the games; if you have ever seen the fans that Ichiro or Chan Ho bring, you can see the potential.

EDIT: So I was looking around at the "other" Bavasi's baseball site, and I happened to notice that a 25 year old Japanese lefty starter put in a request to be posted for auction. hmm...

EDIT: Apparently, the A's have gone a different direction and are close to reaching an agreement with famed Hanshin Tiger pitcher, Keiichi Yabu.