KYOTO, Japan – Yasuyuki Ohta sprinted from the back of his bar's kitchen. He passed jerseys on the wall and autographed baseballs in protective plastic cases before grabbing a T-shirt that hung on a coat rack in the corner.

"See," he said. "J.D. Drew."

Now, there are different types of Boston Red Sox fans. Those who wear pink Red Sox hats and those who read box scores and those who name their kid Manny Papi Beckett. Then there is the type that owns and proudly displays a piece of J.D. Drew memorabilia. Ohta may well be a group of one.

What would you expect from the man who three years ago quit his job as an engineer, bought a pub and named it Fenway Park? Drew had just stroked a grand slam in the Red Sox's eventual 9-2 exhibition victory against the Yomiuri Giants, and Ohta – known as Tiger – didn't want to slack in front of guests.

The other four patrons celebrated too, and although it lacks the fervor of the original, the Fenway Park on the third floor of a building along

TOKYO – They did everything to make it feel like home. Played the theme song from "Cheers" and sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and subjected the poor locals to "Sweet Caroline" in the eighth inning. Were this anywhere but Japan, where anime is always one peripheral glance away, the sight of three pixilated hot dogs slathered in different condiments racing down the streets on the scoreboard might have convinced the Tokyo Dome's denizens that, yep, those Americans really are crazy.

Really, it was another day at Fenway Park, if only it had artificial turf, a bubbled ceiling like the Metrodome, a short-of-capacity crowd and all the charm of a wart. The Boston Red Sox, here to commence Major League Baseball's 2008 season against the Oakland Athletics, warmed up with an exhibition game Saturday against the Hanshin Tigers, a game that, a few years ago, might have carried some significance.

Before the Red Sox won two championships and graduated from underdogs to overexposed, their Far East

SAPPORO, Japan – It's an hour before the first pitch of the Chiba Lotte Marines' 2008 season, and Bobby Valentine isn't the least bit concerned with the baseball game he's about to manage.

He sits on a plastic seat in his dugout and pulls from his pocket a notebook with an electric-orange stripe along the cover. He opens it and reveals hundreds of Japanese characters with English words next to them.

"Look at this one," he says, pointing to a symbol for the butterfly. There are more than 80,000 of these characters, called kanji, and while Valentine isn't endeavoring to learn them all, he wants to reach the 2,000 or so needed for high school equivalency. He has spoken Japanese for years. That wasn't enough, which, as with Valentine, often tends to be the case.

He's using a system espoused by an American theologist who taught himself how to read in Japanese. It's all about imagining, and the kanji for butterfly combines three other symbols Valentine has already memorized: insect, tree and

YOKOSUKA, Japan – The Year of the Rat in the Japanese zodiac started Feb. 7, about a week after Larry Bigbie arrived.

He came here with some fanfare, more than he had seen in his six years playing in the major leagues. Bigbie's new team, the Yokohama BayStars, held a press conference to tout his appearance. They liked his left-handed swing and the way he patrolled right field. And they really didn't care about what was going on back home.

"I needed to get away," Bigbie says, and he meant from the baseball establishment that regarded him as no better than a minor leaguer, sure, but he knew there was much more to it than that.

Bigbie broke the code. In baseball, the honor of the clubhouse, of keeping secrets no matter how deep, dark and dirty, is sacrosanct, and when the former Sen. George Mitchell released his report on the rampant performance-enhancing drug use in baseball, there was Bigbie, not only admitting using them but naming names of teammates who did, too.

"That's not how it

TUCSON, Ariz. – It couldn't be accidental. No way. Not when big, bad Bobby Jenks, baseball's equivalent to a Hollywood wild child gone straight, gets placed next to the locker in the Chicago White Sox's clubhouse that says, in a big, bold nameplate: LOST AND FOUND.

There is some meaning to it, even if it doesn't immediately dawn on Jenks. He is still big, certainly, 275 pounds, give or take a dozen, hauled around on a 6-foot-3 frame that's sturdy like a German car. And he is indeed bad, a goatee – three inches long, a peroxide dip away from being as blond as it gets – jutting downward.

Lost? Oh, yeah, though you know that story. Drank a lot. Lit his skin on fire. All the stuff he's addressed and all the stuff that, with time and success, becomes nothing more than a footnote.

So for now, unless Jenks reverts, render it just that, because his journey to being found is enough to stand by itself. He is 27 years old, one of the best closers in baseball and last season, as the White Sox

TUCSON, Ariz. – The swing looked about the same, left-handed and true as a mother's love, and the number was right, 17 and nothing else, and the goatee – well, it could nest a baby bird. Yeah, that's definitely him.

So if the who question was taken care of, it's time to ask the more important one: What was Todd Helton doing, on a Friday afternoon, about 500 feet from the Colorado Rockies' spring-training clubhouse, playing in a game with a bunch of minor leaguers?

"Good to get back to the roots," Helton said, and you'd swear he had changed his last name to Balboa and was getting ready to pound on a side of beef. When you're a 34-year-old star with a $141.5-million contract and a balky back, the only roots with which you concern yourself are the gray ones sprouting through the noggin.

And yet Helton was here, on a supposed afternoon off, because he was concerned with his swing. Surely Shakespeare got writer's block and Picasso lost his muse once or twice. Neither tried to solve the woes

SURPRISE, Ariz. – Matt West said he doesn't know the name of the performance-enhancing drug he used that almost killed his baseball career. He was taking nitric oxide and creatine and all the other standard supplements, and, poof, somehow his urine came back dirty.

"I couldn't tell you," West said. "The name had, like, 50 letters in it, so I don't know what it was. I was surprised. I was surprised because it was something in my system I didn't know I was taking. Just a GNC product."

Ah, yes. The GNC excuse. Tried and true it is, the domain of major leaguers who know they can hide behind the cloak of secrecy that forces baseball to withhold any specifics regarding positive drug tests.

The difference is, Matt West is not a major leaguer. He was 18 years old when he tested positive. A kid, the kind those Congressmen always talk about, only real. The Texas Rangers drafted him in the second round last year out of Bellaire High near Houston,

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Beware the Heavy Hand. Tim Lincecum warns newcomers in the San Francisco Giants clubhouse about it, like it's some apocryphal beast. Attacks with the stealth of a bee and does similar damage, too, the welt and redness stinging reminders.

"You ever see Cain's hands?" Lincecum said, motioning to his next-door locker neighbor, Matt Cain. "They're big bear paws, and they'll kill your back. And last year, he was like that big brother who picked on you a lot."

Lincecum paused to consider what he had just said.

"Except, uh, big brothers are usually older, right?"

Generally speaking, sure, though Cain's year-and-a-half head start in the major leagues rendered Lincecum 3½-month lead in life rather insignificant in baseball's cosmos.

"OK then," Lincecum said, "he's my big-ger brother."

That much is true, the husky Cain hulking over Lincecum, who seemed to forget that heroin chic died 10 years ago. And inasmuch as they're brothers like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito,