Around the Horde

Dear Jim Humphrey:

First of all, let me congratulate you on being mayor of Fort Myers, spring-training home to the Boston Red Sox. What the hell, somebody has to be, and unlike most of the men I’ve seen driving in downtown Fort Myers, you don’t look like someone who flunked the audition for Lynyrd Skynyrd. And your town, blessed as it is with both a better class of franchise restaurants and at least the rumor of an ocean, is a vast improvement over its immediate predecessor, Winter Haven, the Designer Mudflap Capital of America. So, as I said, good on you for keeping the job. It’s just that your job just became, well, hell.

You probably noticed that not long ago the Red Sox signed Daisuke Matsuzaka, the 26-year-old superstar pitcher of the Seibu Lions in Japan. For Terry Francona, this means his pitching rotation no longer wholly depends on either Curt Schilling’s ankle or Josh Beckett’s intellect, both of which will be there soon and are equally balky. For you, well, it means that the population of your sleepy little city is about to explode and that you will have more fans than you ever dreamed you would. You see, the arrival of young Daisuke also means the simultaneous arrival of somewhere between 800 and 350,000 members of the Japanese press corps, all of whom represent media outlets serving anywhere between 350,000 and a gazillion consumers. In some ways, this may be a good thing. There will be a bull market in all those condos that look as though they’d fall down in a strong wind, and occasionally do. However, it also means that your administration will be subject to an unprecedented level of scrutiny. OK, it’s Japanese scrutiny, but you should watch your step anyway.