NEWSLETTER
We’ve officially reached “that” point in the obsessive Masahiro Tanaka storyline. You know, the part where everyone following goes batshit crazy trying to parse the minutiae of insiders – and self-proclaimed, Scott Swaim insiders – as well as every last morsel of information that crumbles out into the information ecosystem.
I’m definitely a part of that craziness, but, man, today was something else.
It started with a tweet from the man, himself, in Japanese:
決めれん(･_･;
— 田中将大/MASAHIRO TANAKA (@t_masahiro18) January 21, 2014
Everyone ran to Google Translate to get an idea of what Tanaka was saying, knowing all the while that Google Translate is profoundly awful when it comes to non-western languages.
Well, maybe people don’t know that? Because what Google spat out – “It does is decided” – sent a number of folks running to proclaim that Tanaka had decided on his future team. Except it turned out that not only was Google exactly wrong – Tanaka had said he couldn’t decide – but Tanaka wasn’t even talking about baseball. He was talking about his freaking Twitter avatar. (Thank you to several BN’ers for checking with actual Japanese speakers.)
In case you need to hear it again: when it comes to news and rumors in Japanese, don’t try to become a language expert using the ‘net. Wait for someone who actually speaks Japanese to translate. Actually, better yet, wait for two or three people to translate.
Ok. Whew. Enough of that. Here’s a few random Tanaka bits to tide you over while we await the inevitable next freak out (his decision could come any time now):
