TOKYO -- If this were a normal off-season, Gregg Olson would have a full-grown beard and his right arm would be doing absolutely nothing.
But this is not a normal off-season. Gregg Olson is in Japan.
The Orioles relief ace is part of a major-league all-star tour, which opens an eight-game series against Japan tonight at the 56,000-seat Tokyo Dome. The U.S. team will play the Yomiuri Giants and new manager Shigeo Nagashima, a baseball legend here who has won six batting titles and was named Japan World Series MVP four times.
Boston's Roger Clemens, who has been trailed by Japanese television crews and photographers since the team arrived Wednesday, is to start the first game for the team, managed by Minnesota's Tom Kelly.
Clemens' fastball seems to fascinate the Japanese, whose pitchers rarely throw 95 mph. Just wait until they see Olson's curve.
"I had to keep my arm going the past couple of weeks so I could come in here and at least be effective," said Olson, who saved 36 games for the Orioles. "Normally, the arm would've been on ice for three months. Now I've got a month off my time. We'll see how it works out.
"This is a vacation to a point," he said, "but I still want to come over here and pitch well. We're not over here to lose."
That sentiment is shared by Detroit's Cecil Fielder, who played for the Hanshin Tigers in 1989, and was on the 1990 major-league team that finished a disappointing 3-4-1 against the Japanese. After all, baseball is America's game.
"I told them, I'd been over here, I'd played here," Fielder said. "They [the Japanese teams] have some good pitchers. They just don't throw breaking balls. They throw gas."
Since 1908, 29 professional baseball teams have traveled to Japan, compiling a 328-69-21 record. Only twice has a U.S. team lost a series.
Olson, 26, said he prepared himself for the trip by watching the movie "Mr. Baseball," which profiles Japanese baseball, and by talking to former Orioles players Larry Sheets and Jim Traber, as well as Cal Ripken Jr., who was on the '90 traveling squad. Sheets also gave him the names of some Japanese players who speak English.
But nothing could've prepared him for some of the little nuances that make Japan so unique.
"There's a basic honesty of the people here," Olson said. "We went down to dinner and we came back and the bellman had dropped our luggage outside our room. He did the same for Ruben Sierra and Dennis Martinez. You do that in some places in America, and I wouldn't have any clothes."
