In the past, Japanese players did not market themselves so blatantly. Rather, they spent much of their career living in barracks, practicing incessantly, bowing deeply to their teachers, and remaining the chattels of their Japanese teams as long as they were useful.

But now, like so many other industries and traditions around the world, Japanese baseball is being affected by American money.

In late October, Shinjo made a piece of baseball history, becoming the first Japanese player to appear in the American championships, grandiosely titled the World Series.

One hundred years old, the World Series is becoming more worldly, with the games televised to 224 countries in over a dozen languages. As a columnist covering the recent World Series in California, I could practice my few words of Japanese on my bilingual Japanese colleagues (they would smile and congratulate my efforts) and I could practice my mediocre Spanish on my Latin colleagues (they would play along with me, very graciously).

Unless you happened to know that this pitcher escaped from Cuba or that pitcher was from Venezuela, you might not feel you were at an international event. However, Shinjo's appearance in the World Series was front-page news back home. He was surrounded by over 40 Japanese journalists and several camera crew after news came out that he would start in the first game.

"I am honored, of course," he told me through an interpreter the Giants provide for him. "But I cannot say too much because I did not play regularly for the Giants this year. Next year I hope to help them more."

This was the modesty one might expect from a salaryman in a large Japanese organization. Shinjo knew enough to place himself as one small member of the San Francisco team. But with free agency available to them in their late twenties, Japanese players are more assertive than they used to be. If the money is right, they will go to America, for the challenge.

The bat Shinjo used was promptly given to the Baseball Hall of Fame in bucolic Cooperstown, New York, where, allegedly, a soldier named Abner Doubleday invented the sport in 1839.

Never mind that Jane Austen was referring to "base-ball" before Doubleday's dubious creation. The sport undoubtedly traveled from the British Isles -- quite apart from cricket; a form of baseball is still played in Wales and Merseyside, England -- to the United States. It soon became popular in Latin America through the incursions of American military and business interests, and it moved across the ocean to Japan and elsewhere.

Harry Wu, the Chinese-American activist against Chinese labor camps, grew up playing baseball in Shanghai, a legacy of the American colony there. In northeast China, baseball is a legacy of the Japanese occupation in the Thirties.

Baseball once was carried by steamboat but now it is carried by satellite television and the internet. The links that sent Shinjo from being a pretty good Japanese player to a marginal American player are powered by the great maw of cable television, which emits 24 hours a day of the world's most popular sport, football/soccer, but always needs more games, more events.

This past World Series was won by the Anaheim Angels, currently owned by the American multinational, Disney, which is trying to sell the team. The San Francisco Giants are owned by Peter Magowan, who made his money in Safeway, the huge grocery chain.

According to Major League Baseball, foreign-born players now constitute 26 per cent of major-league players. At the recent World Series, 11 of the 50 players were foreign-born, coming from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, and Japan, as well as Puerto Rico, the American territory. The highest total of foreign players in the World Series was 15, in 1995. By contrast, the first half the century never saw more than two foreign-born players in any single World Series, and they were almost always children of European immigrants who had taken up the game in the U.S.

Nowadays, people arrive from Panama, South Korea, Nicaragua, Australia and Curacao as full-fledged professionals. Americans and other players also serve apprenticeships in leagues in Taiwan and elsewhere.

The first Japanese player to come to the U.S. was Masanori Murakami, a left-handed pitcher who was sent over to the U.S. for indoctrination in American baseball methods. He played briefly for the San Francisco Giants at the end of 1964 and all of 1965, but ultimately returned to Japan and had a long career as pitcher and broadcaster. He is very proud to have been the advance man to the United States.

In 1995, the Los Angeles Dodgers signed Hideo Nomo, who arrived with the impact of a rock star. As Japanese players gained freedom from outmoded lifetime contracts, they begin to look to the U.S.

In the 2001 season, the Seattle Mariners, operated by Nintendo money, bought Ichiro Suzuki, an outfielder. He was such an immediate star with his speed and bat skills and Zen-like aura that Americans realized some Japanese regular players could win games, fill stadiums, sell the sponsors' goods -- and draw viewers on cable networks in the U.S. and overseas.

There is no end in sight. The New York Yankees have begun their own network, called YES, which demands high payments from local cable operators to show Yankee games. The Yankees have already forged a tenuous relationship with Manchester United, the great British soccer organization, to ultimately show each other's games on television.

Do not, however, go to Yankee Stadium and try to purchase a Manchester United jersey. That would only invite the most sarcastic Bronx cheer -- nyah, nyah, nyah. The whole deal is about cable.

Now there are rumors of a link between the Yankees and the Tokyo Giants, who are owned by the huge newspaper chain Yomiuri Shimbun, which is so massive an organization that it has its own orchestra. The Giants are a national institution, and recently won their 20th Japan Series title, but even proud Yomiuri may be affected by Yankee dollars and Yankee power.

Late in the season, the Yankees sent over an assistant general manager, Jean Afterman, presumably to inquire about the great outfielder, Hideki Matsui, age twenty-eight. Known in Japan as Godzilla, Matsui is large by Japanese standards, at six feet, one inch tall, and weighing 209 pounds, and is known for mashing long home runs in clutch situations.

Matsui has some leeway in his contract after the 2002 season but few expected him to force his freedom. Instead, the Tokyo Giants were expected to engineer a lend-lease agreement for two or more seasons, to allow Matsui to play right field for the Yankees. In return they might accept the Yankees' Raul Mondesi, who was exposed in the recent American playoffs as being slightly below the demanding levels of the Yankees.

There is some concern that the Japanese leagues would be struck a death blow once knowledgeable Japanese fans saw their best players leaving for the U.S. in return for second-rate American products. However, Japan has suffered more serious blows to its pride as the economy went downhill in the past decade. Accepting a Mondesi for a Matsui would be the least of it.

The good side is the national pride of seeing Japanese players excel in the United States, as some pitchers and Ichiro have already done.

"We got spoiled by Ichiro," said Hideki Okuda, who has been living in Los Angeles for 12 years to write for Yeah, a Japanese sports magazine. "We cannot be too excited by Shinjo's participation."

Every player becomes a cottage industry for Japanese journalists. Shoko Mizutsugi came to New York in 2001 as a free-lance writer to cover Shinjo's debut with the Mets for Japan's Daily Sports. When Shinjo was traded to the Giants in 2002, in effect, Mizutsugi was traded, too.

"It's all right, I have my apartment in Japan so I don't have too many belongings here," she said with a laugh.

She wrote the Shinjo saga almost every day, getting one day off a week. When Shinjo played, it was big news back home. When he did not play, she still had to keep an eye on him.

"He's very friendly. He's an honest person," she said, "but I want to go back to New York."

If Matsui comes to the Bronx, look for a rush of Japanese journalists. They know they have a market in baseball fans back home, where the high-school tournament is as big as American college basketball's Final Four.

Japanese fans are so worldly that they know when to shift gears from Japanese to American-style rooting. We noticed this in 2000, when the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs opened their regular season with two games in the Tokyo Dome.

At the time, the Mets were managed by Bobby Valentine, who had managed in Chiba one season, and loves the country and speaks the language quite well. Valentine was applauded warmly - until he ordered a strategic walk with first base open to Sammy Sosa, the popular Cub slugger.

The fans booed Valentine, something they would never do to a manager in their own league. Because they travel to the U.S. and otherwise follow American ways, the Japanese knew that American fans would boo in that situation. Because it was "American Night," so to speak, they behaved as Americans. Valentine loved the trans-cultural behavior.

This fall, Americans were sending over an all-star squad from Major League baseball to play seven games against Japanese all-stars plus one game against the Tokyo Giants in the Tokyo Dome. There was one huge difference from past tours, however: this time the Major League all-stars would include Tomo Ohka, the Japanese pitcher with the Montreal Expos, and Ichiro of Seattle.

In the past, George Steinbrenner, the heavy-handed owner of the Yankees, had refused to let his players join the Japanese tour because he did not want them getting hurt in the off-season. This year, Steinbrenner sent two of his best players, Jason Giambi and Bernie Williams -- a clear sign of respect for Japanese baseball. When George Steinbrenner begins to symbolically bow at the waist to anybody or any institution, you can be sure there is something in it for him. In this case, it may have been a right fielder. There is no turning back.

The strange thing is that baseball is in jeopardy with the International Olympic Committee. The new Eurocentric leadership may actually drop men's baseball and women's softball as official medal events to make room for golf and rugby that appeal more to Europeans.

There is some animosity between the I.O.C. and Major League Baseball because of the lack of Olympic-style testing for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. But the I.O.C. seems to be ignoring baseball's huge links between east and west, as personified by new faces like Shinjo.

Will there ever be a true World Series between east and west? Not in the short run, given the long distances and long regular seasons. However, there could be a soccer-style Baseball World Cup, every four years, with countries using only their own citizens. Fidel Castro just might stick around long enough to see Cuba play the U.S. in the World Cup. Unless Japan beat one of them first.

(George Vecsey is a longtime sports columnist for the New York Times, and a widely published magazine writer. He is also the author of numerous books.)