The Americanization of Daisuke Matsuzaka: a textual analysis of sports media discourse

In 2007, the Boston Red Sox baseball team acquired a popular Japanese pitcher, Daisuke Matsuzaka, amid a flurry of media hype in sports news publications. A long-term documentation and textual analysis of newspaper articles, online postings, televised sports shows, web and magazine reports before and after the acquisition reveal how transnational ideologies were contextually managed to Americanize ‘Dice-K' into the world of US sports. Although there are numerous foreign players in professional baseball, this sport is regarded as a distinctly American institution infused with societal attitudes concerning, e.g., nativeness/non-nativeness (‘Why can't he speak English?'). Situated within a critical discourse analytical framework, this study draws especially on Van Dijk's (2001a) notion of how micro-level textual features of a particular genre entail broader contextualization to arrive at a credible explanation of how the discourse is likely to be interpreted by readers and listeners. The study's findings contribute to understandings of how the media functions to popularize cultural stereotypes that both depend on and influence ideological constructions of race and national identity.