August in Kansas City is hotter than two rats f**king in a sock.

I wanted the challenge of competing against the best players in the world.

In baseball, even the best hitters fail seven of ten times, and of those seven failures there are different reasons why. Some are personal failures, others are losses to the pitcher. You just get beat. In those personal failures, I felt I could have done better.

I heard that in the United States the level of baseball was the highest in the world. So it was only natural that I would want to go there, as a baseball player.

I'm not a big guy and hopefully kids could look at me and see that I'm not muscular and not physically imposing, that I'm just a regular guy. So if somebody with a regular body can get into the record books, kids can look at that. That would make me happy.

The more that Japanese players go to the big leagues to play and succeed, the more that will serve to inspire young kids in Japan to want to become baseball players when they grow up.

Baseball has been the greatest things in my life, but the cameras and the media surrounding baseball have not been fun. It's unnecessary. How many times do they see me stretch? How many times do they see me walk? It is a big concern. If it affected the team in a negative way, I don't know what I would do.