Imagine how American baseball fans would feel if Mike Trout, Andrew McCutchen and Clayton Kershaw left their major league teams and took their enormous talents to Japan for the rest of their careers or a large chunk thereof.

That’s what happens in Japan except the names are Masahiro Tanaka, Yu Darvish and Ichiro Suzuki.

Japanese fans lost Suzuki to the Seattle Mariners 13 years ago, and the outfielder has not returned home to resume playing there. Instead he is preparing to end his career with the New York Yankees, with whom last year he became only the third player in professional baseball history to collect 4,000 career hits.

Darvish jumped to the United States two years ago after six and a half strong Japanese seasons and in two seasons with the Texas Rangers has compiled a 29-18 record and struck out 498 in 401 innings. Given that he has four years left on his $56 million contract and, health permitting, he is assured of an even more lucrative deal at the age of 31, Japanese fans shouldn’t expect to see Darvish any season soon.

Tanaka, a 25-year-old right-handed pitcher, is the latest Japanese idol to …

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Once upon a time Commissioner Bud Selig and I shared the same view on instant replay in baseball. We didn’t like it. Then somewhere along the way Selig relented and accepted the idea of limited replay, allowing its use for home runs.

Now, for the coming season, Selig finds widespread replay as palatable as his mother’s cooking. I have not talked to him about his change in thinking so I don’t know why he has enthusiastically embraced replay.

“I am very pleased that instant replay will expand to include additional impactful plays,” he said in a statement. “The new system will give managers valuable recourse in potentially game-changing situations.”

For me, though, baseball’s decision to implement replay for everything but players’ injecting themselves with steroids in a stall of the clubhouse bathroom remains …

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The third baseman and the relief pitcher have both played for the New York Yankees, though not at the same time. Both have incurred major suspensions, though not at the same time. Rodriguez, in fact, approaches a suspension that, barring an unlikely decision by a federal judge reversing it, will surpass Howe’s as the longest for a player disciplined for a drug violation.

Howe was actually disciplined for life; that is, in June 1992 Commissioner Fay Vincent hit him with a lifetime ban after he had been suspended six times and then pleaded guilty to a charge of trying to buy cocaine in Montana in the off-season.

However, arbitrator George Nicolau reduced the sentence to the 119 games Howe missed in 1992, in other words, time served.

Nicolau agreed with the novel argument made by Richard Moss, Howe’s lawyer, that his adult attention deficit disorder, which a study had found could lead to cocaine addiction, had gone untreated. Furthermore. Nicolau said, Major League Baseball had not tested the pitcher as regularly as it should have.

With Howe reinstated for the 1993 season, Moss, who had been but no longer was the union’s general counsel, had made a far more successful argument than Rodriguez’s non-union lawyers, whom he used because he was angry with the union.

They succeeded only in getting their client’s suspension reduced from 211 games to 162 plus possible post-season games. Arbitrator Frederic Horowitz ruled that Major League Baseball hadn’t taken the suspension beyond the 2014 season, and he wouldn’t either.

Read more about the Howe-Rodriguez connection in my column in the Wednesday New York Times or on the Times’ web site. The link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/sports/baseball/two-arbitration-rulings-reflecting-how-baseball-has-changed.html?ref=baseball&_r=0

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