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Hype can get lost in translation

By Jerry Crasnick
ESPN.com

Thursday, February 15, 2007

If scouting baseball players were an exact science, Ruben Rivera would have fulfilled his promise as the second coming of Mickey Mantle -- instead of being known as the guy who stole Derek Jeter's glove and drifted into oblivion without cashing in on eBay. Factor in cultural differences, a language barrier and the on-field adjustments that players from the Far East encounter in their journey to a new world, and the job of predicting whether a player from Japan, Korea or Taiwan can cut it in the ...

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