Diamond vision of Friedman catches their eye

Ohtani’s ex-manager wants Japanese teams to learn from success of Dodgers’ executive.

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ANDREW FRIEDMAN, with Shohei Ohtani, believes in creating a destination.

The man who managed Shohei Ohtani in Japan by the dropped Dodgers' training camp the other day, camera crew in tow. He was there to interview Andrew Friedman.

Friedman, quite naturally, assumed the questions would be about Ohtani.

Not at all. The questions were about Friedman, and what he had in common with the people who lead companies that make bullet trains and electron microscopes and Hello Kitty.

Hideki Kuriyama managed Ohtani on the Nippon Ham Fighters, the team that nurtured Ohtani's ambition of pitching and hitting at an elite level.

Today, in addition to serving as the Fighters' chief baseball officer the equivalent of Friedman's role as the Dodgers' president of baseball operations - Kuriyama hosts a prime-time television show in which he interviews the top executives of global corporations based in Japan.

These companies are household names in Japan, and often in the United States: Hitachi. Suzuki.

Japan Airlines. Nippon Steel. Rakuten, the e-commerce giant. Sanrio, the Hello Kitty people.

The Dodgers are a household name in Japan.

The Dodgers are the brand. Nippon Ham is a brand too, but that brand is a food processing company.

Remember when Fox owned the Dodgers and Disney owned the Angels? That is baseball in Japan: teams owned by companies that can be more interested in their core business of financial services or transportation or media or whatever than in their team.