Okajima’s in

Southpaw reliever voted to AL All-Star team

MLB. The 2007 baseball season has been full of surprises for Japanese lefty Hideki Okajima in his first season with the Sox, and he added another accolade to his al-ready bulging resume when he became the final player named to the American League All-Star roster just prior to last night’s game.

Okajima has enjoyed arguably the best first half of any reliever in baseball this season, piling up a 2-0 record with a 0.88 ERA and 13 holds in 38 games.

“John [Deeble] and I are still in Japan and we’re very happy for him, although I’m sure we’re not as excited as [Okajima] is,” said Sox Special Assistant to the General Manager Craig Shipley, who, along with Deeble, heads Boston’s scouting outfit on the Pacific Rim. “It’s a great honor. He’s had a great first half, and it’s a great story.”

“Okaji,” who enters out of the bullpen armed with a funky corkscrew delivery and the mesmerizing “Oka-Doke” changeup, received 4.3 million votes during the four-day online balloting on MLB.com, barely beating out Detroit’s Jeremy Bonderman, as well as Minnesota’s Pat Neshek, Kelvim Escobar of the Los Angeles Angels and Toronto’s Roy Halladay.

“[The changeup] was something I worked on by myself in Japan this winter when I first started pitching with a Major League baseball, so it’s something else with movement that I came up to pitch in different weather with a different baseball,” Okajima said through interpreter Jeff Yamaguchi.

“I had never been able to throw it to the right location and didn’t have much confidence in it, but it’s been a very good pitch for me [with the Sox].”

Okajima is the third Sox player to win the online All-Star Final Vote program since its inception in 2002, as he joins Johnny Damon (2002) and Jason Varitek (2003) as other Sox players to have their All-Star tickets punched via Internet voting.