MLBWeird But True

Hideki Matsui To Retire To His Gratuitous Pornography Collection

We came to know a lot about Hideki Matsui in his decade in the MLB. The Japanese import was a power hitter who made two All-Star teams, hit almost 200 home runs (and over 500 in his professional career), and was the 2009 World Series MVP. Now that Godzilla is on the precipice of retirement, we speculate that he’ll spend a lot of his down time burning through his Godzilla-sized porn collection.

Short of Ichiro, Matsui will probably go down as one of the strongest position players to travel across the Pacific to the major leagues. And while there will be time to celebrate Matsui, The Player, for now, we’d like to acknowledge Matsui, The Pornography Connoisseur.

As Deadspin’s Tom Ley noted, Matsui affirmed in a Time magazine feature on him around the start of his MLB career in 2003 that he had a “much vaunted” porno collection that he would trade with writers. For some reason, this character quirk was swept under the rug until GQ uncovered it earlier in 2012 and revealed that Matsui’s adult film collection is at 55,000, presumably because he wanted it to coincide nicely with his jersey number (at least that’s what I would have done, instead I opted not to play professional baseball and also have the Internet).

From the Time piece:

And, of course, he likes to watch his much vaunted porno collection, tapes that he often trades with Japanese reporters. As one Japanese journalist put it, describing Matsui’s affinity for such unique Japanese cultural institutions like the no-panties shabu-shabu in Japan, “Matsui is a horny guy. All of us are horny, more or less. But Matsui doesn’t attempt to hide the fact.” Yet another win for the Japanese Everyman.

HOW DID THIS GO UNREPORTED THROUGHOUT HIS ENTIRE CAREER? This is a man who owns 55,000 pornos! And he’s Japanese, so you know he’s got the weird shit (exclusively the weird shit). Unfortunately, his 55,000-video porn collection falls drastically short of the rest of the world’s shared pornography collection, The Internet. But hey, some guys like to kick it old school, and I’m sure somewhere in Matsui’s horde of X-rated flicks, there’s bound to be something that hasn’t eked out onto the Web yet.

Enjoy retirement, Hideki. And I mean really enjoy retirement.

[Deadspin, Getty Images]

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