The idea of Hideki Matsui always had been bigger than the ballplayer himself. How could it not be? By the time he arrived in New York in 2003, he already had been in the American conscience since he was a 20-year-old phenom playing in the 1994 Japan Series while baseball fans in the United States had nothing to watch because of a strike. He was the expensive overseas bauble brought in by a Yankees organization that had to have the latest and greatest. He had the outsized nickname "Godz...