The Minnesota Twins continue their pursuit of an outfielder to replace Torii Hunter in center field. They were considered one of the front-runners for Japanese Star Kosuke Fukudome, the top import prospect this year, in the mold of stars such as Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki.

But the Twins have announced they are pulling out of the running for Kosuke after receiving a personal note from the player. "I don't understand what happened," said Fukudome's agent. "I thought it would be nice if we sent hand-written letters to every team that was interested in him explaining how honored he was to play for their organization. There should be no reason why the Twins are reacting in this way."

"We just want to say how offended we were at the note we got from him," said Twins General Manager Cameron James. "First of all, it was written in Japanese. We are not from Japan. We don't operate a sushi restaurant. We need all our star players to speak American language. Where would we be if, say, our star pitcher was from somewhere like Venezuela? The fans would riot. We know he's from this Japan place, but he could at least pretend to help us save face with our fanbase."

"But the most insulting part of the note was what he wrote at the bottom.'Fukudome'. This is ludicrous! We here in Minneapolis are very proud of our dome and it's heritage to both the community and the Twins organization. To throw an insult such as this at us is reprehensible! In fact, #### his dome. #### him right in the dome with a samurai sword or whatever it is they use as bats over there. He wants to play for our team? He probably has a small..."

At that point Cameron James was removed from the podium by his son Mark, who then addressed the crowd. "I'm sorry for that everybody, my father is what we would like to call a blatant ignorant racist. He's in counseling for this, but sometimes he still goes off the deep end. But, sadly, because of this misunderstanding we will not be going after Mr. Fukudome."