BOSTON -- The fate of the Red Sox in October may rest in the hands of a pitcher who:

• was an outfielder in high school;

• spent a year working as a security guard on a construction site because he did not pass his entrance exam into university;

• had a career goal of becoming a high school phys. ed. teacher;

• began pitching in college after his coach told his players to choose the position they liked;

• credits reading Nolan Ryan's "Pitching Bible" for helping him to become what he is today;

• never imagined he'd be playing baseball for a living;

• wears No. 19 to remind himself of where he was at age 19, and how far he has come;

And the Sox couldn't be happier.

Koji Uehara's end-of-game excellence is matched by his enthusiastic high-fives. G Fiume/Getty Images

Baseball has always had its share of improbable back stories. The game just finished celebrating one of its better ones, the son of a fishing boat captain who tried his hand at fishing and failed, played shortstop on an amateur team in Panama, and discovered by accident, during a game of catch early in his pro career, the pitch that would make him the greatest closer in history. School kids in the Bronx can recite the tale of Mariano Rivera.

But outside of Japan, who knew that on the scale of fantastical tales, Koji Uehara's saga sounds like something that Miyazaki, the master of anime, might have invented?

The best high school baseball players in Japan are venerated, usually because of their heroic exploits in the national tournament, Koshien, whose grip on the Japanese imagination is exponentially stronger than March Madness here. Daisuke Matsuzaka was a household name as a teenager because of Koshien, and was assured of being coveted by professional teams in his country.

Koji Uehara? "I never participated in Koshien," he said through translator C.J. Matsumoto.

The best pitcher at Osaka's Tokai University Gyosei High School was not Uehara. It was Yoshinori Tateyama, who is now in the Yankees' organization after cameo appearances with a couple of other big league teams. Uehara was an outfielder.

Japan has a rigorous exam system for incoming university students. Uehara did not pass his exam. He spent the next year studying in advance of retaking the test. "It was a very difficult year," he said, "because I had to study all the time."

To make ends meet, he said through Matsumoto, he took the job as a security guard. Baseball? "I wasn't even playing at that point," he said. "My dream was to teach."

But he did read Ryan's "bible," and from it picked up some weight-training techniques that paid off in added strength when he entered Osaka University of Health and Sports Sciences, and returned to playing.

"My college was not really a baseball school," Uehara said, "so the manager told us just choose whatever position you want to play. The last year in high school, I pitched five innings and I thought it was fun. I thought pitching would be fun."

He was pleasantly surprised that his increased bulk had resulted in an uptick in his velocity. By his junior year in college, he said, scouts began to take notice -- not only in Japan, but in the United States. The Angels approached him about signing.

"The scout told me I had to be absolutely sure that I was going to succeed," he said. "At that point, there weren't a lot of Japanese players."