Fort Myers, Fla. ? Big Papi has big plans for the Red Sox’s very long flight to Japan – eat, sleep and win all of Jonathan Papelbon’s money playing cards.

“He’s a good player, but he’s got bad luck,” David Ortiz says. “So he better bring his whole bank account on the airplane. We always kill him. He’s loud when he’s winning, then boom, he’s quiet.”

Fortunately for Pap – and maybe for Papi – Boston’s star closer was rewarded with a $775,000 contract this month, nearly doubling last year’s salary of $425,000.

It’s players like Papelbon and Ortiz and pitchers Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Okajima who will attract big crowds to the Tokyo Dome to see the World Series champions during a four-game trip that begins when they leave Fort Myers on Wednesday.

The Red Sox and Oakland Athletics each will play two exhibition games against Japanese teams March 22 and 23. Then they will face each other in the regular-season opener March 25, the earliest start in major-league history, and again on March 26.

The competition, though, begins on the way over.

“There’ll be plenty of poker to play,” Papelbon said, “lots of poker. Ortiz better bring his wallet.”

The journey is a gamble for the Red Sox.

After the New York Yankees went to Japan to start the 2004 season against Tampa Bay, Mike Mussina said he couldn’t fall into a normal sleep pattern. Three months after Kevin Brown returned, the pitcher was diagnosed with intestinal parasites, an ailment that he said “would seem to be a distinct possibility” that he picked up in Japan.

“By the time the Yankees team got back from the trip they were all using it as a crutch,” Boston general manager Theo Epstein said this spring training.

Responded Mussina: “Yeah, we used it as an excuse for winning the division.”

But the Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years that season, overcoming a 3-0 deficit in the AL championship series against the Yankees, then sweeping St. Louis.

Just how the early start to this season, the 18-hour flight each way and the jet lag affects the Red Sox remains to be seen. They’re trying to take it in stride, even if some players don’t relish crossing 12 time zones and the international date line while cooped up in a plane.

Manager Terry Francona knows complaining about the trip won’t help.

“I think we all choose to go do it,” he said. “We’re going to go play wherever they tell us to play, whenever they tell us to play, and if we screw it up it’s our own fault.”

He’d love to start ace Josh Beckett, but the right-hander is all but certain to miss the trip with a sore back. Matsuzaka had been a question mark until his wife gave birth Saturday morning to a boy, their second child. His status for the trip had been up in the air until then, and now he could start the season opener in his homeland.

His teammates have peppered him with questions.

Many of them “asked me to teach them more Japanese phrases, and they also had a lot of questions about Japanese food,” Matsuzaka said.

“So I can tell that everyone is looking forward to the trip. For the players, it’s going to be very physically demanding, but I just hope that we can get a couple wins and those will be our good memories.”