By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.blogspot.com/2018/05/it-isnt-goodbye-its-just-good-night-for.htmlWhat would you call the three worst scouting reports of all time? Reasonable minds differ, as they probably should. My call would be these:
Can't act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.---On a legendary screen test.
We don't like your boys' sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.---On a rock and roll quartet from Liverpool, England.
He can really run, but right now he's a little overmatched.---On a Japanese baseball player freshly arrived for his first American spring training.
Well, now. That slightly bald fellow who could dance a little proved a passable actor who eventually set standards for stepping out and sartorial splendor:
If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. That group of guitars representing that which was on the way out? Perhaps you've heard of them---the Beatles.
The fellow who could really run but was a little overmatched? He hit .336 in his first month of American regular season play, finished that season with 242 hits, and made the first of ten All-Star teams he'd make.
He was also the first baseball player in America to wear his given rather than his surname on his back:
ICHIRO. And he was Japan's first export to the United States to excel at baseball without pitching.
There are satisfactions in abundance in making fools of your doubters. Ichiro Suzuki has known such satisfactions, even if he has been too composed to celebrate them. He had to make a fool of a father whose rigors in rearing and training him he would denounce in due course as child abuse; he made fools of those who thought that, at a mere five feet, nine inches, he'd be carved like a Thanksgiving turkey at the plate.
His Rookie of the Year season also brought him a Most Valuable Player award and helped the Mariners win a staggering 116 games, only to be bumped out of that postseason ignominiously enough. The Mariners haven't been back to the postseason since. As the team devolved little by little, Ichiro (almost nobody calls him by his surname anymore) simply began at an extraterrestrial level and stayed there for over a decade.
Those who thought his final couple of seasons in his first Mariners tour were tainted by indifference or sourness didn't see that a man whose passion is excellence isn't likely to suffer fools or the less than excellent gladly. Those who saw Ichiro as a baseball machine alone didn't know or understand the furies that drove him.
"Baseball in America is a game that is born in spring and dies in autumn," wrote Sadaharu Oh, Japan's home run king. "In Japan it is bound to winter as the heart is to the body." For Ichiro as a youth, his father turned discipline into cruelty. When the boy wanted one day to hang with friends rather than practise baseball, he sat down in the middle of the field and his father started throwing baseballs at him. The boy was swift enough to avoid getting clobbered and catch those that came right to his face.
The father eventually described such training sessions and others of more severe makeup as "fun." Asked about that passage in the father's memoir, Ichiro switched to English in an interview and said flatly, "He's a liar." Out of respect for Japan's filial reverence, the writer quoted Ichiro in Japanese when he said his father's training "bordered on child abuse."
"Ichiro," Wright Thompson wrote in a haunting
ESPN: The Magazine profile last winter, "appears to be searching for people and stories to fill the place once occupied by his father." Hence his passion for old ballplayers and their histories; his friendship with Negro Leagues legend Buck O'Neil; his visits to the graves of players whose records he broke; his visits to the Hall of Fame---more than any current major leaguer.
"The tiny village with its glowing lights and happy baseball spirit captivates him nearly as much as the museum," Thompson wrote. "Ichiro likes to hold the gloves and bats of other great players and commune with them." Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson swore Ichiro wanted to know what such players thought in the moments they used that equipment.
Paradoxically, Ichiro as an adult major leaguer has done what he despised his father for making him do on such a cruel leash. Rigorous, often idiosyncratic self training and working out, without breaks, winter and summer alike. "He's earned his rest but can't take it," Thompson wrote. "He's won his freedom but doesn't want it. The kid in [a childhood essay Ichiro wrote] who wrote of a life away from baseball no longer exists."
He experienced a second wind of sorts when the Mariners, whom he knew had to rebuild, traded him to the Yankees while the Yankees happened to be in town for a set in 2012. He took gracious bows for his now-former home audience, then hit .322 in his first 67 games as a Yankee. A year later, he ripped his 3,000th major league hit off R.A. Dickey, then with the Blue Jays. It made him the only man in history to rip 4,000+ hits at major league levels (as Japanese baseball is also considered) across an oceanic divide.
Age finally eroded his bat and his speed, once two of the most lethal weapons in the game. Those who think he could never have been a power hitter missed many a batting practise in which he was just as liable to pump one over the fence as to spray one anywhere around the outfield. I once watched him lead off the top of the ninth against the Angels, against their then-closer Troy Percival, and rip a first-pitch service several rows into the right field bleachers, which in Angel Stadium begin about 20 feet above the field.
He once visited Wee Willie Keeler's grave in Queens, New York; he played the game like Wee Willie Keeler to the tenth power. Hit them where they ain't? Ichiro hit them to places it was said only he could have reached with his glove. He was a model of consistency, innate radar, and periodic acrobatics in the outfield; he was the Road Runner with brains on the bases.
If he wasn't a great run producer---leadoff men aren't usually RBI men, and Ichiro has averaged 48 RBI per 162 games---it's more a reflection of his teams than himself. (He's averaged 87 runs scored per 162 games lifetime.) In his rookie season, he produced 196 runs. It went gradually down from there as the Mariners devolved from there. But he proved you didn't have to be an all-or-nothing power hitter to be valuable and great.
After his tour with the Yankees, Ichiro put in three years' hard labour with the Marlins, for whom he was still somewhat useful but no longer the player he used to be. Returning to Seattle for this season, you just knew the question wasn't "if" but "when" he'd decide enough was enough. Even against that lifetime of thinking and living no life but baseball.
As of Thursday, Ichiro's playing days are over. He's become a combine of front office assistant and coach. His major responsibilities will be helping manager Scott Servais with outfield, baserunning, and batting. What his body refuses to allow him to do at his former standard, his mind can communicate impeccably. But under his new terms, he must leave the dugout for the clubhouse.
"During the game I will be doing the same preparations I've been doing the entire time," he said. "Nothing is going to change for me that I did as a player. But I can't say for certain that maybe I won't put on a beard and glasses and be like Bobby Valentine and be in the dugout."
He won't call it an official retirement. As the pioneering rock and roll disc jockey Alan Freed liked to sign off each night, it isn't goodbye, it's just good night. He kids that he'll know when to make it "official" when he starts using a cane. His agent says nothing that happened this week means 2019 is off the table as far as another chance to play. Common sense says Ichiro should finally start savouring the fruits of his Hall of Fame-to-be labours.
That's what common sense says. Ichiro may or may not say differently. If nothing else, keeping him around the clubhouse---"He's kind of like the Dalai Lama [there]," says Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto---could do the Mariners a world of great.
But he still has the itch and the need to play even if he's stepped aside for the rest of the season. "It's hard for me," he admitted, "to imagine not playing." Maybe the rest of the season will do something for that imagination, and Ichiro can let himself enjoy at last what he earned long enough ago.
Celebrating with teammates after
beating the A's Thursday night---will
that prove to have been Ichiro's final
game as a player?------------------------------------
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