The Meaning of Ichiro (2 page)
Read The Meaning of Ichiro Online
Authors: Robert Whiting
Also a tip of the baseball cap to the gang of artistes and reprobates who constitute my neighbors in Kamakura, Kagari, David,
Mark, Keiko, Karen, Peter, Yuko, and a nod of appreciation to all my relatives and friends on the Monterey Peninsula, starting
with my mother and father, Margo, Ned, Buck and the rest of the tribe. And let us not forget the Kondo, Kobayashi, Hayano
and Noble clans.
I am particularly grateful to David Shapiro, poet, writer and Tokyo’s foremost horse-racing expert, for editing the first
finished drafts of this book and, in the process, saving me from myself on more than one occasion.
Next, at Warner Books, I would like to thank my estimable editor, Rick Wolff, the man primarily responsible for the existence
of
You Gotta Have Wa,
for his encouragement, support and editorial sense. I can’t think of any other editor I’d rather work for. Also much gratitude
to Dan Ambrosio and Bob Castillo, without whom this book would never have happened.
Finally, thanks to my longtime agent Amanda Urban at ICM, who always seems to know the right thing to do.
And to my wife, Machiko, for helping me to read Meiji-era Japanese, among other things.
And thanks to Rob Smaal for proofreading the paperback edition.
This book was inspired by the success and wild popularity of Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui and other stars from Japan. It was
written for North Americans, contemporary fans of Major League Baseball, with little or no knowledge of the Japanese game.
This paperback printing incorporates a certain number of corrections to the original edition, as well as a small amount of
supplemental material for updating purposes.
Contents
Acclaim for ROBERT WHITING’S Books
3: Some History and Some Philosophy
5: The Defector: The Story of Nomo
6: Darth Vader, the Fat Toad and Alfonso Soriano
P
ROFESSIONAL SPORTS IN
N
ORTH
A
MERICA HAVE GONE GLOBAL.
T
HE
National Football League regularly plays several preseason exhibition games abroad, and it has a subsidiary loop in Europe.
The NBA features players from Croatia to China, and telecasts of its games can be seen in every time zone in the world. The
National Hockey League draws on talent from Scandinavia, Russia and several different Eastern European countries. Yet, of
all the professional sports in North America, it may be Major League Baseball that has become the most internationalized.
As of Opening Day of the 2004 MLB season, players born outside the United States and Canada constituted more than a quarter
of all big league rosters (and the percentage in the minor leagues was nearly half). Twenty-one of the participants in the
2003 All-Star Game were foreign born, while the contest itself was beamed to 200 different countries. Only two of the nine
Florida Marlins starters in the final game of the 2003 World Series were American citizens.
This represents quite a change from the previous generation, when foreign players were more of a novelty. Excessive expansion
had threatened to dilute the quality of play, but the influx of players from Latin America and the Caribbean has, in the words
of sportswriter Thomas Boswell, “served to reinvigorate the sport.” And in recent years, Asia has played an increasingly larger
role in that reinvigoration.
The Republic of Korea, whose passion for the high school game dates back to 1905, has already produced a handful of notables
from its amateur ranks: Consider beefy stud pitcher Chan Ho Park (6′2′′, 205), who pitched well for the Los Angeles Dodgers
before moving to the Texas Rangers, where injuries sidelined him; and Byung-Hyun Kim, the relief ace with the submarine delivery
who helped the Arizona Diamondbacks win a World Series in 2001. Kim is particularly remembered for two ignominious deeds:
giving up back-to-back walk-off home runs to the Yankees in the 2001 World Series, and extending the middle-digit salute to
Fenway Park fans during pregame introductions at the opening of the American League Division Series in Boston in 2003, after
he was booed for a string of bad pitching performances. Other major league notables include Seoul-born Braves reliever Jung
Bong and 6′5′′, 240-pound first baseman Hee Seop Choi.
Waiting back home on the Korean peninsula was a right fielder for the Hyundai Unicorns, Shim Jeong-soo, noted for his power
and his gung-ho attitude. Korean baseball’s home run record holder, meanwhile, Lee Seung-yeop, who hit 56 out of the park
in 2003, an all-time Asian high, was headed for Japan.
Taiwan, winner of 17 Little League world titles, has produced a number of young prospects who have been snapped up by hungry
major league scouts: Lo Ching Lung of the Rockies, outfielder Chin-Feng Chen (the first Taiwanese position player to appear
in a pro game in the U.S.), Hu Chin Lung of the Dodgers, Wu Chao Kuan of the Mariners, and Chi-hui Tsao of the Rockies. Taiwan
established its own professional loop in 1990, the Chinese Professional League. Readers who want to know more about the history
of baseball in Korea and Taiwan (and other Asian nations like China, where former major leaguers Jim LeFebvre and Bruce Hurst
were invited to coach the national team in the 2003 Asian Games) should read the prize-winning
Taking in a Game,
by Joseph Reaves.
The most influential Asian country by far, however, has been Japan, which has the longest baseball history of all. Amateur
play extends back to the early 1870s, while the nation’s professional game is seven decades old and rich in tradition. Nippon
Professional Baseball had produced a 400-game winner (Masaichi Kaneda), a 1,000-base stealer (Yutaka Fukumoto) and a slugger
supreme in the form of one Sadaharu Oh, who hit 868 lifetime home runs, more than Hank Aaron or Babe Ruth.
In the decade since Hideo Nomo first tested the waters at Vero Beach in 1995, almost two dozen Japanese have donned the uniform
of a major league team, many of them becoming household names, like the aforementioned Nomo and the iconic Ichiro Suzuki.
Collectively they have instructed Americans that there is another way to play the game.
The Japanese may not play baseball with the looseness and joy of the Americans, but they love the game just as much and they
play it as if they mean it. They have a respect for the sport that is sometimes lacking in the U.S., and, as such, they have
much to offer.
Perhaps more important, they have also added a new dimension to the financial makeup of MLB, as evidenced by the hundreds
of millions of dollars major league teams have earned from selling TV rights in Japan as well as from the sales of tickets
and merchandise to Japanese tourists flocking to the U.S. From 2001-2003, sales of Ichiro-related goods surpassed those of
any other Seattle Mariner in history for a similar period, including those of Alex Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jr., while during
Hideki Matsui’s rookie year in New York, Yankee jerseys bearing his autograph were being sold to visiting Japanese for a whopping
$2,000 apiece. Matsui’s popularity with his fellow countrymen, and the vast lucre it represented, was such that George Steinbrenner,
in an unprecedented move, allowed the New York Yankees to travel 8,000 miles, from Tampa to Tokyo, to play Opening Day in
Japan in 2004. There, in another historical first, his players wore advertising patches promoting Ricoh Copiers on their uniforms,
making them look not unlike NASCAR drivers. In recognition of Matsui’s financial importance to New York, the city made the
Yankee left fielder an official “tourism ambassador” to Japan.
As a result of all this, scouts from the leading major league baseball clubs have established a permanent presence in Japan,
scouring high schools, colleges and the pro leagues for fresh talent.
Because of linguistic difficulties and other factors, not that much is really known about those individuals who have made
their marks on the American consciousness. Who are they? Where do they come from? What makes them tick? How do they regard
their own experiences and their impact on our game, and what lessons can we learn from them? This book is meant to answer
those questions.
THE EDUCATION OF ICHIRO
A person does not live alone. Our lives are not our own. They are a gift from heaven. Just like our physical bodies. We are
created and nurtured by our parents, by all mankind, by the wind and the rain, by the food we eat and countless other things
that have supported our hearts, soul, spirit. So, in a sense, they are not really our bodies. We live because we are allowed
to live. I taught this to my son Ichiro again and again.
N
OBUYUKI
S
UZUKI
H
E HAD PLAYED BASEBALL ALL HIS LIFE.
H
E HAD APPROACHED
the sport with a passion and conviction that few of his contemporaries could match. For that, he had his father, a former
high school pitcher, to thank. When he was three years old, his father had given him his first baseball glove and initiated
daily games of catch. Made of shiny red leather, it was the most expensive type available at sporting goods counters in and
around Toyoyama, a sparsely populated suburb of industrial, smog-bound Nagoya, where the Suzuki family lived. The boy’s mother
had strenuously objected that at half a month’s wages, it was far too costly a toy for a small child, but the father had been
resolute.
“It’s not a toy,” he had said. “It’s a tool that will teach him the value of things.”
Nobuyuki Suzuki was a Buddhist/Shintoist who believed that all inanimate things—rocks, trees, lakes, baseball gloves—were
animated with spirit, that they were created by a higher force and deserved to be treated with respect
and
gratitude. He demanded that his son Ichiro follow their daily games of catch in the backyard with a ritualistic cleaning
and oiling of the glove (a habit that the son continued to follow religiously for the next three decades).
At age seven, the boy, Ichiro, had joined a local youth baseball team, which played on weekends; shortly after that, he asked
his father to teach him the proper way to play the game.
The father in turn asked his son if he could commit himself to practice every day, to stick without deviation to the endeavor,
all the way to the end. Could he promise? The answer was yes.
“Good, then,” said the father. “We have a deal. Make sure you keep your end of it.”
Thus did practice—and what would prove to be Nobuyuki’s lifelong mission—begin in earnest. At 3:30 every afternoon, the father
would excuse himself from the small family-owned electrical parts factory he managed and join his son at a neighborhood Little
League ballpark, an island of manicured grass and raked earth set amongst suburban rice fields and newly built residential
houses, bringing with him bats, gloves and a suitcase filled with hard rubber balls. The daily routine included some jogging
and a light game of catch to start, then the boy would throw 50 pitches, hit 200 balls tossed to him by his father, and finally
finish up with infield and outfield defensive fungo drills of 50 balls each. The father, a slightly built man who as an amateur
ballplayer had been distinguished more by his desire than real ability, taught his naturally right-handed son to swing from
the left side, which he explained would give him an extra two or three steps’ advantage on the sprint to first base. He also
taught him to swing so that he would always be in a position to run.
On the way home, around seven o’clock, they would stop at a shop for ice cream, then after dinner and homework, father and
son would set out once more, this time to a nearby batting center, located in the shadow of the city’s international airport
and named, fittingly enough, “Airport Batting Center.” The boy would take 250 to 300 swings against a pitching machine. He
would assume his stance, imitating the star batters he saw on television like Yasushi Tao, the smooth-swinging line-drive-hitting
outfielder of the Chunichi Dragons—the thwack of bat against ball competing with the roar of the passenger jets taking off
and landing down the road. The father would stand behind the net, monitoring his son’s form, scolding him if he swung at a
ball that was outside of an imagined strike zone. The batting center closed at 11
P.M.
and quite often the Suzuki team was still there when it did. Then, before bed, the father would massage the soles of his
son’s feet, in the belief that the foot with all its nerve endings was the key to a sound body.
“If the feet are healthy, you are healthy,” he liked to say.
This routine went on every day for several years, regardless of the heat or cold, rain or snow. During this time, Nobuyuki
Suzuki became known in the neighborhood simply as
san-ji-han otoko
(the 3:30 man) for his compulsive habit of leaving work early to play baseball with his son.
Ichiro, whose name meant “most cheerful boy,” was not always so cheerful about practicing, especially during the harsh winter
days of central Japan, when his fingers grew so numb from the frigid air that he could not button his shirt.
Once, denied permission to leave practice early to play with his friends, he sat down in the middle of the field in protest
and refused to budge. The father angrily began to throw balls at his son, but the boy’s reflexes were so fast that he would
move his body an inch to the left or right and the ball would whiz harmlessly by, or else a hand would shoot up, like the
automatic flag on a Nagoya taxi meter, and snare a bullet headed for the bridge of his nose.