The Meaning of Ichiro (7 page)

On opening day against Oakland, in front of Nobuyuki Suzuki (who had been robbed on his way in from the airport) and 43,000
other fans at Safeco Field, Seattle’s beautiful, sparkling new gem of a park, he collected his first two official MLB hits,
including a perfect drag bunt single in the ninth inning that left the Oakland infield searching for their athletic supporters.
That surprise tactic led the Mariners to a dramatic come-from-behind victory and earned the famously reserved Japanese star
a big, wet, sloppy kiss from the famously extroverted Piniella, an impulsive display of appreciation which the embarrassed
Ichiro bore with some discomfort. As he told a Japanese TV crew, “It’s something that makes most Japanese men want to throw
up.”

Back-to-back hitting streaks of 15 and 23 games followed, highlighted by three four-hit performances and a 10th-inning, game-winning
home run in Texas. By the first week of June he was on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
(in the same week that the movie
Pearl Harbor
opened nationwide, ironically enough), leading the American League in hits with an overall batting average of .366. He also
had a mark of over .500 with the bases loaded, totally obliterating the misconception that Japanese batters could not handle
major league pitching.

Opposing pitchers discovered that he could hit everything they threw at him: curves, sliders, changeups, split-fingers and
pure unadulterated heat, in-high or low-and-away. It didn’t matter. He was an equal opportunity batsman. So exceptional was
his hand-eye coordination that it was calculated he swung and missed only 6 percent of the time. These were figures that had
not been seen since Wade Boggs was in his prime.

Although the Japanese flash could smack line drives to either gap and pull the occasional pitch into the stands, his specialty
was slashing pitches in the dirt to the left side of the infield and then beating the throw to first base—his time down the
line was a Mantlesque 3.6 seconds, the swiftest in the major leagues. In fact, he was so quick out of the box that it looked
to most observers as though he was running even before he had hit the ball. Opposing teams radically revised their infield
defenses to cope, moving in only to leave larger holes through which Ichiro punched one-hoppers to the outfield.

This was, it should be pointed out, not exactly the Ichiro that Japanese fans were used to seeing. In the major leagues, Ichiro
had half again as many infield hits as he had ever had in Japan, where he was rather more noted for whipping line drives over
the infielders and for occasional bursts of power. The change was largely due to Piniella, who, when not showering his new
star with affection, was ordering him to eschew the fly ball and chop pitches into the dirt, the better to take advantage
of his blinding speed and force errant throws.

Seattle, a team that had heretofore relied primarily on home run power from its former slugging stars Ken Griffey Jr. and
Alex Rodriguez, was now transformed into a gang of scrappers, scoring runs on infield hits, stolen bases and sacrifice flies,
thanks to the spark plug from the Orient. In fact, the Mariners frequently scored a first-inning run before their cleanup
hitters even had a chance to bat. Their offense was so diabolically effective that by mid-June, they found themselves leading
the American League West by more than 22 games and were on pace to match the all-time single-season win record.

The new guy on the team also turned out to have one of the best throwing arms on the planet. In one frigid night game in Oakland,
he launched a 200-foot missile that nailed Oakland baserunner Terence Long attempting to go from first to third on a single
to right field. Long, who had expected to make the trip easily, was so astonished to be thrown out that he turned, faced right
field and tipped his cap.

“I’m not the fastest guy in the world,” he said later. “But that has to be the best throw I’ve ever seen.” ESPN agreed. “The
Throw,” as it came to be known in Seattle baseball lore, quickly won a spot on the sports channel’s highlight clips.

By the midseason break, the verdict was in. A survey of baseball managers, conducted by
Baseball America,
voted Ichiro the best base-runner in the American League, its second-best hitter and its third-best defensive outfielder.
Catching great Ivan Rodriguez declared flatly, “Ichiro is the best player in the game.”

In the voting for the All-Star Game, held fortuitously enough in Seattle, Ichiro garnered 3,373,000 votes—an all-time record,
as was the 800,000-vote margin he boasted over his nearest rival. Although he had benefited from newly instituted Internet
polling as well as convenience store voting in Japan, where zealous fans were notoriously un-shy about voting multiple times,
he had also dominated the hard ballots filled out at stadiums across North America.

Piniella, sitting atop the baseball world, couldn’t believe his good fortune. “This guy Suzuki, he hits, bunts and steals,”
he said. “He scores before you know it. He sets the tone for the team. He’s phenomenal… . I’ll bet if you ask the managers
today what they really want, it’s a leadoff man like him. And of course Ichiro is the best in the game.” Said Mariners veteran
first baseman John Olerud to a Japanese reporter, “He’s without question the driving force on this team. He’s the one who
makes it go.”

The effect that Ichiro’s presence had on the city of Seattle and the entire Northwest was electric. Attendance at Mariners
games surged, on its way to a new single-season record. Ichiro posters, T-shirts and jerseys flew off the shelves. Autographed
Ichiro baseballs went for $500. An Ichiro bobblehead doll, a Mariners promotional giveaway in July, caused a 30 percent jump
in ticket sales. One man drove all the way from Boise, Idaho, just to get one of them, purportedly for his son.

In addition, airline and hotel reservations rose 20 percent, the latter thanks primarily to visitors from Japan who were paying
up to $2,000 for baseball package tours. This caused the subsequent debut of sushi stands at Safeco, selling “Ichirolls” (tuna
rolls for $9), for example. Headbands emblazoned with the
kanji
slogan for “Water Warrior” (a Mariners nickname) also went on sale, and a large Nissan sign in
katakana
was erected inside the park. The Pacific Northwest had never seemed more Japanese.

Analysts predicted that the Ichiro factor—when one included ticket sales, souvenirs and advertising—would move over $100 million
into Seattle’s economy over a five-year span.

NHK, Japan’s quasi-national television network, which had opened up a permanent booth in the Safeco upper deck, was telecasting
live all Seattle games—182 of them including exhibition and playoff games—back to Japan, where Ichiro was suddenly the talk
of the land. Almost overnight, solely because of him, Japan had gone from a country that sporadically watched American baseball
to one that watched Seattle Mariners games with something approaching religious fervor, even though the 16-hour time difference
meant that the games were televised in the morning.

Tokyo taxi drivers plied the streets with their radios tuned to the Mariners’ play-by-play in Japanese, while the numerous
sports dailies—14 in all with circulations of up to several hundred thousand each—carried detailed reports on every move Ichiro
made. His success in the big leagues was the story of the year in Japan, the story of the decade, perhaps. He got more attention
than the Emperor and the Prime Minister combined. Everybody wanted a piece of him, from the mainstream newspapers, with circulations
running well into the millions, to the myriad network TV shows, as well as the weekly and monthly magazines. The
Yukan Fuji,
an evening tabloid, featured the exploits of Ichiro on its back page every single day and saw its sales jump dramatically.
The Yomiuri Giants, a national institution whose games had been televised nationwide nearly every evening since April 1954,
saw their ratings drop.

With homegrown baseball suddenly relegated to second-tier status, “How did Ichiro do today?” became a new way of saying hello
in Japan.

The Mariners had given credentials to 166 reporters dispatched from Japan, many of whom were to take up permanent residence
in the Puget Sound area and follow Ichiro around 24/7 the entire season. This caused not a few headaches for the Mariners’
media relations department, bombarded as they were daily with requests for information.

The Japanese reporters on the scene were on orders from their editors to file something new and interesting about Ichiro every
day, along with photos. This was not easy, because the object of their attentions followed the same unvarying, if lengthy,
pre- and postgame routines with such religiosity that a minor event such as the delivery by Ichiro of a
bent
of pickled
onigiri
packed by Mrs. Suzuki for Bret Boone (or even a gratuitous nose-picking) qualified as news. After one workout, a Japanese
writer approached Seattle coach John McLaren and asked, “Yesterday, Ichiro swung 214 times in batting practice. Today he swung
only 196 times. What is the problem?”

Desperate for something different, reporters staked out the condo in Bellevue where Ichiro and his wife lived. They sifted
through the Suzuki family garbage and badgered the neighbors for information. When a pictorial scandal magazine offered $1
million for a photograph of Ichiro in the nude and photographers took to hiding out in the bushes near his backyard, Ichiro
was forced to move to a house in East Bellevue to protect his privacy, as well as shower in private at the ballpark. (He declined
an offer from an insouciant fellow Mariner to take a snapshot in the altogether and split the money.)

Observing all this, ESPN reporter and noted wit Jim Caple was moved to remark, “This is what it would have been like if Princess
Di had played baseball.”

As the season wore on, Ichiro proved impossible to intimidate. Opposing pitchers who tried to knock him back with high, inside
pitches found his bat so quick he could snake their offerings down the line. Knock him down and he’d get right back up and
stand that much closer to the plate. Send him to first with a pitch in the ribs and he’d promptly steal second, maybe even
third for good measure. He was, in the words of fellow outfielder Mike Cameron, “one feisty little sucker.”

The longer schedule (162 games in 180 days in the MLB in 2001 as opposed to 140 games in 199 for the NPB) and a much heavier
travel load than he had ever experienced in geographically compact Japan also proved to be less of a problem than many had
predicted. Indeed, the only pitch that proved effective against Ichiro was an unexpected curve thrown by a long-legged 20-year-old
Japanese exchange student—a young lady whom Ichiro had reportedly met at a hostess club for expatriate Japanese in San Francisco.

After a game in Oakland one night, as the story went, Ichiro had invited her to his hotel room at the Westin for a romantic
encounter. He was unaware, when the young lady arrived, that the cell phone in her handbag was turned on and connected to
a number that would record their subsequent activities.

A transcript of the recording subsequently appeared in the pages of
Friday
and caused a huge scandal. Among other things, it had Ichiro saying, “I’d like to tie you up with the bathrobe sash. The
thought of it really turns me on.” Some readers compared its contents to the infamous Charles and Camilla tapes.

The embarrassment of it all plunged Ichiro into an 0-21 slump, his batting average plummeting from the .347 mark he had taken
into the All-Star classic all the way down to .325 and prompted a flurry of wisecracks in the Japanese media. Typical was
that of a
Shukan Post
journalist who wrote, “Ichiro might have great bat control, but this is one time he forgot to exercise it.”

Reportedly, Ichiro’s wife did not speak to him for a long time after that, while Ichiro and relief ace Kazuhiro Sasaki, who
had joined Seattle a year earlier from the Yokohama BayStars, launched a brief boycott of the Japanese press for hounding
them in such a manner.

Operation Tapegate proved to be only a temporary setback, however. In time, Ichiro regained his old stroke and by the end
of the season he was leading the American League in a multitude of categories. He won the batting title, hitting .350, and
led the league in hits with 242 (59 of the infield variety). The latter was an American League rookie record, as well as a
Seattle Mariners team record and was the highest total anyone had seen in 71 years. He also led the AL in runs scored (127)
and stolen bases (56), as Seattle finished with 116 victories, which broke the American League record for total wins heretofore
held by the New York Yankees, with 114 in 1998. Ichiro had helped the Mariners achieve victory in the AL Division Series (collecting
12 hits) before losing out to New York in the AL Championship Series in five games. He was chosen the American League’s Most
Valuable Player as well as its Rookie of the Year (only the second man in history to earn both honors in one season) and won
a Gold Glove. All in all he broke 13 MLB, AL or franchise records and his former critics now were saying that he had the ability
to become the first man in over 60 years to hit .400.