Year after Year: How Ichiro did it

I wish I could say that every time I sit down to write a column about baseball, I tug my right sleeve with my left hand. But consistency never was my thing. Nevertheless, in honor of the most unusual, successful, consistent athlete in my experience around Seattle sports, I start today. Ichiro Suzuki, this tug’s for you.

I will leave to others in the tribe of baseball voters/scholars to decide whether that tug is a greater honor than Ichiro being selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame Tuesday. Among the 396 Baseball Writers Association of America who returned a ballot, 395 had checked Ichiro. By a single vote, he missed becoming the second unanimous selection ever — Yankees reliever Mariano Rivera was the first — in the Hall’s 81-year history.

Until I sleuth out the anonymous wretch responsible, and punish him by making him watch film of the entire 1969 season of the misbegotten Seattle Pilots, the tug and this essay is the best I can do for Ichiro (I long ago declined my opportunity to be a Hall voter, reasoning that if I were an electrician, I would not respect an industry award given to me by others whose experience with electricity peaked at flipping a light switch).

“I can’t imagine it would get to this point where I am today,” Ichiro said Tuesday via interpreter Allen Turner on MLB.com. “There was a time where I didn’t even know if I would be given the chance to play in MLB. What an honor it is for me to be here and be a Hall of Famer — it’s a special day.”

Few others around the game in the 1990s could have imagined differently. But we learned quickly.

I will confine the stat recital to my favorite Ichiro historical feat. In his first Mariners season of 2001 — when he was named American League Rookie of the Year as well as Most Valuable Player while his team won an other-worldly 116 games — Ichiro joined the immortal Jackie Robinson as the only players to lead the majors in batting average and stolen bases in the same season. I particularly enjoyed the symmetry of cultural breakthroughs: Robinson erased the white patriarchy myth about black players as Ichiro erased the white patriarchy myth of Japanese position players.

My favorite Ichiro personal accolade will never be part of his Cooperstown biography but was said well by longtime MLB player and manager Dusty Baker.

“I love the guy — he’s cool,” Baker said. “He’s got a cool hairstyle. Cool clothes. Cool car. Anyone who goes by one name has got to be cool.”

In Dusty I trusty.

The most intriguing aspect of Ichiro for me was less about the what and more about the how. For someone who is not physically imposing to impose his will on the game was an object of much fascination. Much of his resourcefulness had to do with his upbringing in the more disciplined Japanese baseball culture, along with the persistence of his father. Since Ichiro rarely explained much at length in the Seattle clubhouse, hiding behind a club-provided English interpreter that made real conversation clumsy, I had to find sources elsewhere to explain the mystery (FYI, he is quite fluent in English and Spanish, particularly when it comes to profanity).

In 2004, Sasquatch Books published “Ichiro on Ichiro,” which was mostly a series of conversations with author Narumi Komatsu. The book is a little self-serving, but when you seek to explain the inexplicable, help is where you find it.

One answer illuminated his understanding of the push-pull that hitters face at the plate.

“There’s two important elements in batting. There’s a part of you that needs to be aggressive and a part of you that needs to be patient. These are contradictory elements, but unless you can be both, there will be an imbalance in your batting. If one is stronger than the other, say the aggressive part, then you’ll chase pitches you don’t really want to go after. If the patient part is stronger, you won’t go after pitches you could hit. As long as both of these batting fundamentals work together, your batting will be in balance, and you’ll always be able to do well.”

If 10 consecutive seasons of 200-plus hits means anything, Ichiro found that balance better than anyone. Had Julio Rodriguez found that balance for most of the 2024 season, Mariners fans would still be giggling about how fun it was to be World Series first-timers.

The other part of the game where Ichiro exhibited mastery was baserunning. Yes, he was fast, but disruptive baserunning is more than pure speed.

“In 2002, in a game against the Toronto Blue Jays in Seattle, John Olerud was at bat and I was on third. We were in extra innings, and Olerud hit a grounder to second, driving me in, winning the game.

The Toronto infield was playing in, so anybody would think on a grounder to second, the runner from third would be tagged out at the plate. Our bench gave me the go sign, so I went for it. But if I had made a decision to go for it after the batter had hit, there’s no way I could have been safe. I had to have a mental image beforehand of the kind of pitches this pitcher might throw to Olerud, what kind of grounder he might hit and where, and the timing of my start for home. You have to have a mental image of those things before they happen. The pitcher was a southpaw who liked to throw sinkers. I imagined the ball would be hit to short or second. That’s exactly what happened.

Those times are the greatest. It feels good to hit a home run to win a game, for sure, but nothing could make a player happier than a case like this, where no one expects it. Those are the times I get emotional . . .”

Outsmarting the opponent seemed to be his greatest pleasure. But there were times where Ichiro’s obsessiveness didn’t help with teammates.

In pursuit of hits to keep up his batting average, he avoided taking walks or sacrifice bunts when the moments called for such tactics, because those plate appearances didn’t help his numbers. In the field, Ichiro was careful to avoid walls and falls. In Japanese culture, high respect goes to those who show up for work every day. Ichiro’s belief in staying healthy for the team’s sake sometimes collided with the all-out, all-the-time ethos of American players. Returning to the dugout with more grass stains might have been better clubhouse politics. But as Woody Allen said, showing up is 80 percent of life.

Many premier players have idiosyncrasies — Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, etc. — that always emerge over a 162-game season. Managing them all at once is baseball’s orneriest task, which is why Lou Piniella may have been the MVP of the Mariners’ glory years.

Most significantly, Ichiro was a master of himself. That allowed him to find balance, persistence and endurance to be so good for so long. Jim Colborn, a former big-league pitcher who, as a Mariners scout, connected with a young Ichiro in Japan, understood Ichiro’s mindset as well as anyone.

 “Reggie Jackson could focus in the postseason, but Ichiro is much broader,” he said. “He can focus for a whole season.”

For a whole Hall of Fame career.