The Meaning of Ichiro (51 page)

Said McAdam, criticizing the ballot box stuffing by fans back in Japan, “Matsui’s RBI total shows him the beneficiary of the
many base runners in front of him in the powerful Yankees batting order.” He added, “There are more regulars in the Yankees lineup who have more homers than Matsui than those who have fewer… . This
is an All-Star?”

Nonetheless, it was a historic game for Japan because there were an unprecedented three native sons selected to play: Matsui,
Ichiro Suzuki and Shigetoshi Hasegawa. In fact, ratings for the telecast of that game in Japan were higher than they were
in the United States. (Shown on NHK General, the network’s terrestrial channel beamed to nearly every household in Japan,
the game drew a viewer rating of 11.6 percent, meaning nearly 12 million people watched the morning telecast. The rating was
higher than for the Fox telecast of the contest in the United States, and higher even than certain Tokyo Giants games that
year.) Fans missed the last two innings of that game, one of the most exciting All-Star Games in years, with the AL rallying
in the bottom of the eighth inning for three runs to take a come-from-behind victory, because of a previously scheduled half-hour
news break. It hardly mattered to most of them, though, because the last Japanese player had already been removed from the
game. Indeed, a subsequent survey conducted by the
Mainichi Shim-bun
asked the question, “After you see the day’s news on Matsui, do you remember who won the day’s game?” Seventy-eight percent
of respondents said no.

Matsui continued to impress as play resumed in the second half of the season, with a number of crowd-pleasing hits, foremost
among them a towering walk-off home run to right field to beat the Cleveland Indians on July 18; it was the first
sayonara
home run ever hit by a Japanese in MLB history. On September 17, he became only the third Yankees rookie in history—after
Joe DiMaggio and Tony Lazerri—to drive in 100 runs in a season.

Although Matsui did not ultimately prove to be the franchise player (or even the home run threat) that many Japanese had anticipated,
he did finish with a set of statistics you could send home to Mama. They included a batting average of .287, 16 home runs
and his 106 RBIs, which was second on the team and was the highest total for a Yankees rookie since DiMaggio in 1936. Showing
“gap power,” he also led New York in doubles, batted .335 with runners in scoring position and earned kudos from fans and
sportswriters alike for his other talents—the fielding skills, the quickness with which he got the ball back to the infield
(“He’s like a second baseman in that regard,” said YES broadcaster Michael Kay), his heads-up baserunning ability and mastery
of the other fundamentals. Thomas Boswell called him “a left-handed version of the elegant Hall of Famer Al Kaline.”

New Yorkers especially took to his unfailingly polite demeanor, which fit in nicely with the clean-cut, almost bland Yankee
persona. Had Matsui been less of a nice guy during his down periods, the New York press would most certainly have been harder
on him, but, as it was, there were no howling back-page headlines of the “Iraboo” sort about his performance.

No one was more satisfied than Yankee manager Joe Torre, who said, summing up, “He does everything well. Sure, he’s a different
player than I thought we were getting, but I think he’s better. It’s tough for a slugger to switch leagues and switch countries
because most of them take advantage of pitchers’ mistakes, pitchers they’ve faced over and over again. But Hideki is much
more than a home run hitter. He’s a line drive hitter who covers the whole plate. He hits to all fields. He has good at-bats.
And he knows how to play the game. I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have at bat with men on base than Hideki.” High
praise indeed.

And there was more to come as shares in Matsui’s stock enjoyed a major postseason rally. He whacked a powerful home run in
Minnesota to give the Yankees a 3-1 lead in the American League Division Series. He slammed a scalding double down the right-field
line off Pedro Martinez in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, while his alert baserunning allowed him to score
the tying run in the eighth inning of Game 7, which New York won in extra innings. He was so excited after touching home plate
on that play that he jumped three feet into the air, pumping his fists in jubilation. Said one Japanese writer watching wide-eyed
back in Japan, “That’s more emotion than he ever showed in his life.”

In Game 2 of the 99th World Series (which the Yankees would lose in six games), he hit a 3-0 fastball off Florida starter
Mark Redman over the center-field fence, 408 feet away. That blast made him the first Japanese ever to hit a World Series
home run and earned him gushing headlines the next morning—“A Classic Yankee!” blared the
New York Post.
“Matsui Earns Stripes!” went another—and a public prediction by Steinbrenner that Matsui would hit “35 homers” for sure the
following year.

In the end, Matsui’s most important contribution may have been financial, as he single-handedly created new ways for tourists
to blow their money in New York. Sales of Yankees tickets to Japanese tour groups went through the roof, as did sales of Matsui
goods. In mid-season, an autographed Hideki Matsui baseball sold for $379, compared to $269 for teammate Derek Jeter (and
a Barry Bonds ball for $279), prompting one baffled Yankees official to remark, “The people from Japan don’t seem to give
a damn about Yankee baseball. All they want is to see Matsui get a hit, to buy a Matsui souvenir and go home feeling good
about their country. Watching the other Yankees play is incidental.”

Be that as it may, according to one estimate, the intense Japanese interest in Matsui brought in well over 100 million much-needed
dollars for the city’s economy, about five times what Ichiro had done for Seattle in his debut campaign.

Godzilla himself didn’t do so badly either with lucrative endorsement contracts for Upper Deck sports cards, Lotte ice cream,
a Mizuno sports drink and Japan Airlines, among others. In midsummer of 2003, JAL launched a new fleet of Boeing 747 jets,
two of which flew to Matsui’s hometown airport in the city of Komatsu (of which Neagari is a suburb) bearing a 20-foot image
of the star’s puss on the fuselage. One of the many advantages for Matsui of being a Yankee was that unlike the Yomiuri Giants,
the Yankees did not demand control over his endorsements or a 20 percent cut off the top.

The city fathers of Neagari certainly welcomed the publicity generated by their native son’s emigration to New York. Plans
were laid to ignite a tourist boom by merging their town with two nearby communities and bestowing upon the new mini-metropolis
the name “Matsui City.” A train station near the local ballpark was to be renamed “Godzilla Station.”

Not everybody in Japan was eager to share in the joy. One, of course, was Watanabe, who saw his TV ratings slip to under 15
percent, the team’s lowest since the Japanese Nielsen system began in 1965. Another malcontent was a fan named Kiyoko Morishita
who wrote a letter of complaint to a newspaper in which she decried the fuss over American games. “Many players seem to think
that success in the major leagues means more than success in Japan,” she sniffed. “The attitude is similar to some Japanese
people’s adoration of Western culture. I want Japanese players to respect Japanese fans. The media and TV shows actually give
more attention to the achievements of Japanese major leaguers. I’m bored with that. They should focus on Japanese baseball….
If the Professional Baseball Association doesn’t consider ways to change the situation, it will become unable to attract spectators.
My hope is that more young talented players will come out and show us more exciting games.”

One who wasn’t about to fly back to the rescue of NPB was Hideki Matsui, who, by season’s end, was standing as erect and as
proud as anyone else in the park during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America”—shoulders back,
cap respectfully over his heart—as if he truly were an American citizen. Said Yankees vice president Jean Afterman, “Hideki
absolutely reveled in being a New York Yankee.”

“I’m a American major leaguer, now,” Matsui said emphatically, after a year of enjoying American-style freedom. “And I’m here
to stay… . This is only the beginning.”

To prove how serious he was, Matsui stepped up his game to a higher level in his sophomore year in the Bronx, improving his
line to .298, 31 HR and 108 RBIs and proving himself a full-fledged equal in a rejiggered Yankees murderer’s row that now
included such feared names as Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez.

The funny thing is not how different Japanese and American baseball is, but how, in some ways, each country longs to be a
little more like the other.

J
OE
P
OSANASKI,
K
ANSAS
C
ITY
S
TAR

For Ichiro Suzuki, 2001 proved hard to match. The shades-wearing teen idol followed his gilt-edged first season with successively
declining marks of .321 and .312, starting off like an F-l racer in both years but then developing engine trouble and running
out of gas by September. It was a pattern that accompanied the Mariners’ frustrating dissipation of huge division leads in
both of those campaigns, which ended with their failure to make the playoffs two years running. In 2002 Ichiro hit .357 in
the first half of the season, but only .280 after. In 2003 his collapse was even more striking, as he nosedived from .352
at the All-Star break all the way down to .243 over the final two months.

This prompted some observers, like sports columnist Jack Gallagher, to suggest that perhaps Ichiro’s famed work ethic was
inappropriate to the long MLB grind, with its grueling travel schedule. Others believed that the problem was caused by opposing
pitchers who had been pounding the Seattle Flash more than ever with inside fastballs, which Ichiro had taken to pulling for
fly outs. This caused a significant drop-off in the number of hits he slashed to the opposite side of the field—such infield
singles being a hallmark of his unforgettable first year.

Ichiro himself, who had once aspired to hitting .400 in MLB, was said to be so upset by his inability to perform well for
the Mariners down the stretch that he lost his famous composure. He told his old friend Leon Lee, who had spent 2003 managing
Ichiro’s former team, the Orix BlueWave, “It was killing me that I was letting my teammates down. I felt so much anger and
anxiety at times that I threw up.”

“Don’t worry so much,” Leon counseled him. “Your problem is that you’re getting stronger. You’re only 29 and you’re still
developing as a player. Add to that the fact that you know the pitchers in the majors better, so you’re being more aggressive.
This all goes to why you’re hitting more fly balls. What you should be doing is easing up and trying to hit more to left field.
Hit inside out and you’ll be fine.”

It would prove to be advice well worth taking.

Certain other distractions may have affected Ichiro’s mental state as well. Among them was his irrepressible father, Nobuyuki,
who was now spending all his time running the Ichiro museum in Nagoya, an amazing operation that housed, among other delectations,
every conceivable bit of Ichiro childhood memorabilia, from his preschool baseball glove to his dental retainer. It was all
maintained “as lovingly as the Shroud of Turin,” to use the words of one writer. Nobuyuki had been funneling Ichiro’s ancillary
income from endorsements and other sources through the museum’s accounting books, a practice that unfortunately came under
the inquiring gaze of the National Tax Office. Tax officials subsequently required Ichiro to pay back taxes to the tune of
$168,000. Then there was the report that his father had attempted to charge ESPN $800 for an interview. According to Orix
beat reporters, Nobuyuki had been making up to $100,000 a year from such endeavors in Japan, where paying for press interviews
was a custom. Most Japanese sports figures understood that such practices were not generally welcome in the West and declined
to invoice American reporters for their time. Nobuyuki, however, had apparently not gotten the word. ESPN predictably declined
to pay and the interview never took place. (Hideki Matsui, chosen in the postseason by
People
magazine as one of the 23 Most Lovable Men on the Globe, suffered a similar embarrassment when his father, a noted karaoke
buff, took advantage of his son’s exploding popularity to record a CD in a duet with a popular
enka
songstress named Kaori Kozai. Matsui’s exasperated response to the album, entitled
Yukizuri Monogatari,
or “A Tale of Passing Strangers,” might be loosely translated as “Dad, you really ought to know better.”)

By 2003, Ichiro’s media star had begun to fade somewhat in Japan, if only fractionally, as his comings and goings were partially
eclipsed by the surge of interest in the new Yankee samurai Matsui. Coincidentally or otherwise, it was about this time that
Ichiro began to lower his guard and make himself more accessible to U.S. media. The highlight of this new availability was
an interview he did with Bob Costas in which he revealed his favorite English expression: Kansas City in August was “as hot
as two rats fucking inside a sock.”

If his own late-season pace had been less torrid than that, it was still impossible to ignore the raw fact of his three-year
average of .328 and aggregate total of 662 hits, stats that few players in MLB history had ever approached. He had opened
a door that was swinging ever wider, and more and more of his confreres were willing to walk through it. And stay.

They were led by Hideki Matsui, despite the fact that he found adjustment to MLB extremely difficult. Although he had complained
about the two-seam fastball—“Even when you know how the ball is going to break, there is no guarantee you can hit it solidly,”
he told a gathering at the National Press Club in Tokyo in November—and had adjudged the NPB and MLB to be so different that
it took a special kind of individual, one with mental strength as well as physical adaptability, to make it, he could not
wait to get back. He urged other big names in Japan who were eligible to leave to follow his example and take on the challenge
of a higher brand of
yaky
.