Ichiro Suzuki had an outsized impact on baseball in Japan and the United States, and on Thursday, after he was announced as one of the four newest members in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, he subtly reminded us of what he has meant.
In Japan, Ichiro’s effort to be the ultimate player in the traditional Japanese style, restored a zest and unpredictability to pro baseball that a generation of big thinkers had gone a long way toward erasing.
When he came to the United States, Ichiro was a player like few remembered seeing, someone who lit up every game he played whether he was at bat, on the bases or in the field. He was a player who could dominate play with the same non-stop action that had made the game popular in America before anyone had ever heard of Babe Ruth.
In my limited experience with him, Ichiro has two kinds of press conferences, those he manages with pre-arranged questions for his prepared answers mean to display his skill with language and imagery, and those where he takes whatever questions he gets and is starkly honest and open with his answers. These latter ones are feasts.
Because the day job demanded I be in the office, I was not able to be at Tokyo Dome, so I have no sense of how Thursday’s session with the press went down. However, I want to share a few things he said that I believe reveal, to borrow a phrase from my dear friend Robert Whiting, the meaning of Ichiro.
Asked the secret to his longevity and success on Thursday, Suzuki said, “I have questioned what many people consider to be conventional wisdom, and have made important decisions on my own. I think one of the biggest factors is that I have acted based on my intuition, not on the opinions of others.”
On analytics, he said, “Things that have been fashioned over a long period of time exist for a reason. I don’t want us to lose that which is essential for the sake of temporary gain. I am one who takes an overly cautious stance when making decisions.”
The solution to kanri yakyu
Turning pro at a time when the loudest voices in Japanese baseball were those of people who believed the tenets of “kanri yakyu” – controlled baseball — every tactical situation, every lineup, every fitness issue, every swing, every throwing motion, every pitching pattern had a single solution that could be rationalized and controlled for maximum efficiency.
One look at Ichiro Suzuki’s batting stance, with its pendulum leg swing was enough to ensure he would never handle good major league pitching in Japan, or so his first Orix BlueWave skipper, Shozo Doi, said.
After two years spent mostly in the minors, where Suzuki demolished Western League pitching as a teenager, he was rescued by iconoclastic Hall of Fame manager Akira Ogi, who had no trouble ignoring kanri yakyu’s cookie-cutter prescriptions when it suited him.
Ogi, who had been a second baseman for another iconoclast Hall of Fame skipper, Osamu Mihara and played in the 1950s and 1960s, when Japanese baseball was a cornucopia of contrasting styles from tactics to individual approaches.
When some pros cast doubt on Hideo Nomo’s chances to be successful because of his poor command and unorthodox delivery, Ogi offered him the same prescription he would later give Ichiro, “do what works.”
In his first full season in Japan’s majors, Ichiro became a household name. Every evening newscast had a segment showing clips of all his plate appearances that day. He was news, and soon virtually every high school player in Japan had adopted a front-leg swing of some kind, and within a few years they were ubiquitous at all levels as players sought to find their own way instead of simply doing what they were told. Of course, a lot of it was simply copying Ichiro, but he planted the seed for an idea that conventional wisdom passed down from coaches did not hold all the answers.
After more than a decade of kanri yakyu influence, there were precious few players at the time who had such truly unorthodox batting stances, and they were seen as outliers, but in fact they were throwbacks to a time when there were no prescribed stances and swings.
So in that sense, Ichiro and his outlandish style was both a novelty and a window back on a day when players sought their own solutions rather than choosing one from among authorized by the people who tried to model baseball after a quality-controlled Japanese factory where every process and subprocess was mapped out for maximum efficiency.
For years, conventional baseball wisdom has been for fast left-handed hitters with defensive skills should hit the ball to the left side of the infield, on the ground to force errors from shortstops and third basemen rushing to make the long throw to first. This was the way children were taught to be beat unskilled opponents in order to win in Japan’s pervasive knockout tournaments.
Because of his body type, Suzuki had been assigned by his first manager to be a defensive substitute and pinch-runner. But despite the obvious proof from the minors that he could in fact hit, Suzuki’s form was repeatedly pronounced unsound.
In 1994, however, Ichiro shattered Japan’s 44-year-old record for hits in a season with 210 in 130 games. The previous record of 191 had been set over 140 games in NPB’s 1950 expansion season by Hall of Famer Fumio Fujimura, one of the numerous two-way players that populated the early years of Japanese pro baseball.
That first of Ichiro’s three Pacific League MVP seasons was followed in 1995 by the first of two PL pennants, and in 1996 by a Japan Series championship. He went on to win the PL batting title and a Golden Glove in each of the next seven seasons before begging Orix to post him to MLB.
Before that move, his ability to hit MLB pitching was doubted by Vinny Castilla during an all-star tour of Japan, while Mike Hargrove, managing the MLB side one autumn, praised Suzuki by saying he would be an excellent fit in MLB as a “fourth or fifth outfielder” foreshadowing the frostiness that later developed between them with the Mariners.
During the November 2020 MLB-Japan all-star tour, the MLB players were gobsmacked to learn Seattle had committed to a $13 million posting fee for the exclusive rights to negotiate with a player who had never competed in MLB and ridiculed the Mariners for their stupidity.
No one doubted him after he shut Mariners manager Lou Piniella up in spring training, when he moaned about Ichiro not pulling at all, asking him if he ever turned on the ball. According to John McClaren, then the bench coach, Suzuki’s response was to pull a long home run in his first at-bat of the next preseason game. When he returned to the dugout and said to Piniella, “Is that turning on the ball, skip?”
In Japan, where Ichiro was the kind of player the establishment idolized because of his ability to make contact, hit for average and play flawless defense, he wasn’t seen as a throwback, but simply the best of an honored genre. His unique style and crowd-pleasing showmanship were simply icing on an already spectacular cake.
The throwback
In America, however, he represented an approach that had been out of style for so long that many considered him a unique quantity. But what didn’t occur to me until this week was that Ichiro was not a throwback to the time of Ty Cobb, but to the 19th century when baseball was a contest, not between batter and pitcher, but between runner and fielder.
The appeal of Ichiro’s game is that embraces baseball’s original elemental appeal of players racing around the basepaths, challenging fielders to get to the ball quickly and either make catches or throw them out.
I don’t want to say he disdained walks, but Ichiro went to the plate to get a pitch to hit.
“He’d remember what you threw,” Kudo said. “If you threw a pitch outside the zone, he’d remember it and when you threw it again, he’d react to it. He could handle anything.”
He was not a hacker, but he existed to make things happen, to put the ball in play and challenge the fielders with his base running.
When Ichiro was in the field, it was the same game for him, robbing batters of hits, daring them to challenge his arm. It was all about action and imposing his will on the game, plain and simple.
It’s no surprise that a player obsessed with baseball’s history, who played a game that would have been right at home in baseball’s earliest year would be overly cautious about change. As new and different as he was to MLB fans, Ichiro was the living breathing embodiment of how exciting the core elements of the game could be in the hands of a dedicated master.
Former pitcher Satoru Komiyama, who faced off against Ichiro in Japan, said it was a matter of priorities.
Now, as manager of Waseda University’s baseball program, Komiyama has adopted a philosophy of letting players develop, hone and take ownership of their individual styles. When asked about Ichiro’s influence on the game, he chose not to talk about his former rival’s stylistic departures but their shared philosophy about the importance of putting the bat to the ball.
“I believe that hitting the ball squarely 30 times out of 100 is better than hitting a 150-meter home run once in 100 times, so I think we should first develop hitters like that,” he said. “I think I share that same idea as Ichiro.”
“I think he (Ichiro) is a ‘child of baseball.’ Of course, the the great players of Japan’s past, Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Katsuya Nomura, and so on were also amazing, but I think Ichiro is the best.”
