THE QUIRKY STYLINGS OF ICHIRO
Yankees get to see firsthand the art of what makes Suzuki one of era’s most prolific hitters
From the moment he steps to the plate to the followthrough on his swing, Ichiro hits like no other player and there’s a reason it works. ICHIRO SUZUKI is rooting around in the batter’s box dirt, using his left spike to smooth the clay in what is essentially his office. Then he twirls the bat around, pauses and holds it vertically before settling into the batting stance — or one of them, anyway — that has launched 2,558 major-league hits and counting.
Ichiro flicks a high pitch from Texas’ Mike Adams toward third base, nothing impressive, except what it’ll end up being in the box score. Ichiro sprints to first and not even Adrian Beltre, the Rangers’ elite third baseman, has time for a throw.
For his whole life, this is what Ichiro has done, whacking hits, whether they be liners or bouncers. It might not look like art when a dribbler becomes a single, like Wednesday night. But only the harshest critic or a threetrue-outcomes junkie would deny that Ichiro is a master of his craft, even at age 38.
Ichiro’s hitting is a skill born in his youth in Japan, when he first started developing a style that Derek Jeter, among others, describes as “slap and run.” Ichiro honed it as he got older and continues to work doggedly at it even though he’s already a lock for Cooperstown, a place he’s visited four times because he adores baseball history. He’s been a Yankee less than a month, but Ichiro
has proven himself to be another pinstriped workaholic, says hitting coach Kevin Long, who counts Ichiro among the Yanks who take the most batting-cage swings.
“To get that style down, you’d have to work,” says Long. “He’s constantly hitting.”
It’s working, as usual. Ichiro was acquired in a July 23 trade with Seattle mostly to provide defense and speed. The Yanks don’t expect him to be the hitter he was when he came to the majors in 2001 and got 200 hits for 10 straight seasons. But he’s batting .301 as a Yankee.
“He’s difficult to defend,” Jeter says. “If he puts the ball in play, he’s tough to throw out, especially if, as an infielder, you have to move. He’s faster than everybody.”
Ichiro is constantly stretching. His new teammates know if they need to see him, he can probably be found lying prone on the blue clubhouse carpet, contorting his valuable legs.
“He’s kind of weird about that,” says Freddy Garcia, Ichiro’s teammate in Seattle and now with the Yankees. “He’s stretching all day. Everybody knows that, that he’s always doing that.”
“He stretches more than any person that probably has played the game,” Long adds.
Inside Ichiro’s locker, there is an orange roller and yoga bricks to help get him loose. He spends part of a 25-minute interview with a reporter stretching his hamstrings. Then he starts a set of explosive push-ups, exhaling on each rep.
In between exercises, Ichiro talks about how he started hitting the way he does. Ichiro was born in Kasugai Aichi prefecture in Japan and, growing up, knew he was no brawny slugger.
“I was a skinny kid, even in Japan,” he says through his translator, Allen Turner. “That’s how I started doing the things I did. It was natural. I learned while playing the game with what I had.”
Speed, obviously, was something he had. Did he always know he was fast? “I was on the faster side, yes,” he says, grinning as Turner translates from Japanese.
The fundamentals of his style have mostly remained the same, but Ichiro has changed his stance many times, adding tweaks, moving his feet closer together, dropping a leg kick. He views his hitting as ever-evolving.
“When I turned pro (in 1992), you obviously gain more knowledge,” he says. “Especially in 1994 — that was the first year that I started the regular season in the big leagues in Japan and that year I had 210 hits. That’s really when my knowledge of hitting began and started to develop.
“I can’t count how many times I’ve made changes,” he adds. “I leave that up to the way I feel and my instincts just take over. “
Slapping at the ball and running is still seen nowadays in Japan but mostly gone from the majors, a relic of the ‘60s and 70s. As Long puts it, “Unique is a very good word for Ichiro’s style. Out of the ordinary. American players, Dominican players, Latin players, you don’t see that.
“With him,
the uniqueness is how his body bails out, but his bat stays in the zone a long time and if he doesn’t necessarily hit it flush but it hits the ground and bounces, he’s going to be safe. You could go through the years and you’ll probably see he leads baseball in infield hits. And then you can see 2030 doubles, 10 triples and 5-6 home runs from him.
“The style, for him, is perfect, because he’s lefthanded, can run and has extraordinary hand-eye coordination. There’s a lot of power in that body, a lot of sock — in batting practice, he hits as many balls out as anybody I’ve ever had. But in games you don’t see that swing.”
Long is right about the infield hits. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Ichiro had 454 infield hits from 2003 through Wednesday. Juan Pierre was second with 376. No one else had as many as 300.
A man who forges a career as wonderful as Ichiro’s inadvertently forges myths alongside it, stories that get flavored with extraordinary details as years pass. Ichiro, his buzz cut flecked with gray these days, grins again as he talks about his first spring training in the majors, 2001, with Lou Piniella’s Mariners, and a famous story that bloomed into legend.
It was early in camp and Piniella was watching the first Japanese position player to come to the majors. Ichiro, working to chip away rust after the offseason, was exclusively hitting balls toward third base.
“I remember Lou saying, ‘Son, what are you doing? We are in America, we like to see people pull the ball, you know?’” Garcia says. “It was funny, but I remember being impressed by the guy. Nobody could’ve imagined he’d be as good as he was.
“And now, time passes, but he still has the ability to play this game.”
“Lou was getting worried,” Ichiro says. “One day, he came to me and said, ‘Can you pull the ball?’ A lot of people have written that in the next at-bat, I hit a home run, but it was a couple games later that I pulled the ball and hit a home run.”
Ichiro also wants to debunk another myth. Those fast-moving legs of his? They’re not already running toward first as he swings.
“It might look that way because my weight shift from the back to the front might be bigger than other players’,” Ichiro says. “Because of the weight shift, my first step might be faster than others, but you shouldn’t ever run before you swing the bat. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about that, but it’s not what I do.”
Ichiro thinks long and hard when he’s asked what the most memorable thing someone has said to him about hitting. Ultimately, he doesn’t choose anything anyone said. Rather, he goes back to the ritual of working with Paul Molitor, the Hall of Famer who was once the hitting coach of the Mariners.
While Ichiro was in the midst of chasing records — he broke George Sisler’s 84-year-old record for hits in a season and Wee Willie Keeler’s mark for consecutive seasons with 200 or more hits — Molitor knew how to deflate the pressure Ichiro felt.
In the batting cage, Molitor, wordlessly, would place ball after ball atop a hitting tee. Again and again, in silence.
“You’re going through, mentally, a lot of tough times there,” Ichiro says. “Nothing was said, but that was the biggest impression I received, from a person like Paul Molitor, who went through some of the things I did, but chose not to say anything. That was a calming influence.”
Ichiro grunts when he swings, so much so that when fellow Yankees first heard it, they teased him with comparisons to tennis players. “Guys were clowning on him, talking about Serena Williams or Roger Federer,” Long says. “When he hits, it’s like, ‘Uhh.’ He’ll do it quite a bit, even in batting practice.”
The jokes are a sign that Ichiro has already melded into the Yankees’ clubhouse culture. Some days, from across the room, Jeter cackles at him. So does Nick Swisher. They all seem to be having a good time.
“He’s a hoot, man,” Long says. “He’s pretty witty and he comes up with some good stuff. Him and Swish, of all the guys, have hit it off. They’re always laughing.”
Teammates get a kick out of his wardrobe — shirts with wide stripes, skinny jeans, flashy sneakers. “It’s definitely a different style,” Long says. “Hey, be who you are, you know?”
Part of who Ichiro is right now is a man who wants to return to the postseason fishbowl. Ichiro hasn’t seen playoff bunting since his first season, when the Mariners won 116 games.
He and Long were talking about that recently and Long noted that Ichiro believed he’d be in the playoffs every year. That was a salve of sorts after losing to the Yankees in the ‘01 ALCS. But there was only disappointment coming.
“Being here,” Long says, “It’s exciting for him, because he wants to be back on the big stage.”