At the dicey baseball age of 38, Ichiro, one of the nation’s
one-name athletes, has become a Yankee. The pinstripes picked up
the future hall-of-famer from the Seattle Wombats because Brett
Gardner’s injury created the need for outfield help in New Yawk.
Ichiro is going from the city famous for strong coffee to the city
that stays up all night (and looks it).
The aging (as these things are measured in baseball) Ichiro was
hitting .261 when traded Monday for two prospects and a
subscription to the Sporting News. He’s not the same
player who collected more than 200 hits per season for 10 straight
years and holds the single season record for base hits at 262. But
he’s still spry enough to add some speed to a Yankees lineup that
averages 35 years old. He’s still a solid defensive outfielder. And
he may well be rejuvenated by moving to a team with more than an
outside chance of being in the World Series this year from a team
with a shot at finishing the year in the Pacific Coast League.
The Yankees, who’ve always been baseball’s financial overdogs,
have a venerable tradition of picking up whomever, at whatever
cost, the team needs before the trading deadline. I first became
aware of this tradition in 1954, when I was 12 and hot to acquire a
complete set of Topps baseball cards. That year the Yankees picked
up outfielder Enos “Country” Slaughter from the Cardinals. (It
didn’t help — the Cleveland Indians won the AL pennant in 54.)
Slaughter, like Ichiro, was 38 and a talented and aggressive
ballplayer. Slaughter has a spot in Cooperstown now, as Ichiro will
have one day.
Slaughter was a role player with the Yankees and contributed to
their successes through 1958. When the Yankees didn’t need
Slaughter during the ‘55 and ‘56 seasons, they stashed him on their
American League farm team, the Kansas City Athletics, from which
they could recall him at a moment’s notice.
Whether or not Ichiro will last so long in Gotham is not clear.
He becomes a free agent at the end of this year, when young Gardner
doubtless will be sound again. With baseball’s bizarre salaries,
endless union rules, and assertive, high-priced agents who fancy
themselves GMs, it won’t be as easy to plug Ichiro into and out of
the Yankees’ needs as it was with Slaughter.
And Ichiro may not wish to be a phone call away when the suits
in the Yankees front office snap their fingers. At the relatively
modest Major League salaries of the forties and fifties, Slaughter
could only look forward to returning to farming tobacco in North
Carolina after his playing days were over (in 1959, at age 43, when
the Milwaukee Braves released him). So he put up with a lot.
With the gaudy amount of money Ichiro has raked in, even from a
team that has spent most of Ichiro’s career rebuilding, he has, let
us say, more options. One indignity Ichiro will not have to endure
is playing for the sad-sack Kansas City Athletics (in 13 years in
KC, the A’s never played .500 ball), which must have been durance
vile for the competitive Slaughter.
Ichiro was gracious toward the Mariners and Mariner fans in his
farewell press conference in Seattle. As he always was as a player.
I guess it’s fitting that a player with as distinguished a career
and as pleasing a temperament as Ichiro’s spends some time on a
winner, even if it has to be the Yankees. It’s nice to see World
Series rings go to excellent athletes who play the game with
humility and respect.
Ichiro’s humility is shown in photos from the 2009 All-Star game
where Ichiro bows to a visiting Barack Obama during a pre-game
presidential visit to the club house. Must have been an interesting
change from Obama’s visit to Japan, where he did the bowing. While
in St. Louis for that All-Star game, Ichiro and his wife Yumiko
laid flowers on the grave of George Sisler, whose single season
record of 257 base hits Ichiro surpassed in 2004. Classy.
The farewell remarks in Seattle were delivered in Japanese, and
then repeated in English by his interpreter. Ichiro, who has
enjoyed American fame and boodle since 2001, apparently hasn’t
found the time to learn English. Or at least well enough to use it
when dealing with the scorpions of the press.
With his incomplete grasp of the American idiom, he may be
puzzled at why old-timers in Yankee Stadium, wearing beat-up Yankee
hats, insist on referring to him as “Country” Suzuki. But Ichiro
surely knows that if he doesn’t deliver as expected when he gets to
his new baseball home in the Bronx, the unforgiving land of
fuggedaboutit!, the references from the stands will be much less
gracious than his farewell remarks in Seattle, in whatever
language.
