An Apparent Superhero Contributing to the Japanese Influence on America
Sensing imminent doom, Jor-El launched his son Kal-El in a rocket ship off of the planet Krypton mere moments before it imploded. Kal-El landed on Earth, was adopted by a couple in Kansas, and would grow up to be known as Superman, defender of all humankind and virtually indestructible. This is Superman’s origin story.
Ichiro Suzuki, a real-life baseball player born in Japan who experienced a long and successful MLB career in the US, has a life story that is basically exactly the same. There might be a few minor variations here and there that vary from Superman’s story, but let’s not quibble over the details.
Like Superman, Ichiro came to America from a distant place and over time, with an unassuming air and repeated displays of seemingly superhuman abilities on the ball diamond, achieved a superhero-like status.
I hope to share some of that magic and inspiration with others now who may or may not be familiar with his legendary career.
As of this writing, in the fall of 2023, Ichiro has been retired from Major League Baseball for about four years. There’s no event in the news, no buzzworthy or SEO-driven reason to draw, or write about him now. This is just a (very) simple man’s goofy attempt at honoring a unique athlete in a fun way.
Ichiro became the first Japanese-born position player (non-pitcher) to be signed by an MLB club in 2001 by the Seattle Mariners. He garnered some headlines and curiosity in the spring of that year, but by the summer of 2001, he’d established himself as a force in right field to be reckoned with. Pretty soon, even in places like Indiana, Little League country bumpkins like myself would be shouting “Ichiroooo!” when one of our teammates made a defensive play that seemed destined for a highlight reel.
What really helped solidify Ichiro’s place in the imaginations of so many ballplayers was a play early in his rookie season that would later be known by Japanese and the U.S. media as (cue deep movie announcer voice), “The Throw”.
If you’re not an ardent baseball fan, or if you’ve either forgotten what it’s like to, or never even held and felt the heft of a baseball, it may not be clear what’s so amazing about this play.
Imagine that you’re holding an apple, and your friend bets you that you can’t knock a can of pop (or “soda”, if you’re one of those interesting people with accents from exotic places, like Minnesota) out of his hand. Your friend is far off, as if you’re standing in the Sporting Goods section of Super Walmart and he’s all the way over by the frozen pizzas (this hypothetical scenario brought you by a very well-traveled and cultured Midwesterner). You might think Well, with a running start, that’s doable.
But you can’t just lob the baseball way up in the air. Imagine you and your friend are both standing inside a hallway with 6-foot ceilings (inside a Walmart, if that helps you), and if your apple even grazes the ceiling after you throw it, you lose.
That’s what makes “The Throw” an unbelievable display of precise athleticism. Ichiro’s throw, according to players on the field, never went over about 6 feet in the air, but it kept soaring by like it was caught in a jet stream, seemingly defying physics. The most logical explanation was that Ichiro had smuggled a T-shirt cannon in to right field and used that to launch the ball over to third.
The highlights for Ichiro don’t end there. There’s no shortage of long compilations on YouTube showing one astounding play after another.
And it wasn’t just his defensive skills, either. Ichiro retired with a career batting average over .300 (.311). Out of the thousands and thousands of players to play in the big leagues, less than 150 have retired with a career batting average over .300.
His stats and accolades over the years have been written about many times before, so I don’t need to do that here.
But I do want to note one last thing about Ichiro.
When Ichiro came into the league in 2001, Japan had already cemented itself in American popular culture. Japanese cars and consumer electronics had been popular in America for years, but with game consoles from Sony and Nintendo finding their way into seemingly every American living room, the Land of the Rising Sun was contributing significantly to America’s imagination.
And it seemed only fitting that Ichiro would get signed by the Seattle ball club. I’ve never been to a game at Seattle’s ballpark, but it’s always held an allure to me. Even as a kid growing up in the middle of nowhere with a shaky grasp on geography, I knew a few things about Seattle and its ball club. In my mind, Seattle sat on the northwestern edge of the US, and its ball club was on the very edge of the city, so close to the Pacific Ocean that players needed to wring saltwater out of their socks every inning.
I also knew that, at the time, the Seattle Mariners were owned by Nintendo. Which made Seattle’s ballpark a literal and figurative gateway between the US and Japan. Ichiro then came on to the scene for Seattle, conducting himself like a Samurai, and only added to the awe and mystique that was Japanese culture thriving in America.
Nintendo is no longer the primary owner of the Mariners, but Ichiro is still involved in the club. I like to imagine that Ichiro spends every moment he’s not at the ballpark back at his own Fortress of Solitude. Superman’s Fortress of Solitude (if I’m recalling correctly, and I am too lazy to fact check this) was somewhere in Antarctica or by the north pole, an ice castle in which he would watch holographic messages from his late Kryptonian father.
In my mind, Ichiro stands guard at his Fortress of Solitude eyeing the sky, protecting Earth by disintegrating would be invading aliens and earth-shaking meteorites, armed only with a bucket of baseballs and “The Throw”.
Web sites and pages referenced here:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/s/suzukic01-field.shtml
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