Word: ichiro
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...that the team has posted signs in Japanese around the ballpark. "I'd like to say to Seattle baseball people and the mayor of Seattle, 'Please give an award to me,'" Inow says. "Seattle was known in Japan before, but it was not so popular. Now look: Seattle is Ichiro's town, and Japanese people are coming. I need a special bonus...
...waits like this? more ballplayers each day, it seems. Ichiro's on-deck gyrations have become a Seattle model of cool, with little leaguers everywhere trying to keep their faces blank while contorting like pretzels. It is the fourth inning of a recent game against the Oakland Athletics. Lefthander Barry Zito, winner of nine straight games, is on the mound for the A's. As he prepares to step in, Ichiro betrays no awareness that he's enduring his longest drought?0 for 13?of the season. No, as always, Ichiro spends his time running through at least six different...
...Ichiro's at bats are clinics in working over a pitcher: stretch, shirt tug, foul, foul, foul, flare to left center. With his maddening skill at making contact, it's nearly impossible to fire three pitches past Ichiro. When he dives after a curveball in the dirt, as Zito induces him to do in his first at bat, "I can't really pat myself on the back," Zito says. He figures Ichiro just made a rare mistake...
...makes the game look easier, and for a public happy to interpret Ichiro's few, banal utterances ("Whether it's a good day or a bad day, I look back and find anyplace I can correct myself," he says. "I absorb it, digest it and come back the next day. That's all I can do") as proof of Zen profundity, there's the temptation to believe he received his gift from some monk on a mountaintop. It doesn't quite fit that Japan's master hitter actually grew up an American clichE: Ichiro worked himself to greatness...
...father, Nobuyuki, made him feel special from the start, naming him Ichiro?"first boy"?though he was actually the second. Nobuyuki, a former high school player himself, poured his chosen one into the game, drilling with him every day for four years. By the time Ichiro was a freshman in high school, his competitiveness had been honed to a fine point. It's a tradition in Japan for freshman ballplayers to wash the uniforms of the seniors, so to make sure he lost no daylight practice time, Ichiro would wake up at 3 a.m. to do the laundry. During classes...