Wednesday, July 25, 2012

To Cheer Ichiro Or Not Cheer Ichiro- Ay, There's the Rub



Mixed Emotions
By Mike Takeuchi

*Please note that while there are no curse words in this story, there are self-censored substitutes that are liberally sprinkled throughout this piece.

  What happens when your all-time favorite ballplayer is traded to your least favorite team?  That's exactly the dilemma I faced on Monday when the Seattle Mariners sent right fielder Ichiro Suzuki across the hallway and from the bottom to the top of the standings to play for the New York Yankees.
  It began innocuously that afternoon after I filed my story on Oakland A's (and former Santa Barbara Foresters) pitchers Ryan Cook and A.J. Griffin.  Taking a break for lunch, I plopped down in a chair to watch the fifth episode of "The Newsroom" for the third time.
  It seemed like a normal day, but for some reason, I felt a great disturbance in the Force.  I should have known something was up when I turned to a channel I never watch- the MLB Channel.  Baseball is a great sport, but listening to poor imitations of Vin Scully or worse yet, Bob Costas (there is actually a Mini-Me or in this case of Costas' diminutive stature, a Maxi-Me version that sounds just like the verbose NBC commentator) is something that is never appealing.  Thank Buddha for MLB online where one can watch highlights without a buildup from announcers who act like they are in the middle of the SALT talks.
  As the channel changed to 282, sure enough, there it was in plain letters.
"Ichiro Suzuki traded to the Yankees for two heretofore and future unknown pitchers."

"What. The. Eff?"
  While sometimes forgetting what day it was due to reaching 40-something, I at least knew that it was not April 1. As  Maxi-Me, a few others and a drunk sounding Harold Reynolds (okay, he always sounds drunk) sounded off about the trade, I numbly stared at the screen.
  "How the f--- could this have happened?"

 A million thoughts went from my mind, including blaming Griffin, the right-hander who struck out Raul Ibanez on Thursday night with a nasty curve ball in the sixth inning of the first of four games the A's would take from the Pinstripes (yay! btw). Then I blamed the nice-guy Ibanez, because if he wouldn't have looked so foolish maybe they wouldn't have made the trade.
  Of course these were all so ridiculous, but when one's favorite player is traded to a team I hate worse than brussels sprouts or Japanese nato#, rational thought goes out the window.  My favorite singularly named singles hitter was heading to a place I was essentially taught to hate in the womb-Effing Yankees.
 In the summer of 1965, while my poor mother, was pregnant with me and  holed up in my uncle's central Los Angeles home during the Watt's Riots, my dad drove through darkened and scary city streets on the way back from watching the great Sandy Koufax throw a complete-game shutout.  While mom wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea, she gave dad permission because it was her Man Sandy that was pitching after all.
  When I finally arrived to the outside world, my Uncle Caesar Uyesaka, who was some big shot with the Santa Barbara Dodgers, LA's single A farm team, had the connections within Chavez Ravine.   In addition to introducing me to the likes of Tommy Lasorda, Peter O'Malley and the infamous Al Campanis (who as far as I know was the nicest man April 6, 1987 controversy notwithstanding), we would get seats closer to the field than the ones my dad, a service station owner, got for Union Oil Night which were high in the reserved section near the left field fair pole.   It was here where I learned about bourgeoise and proletariat at a young age, but that is a story for another time.
  I loved going to the games and even though they were far past their primes, I was able to see an over-the-hill Hank Aaron and a fast-fading Willie Mays play, albeit with them looking like tiny ants in gray uniforms.  Maybe that was better, because I couldn't see the slowing of Aaron's bat speed or the stumbling of Mays in the outfield.  Distance helped them remain legends forevermore in the history books and in my eyes.
 As a kid growing up in the Seventies, I never had a favorite ballplayer. Oh there were plenty of wondrous players that I rooted for, but I had just missed the last golden era of the game.  Instead I rooted for Dusty Baker  or the Dodgers infield of Garvey, Lopes, Russell, and Cey simply because they were the good guys because they played close to home.  But as good as they were, they never really instilled a passion within me.
  The one thing that did get my blood boiling was the Cincinnati Reds and their future Hall of Famers Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, and Pete Rose...err, forget the last one.  And because of the 1975 World Series this hatred had me rooting hard for the Red Sox as my number two team, which in turn had me despising the Yankees as my number two (get it?) team.
   New York supplanted the Reds at the top of the list on October 15, 1977 when Lou Effing Piniella robbed Ron Cey of a game-tying home run and me a souvenir in Game Four of the World Series that the Yankees would eventually win.  The Yanks followed that up of course with another world championship the next year while earlier beating the Red Sox in a heartbreaking one-game playoff thanks to another player with a similarly unique middle name, Bucky Equally Effing Dent.  A win over New York in 1981 tempered the hate, but only a bit.
  In that whole time, there were plenty of players that I liked like Willie Stargell and later, Ozzie Smith, but none for an Asian American kid to identify with.  Even as a young child, I noticed this. The only known athlete we had was Bruce Lee, and he wasn't really a team sport guy.  Besides, he was dead, passing when I was seven before I even heard of him.  One can only cheer a dead guy in "Enter the Dragon" and "Game of Death" so many times.
   Baseball had a hero that looked like me.  Only in America, hardly anyone had ever heard of him. With 868 home runs, Japanese slugger, Sadaharu Oh was and remains the most prolific home run hitter in all of baseball.  But since the competition in Japan didn't approach Major League levels and the outfield fences were closer to the plate than they were in America, he wasn't given much credit here stateside. (While agreeing with the facts of this, I always felt that there was a tinge of arrogance at best, racism at worst whenever someone brought this up when I was younger.)  Besides, I never even saw him play other than a "Wide World of Sports" clip here and there.
  The single Asian American guy in pro sports was the Baltimore Orioles Lenn Sakata-a decent middle infielder who played 11 seasons from 1977 to '87 mostly with Baltimore before becoming a coach. Sakata is best known for being the last guy who started at shortstop before Cal Ripken (whose consecutive games streak began a month earlier)  took over for seemingly forever.
 Sakata, who is now the manager of the Modesto Nuts, the Rockies Single A team in the California League,was also known for being behind the plate (because Baltimore over-manager Earl Weaver ran out of catchers) when Tippy Martinez picked off three Toronto runners in one inning.  Sakata hit a walk-off three-run home run in the bottom of that inning.
   But while I had heard of him, Sakata wasn't a star and in pre-cable television games and no internet nor national newspapers in circulation, he was largely unknown on the West Coast.  While everyone at the annual JACL (Japanese American Citizen League) picnics were wearing Dodgers gear, there was one kid who wore a Baltimore Orioles cap.  When we teased him he said something to the effect of they're the only team with one of us on it.  Despite snickering, deep down I knew he was right.
  Thirty one years after the first Japanese player, Masanori Murakami threw his first pitch for the San Francisco Giants, Hideo Nomo and his corkscrew delivery came to L.A. in 1995. Nomo did pretty well winning 123 games (after winning 78 in Japan) while being the only pitcher to throw a no-hitter at Coors Field (1996 with the Dodgers) and Oriole Park at Camden Yards (2001 while playing for the Red Sox).  After that, there were failures (Mac Suzuki-no relation to Ichiro *Suzuki is the number two name behind Sato as the most common in Japan), tragedies (Hideki Irabu) and semi-successes (Shigetoshi Hasagawa).  For position players, the failures of Tsuyoshi Shinjo (Mets, Giants) mixed in with moderate success (So Taguchi won WS titles with St. Louis and Philly).
   Ichiro finally came onto the scene in 2001.  And when I first saw him, I finally understood what that kid in the Orioles cap was talking about.   To paraphrase a line from a movie starring a recently divorced Scientologist, Ichiro had me at hello.
  While pitcher Hideo Nomo opened the door for Japanese pitchers, Ichiro busted it down for Japanese position players.
  While usually comparisons of Asians to samurai warriors caused me to roll my eyes, just like racist stereotypes of bad driving and Charlie Chan or Long Duk Dong accents do, this time it was actually close to the mark.  Watching him extend the upright bat towards center field before circling it over his head conjures up that image of a
daimyo  wielding his blade.
  In the field, highlight after ESPN highlight was shown him making a catch or throw or steal and I would relish each one. Heck, I was proud.
   While I enjoyed watching him on television that year as he made his debut with the eventual West Division winning  Mariners, it wasn't until I saw him personally did I fully appreciate his mystique.  It was a game in Anaheim that was scheduled for September 12 but was changed for obvious reasons to October 3-one week before Munch and I were scheduled to be married in Maui.
 Knowing my love for the game, she wanted to share that with me while I felt the same way.  The only problem was, she had only been to one game prior "a zero-zero tie" in the nosebleed or Union Oil section of Dodger Stadium with some disabled clients she worked with at the time. Baseball to her, was one long snooze-fest.  And to be quite honest, who could blame her for thinking that?  Sometimes it is.
  So I was determined to make the experience better for her by buying tickets close to the field.   But because of the tension of the times, the game had a playoff atmosphere in a packed stadium despite the Mariners heading towards the playoffs and Anaheim heading towards their off-season eventually finishing a whopping 41 games down in the standings (*Note that year, Oakland won 102 games and still finished 14 games behind the M's!).  But much to manager Mike Scioscia and the team's credit, they didn't play that way on this day and showed it when  Angels right fielder Orlando Palmeiro made a diving catch while eating dirt right in front of our seats along the right field line, my future wife turned to me with a smile.
  "Well, this game seems different," she said.  And it was.
  Ichiro banged out four hits that day while exceeding the already high expectations I set for him.  He managed to top it on one play in the field that secured my fandom.
 With runners on first and third with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the Angels were down 4-3 when Darin Erstad came to bat . It had already been a crazy inning because Adam Kennedy appeared to have beaten the tag in a fielder's choice play at the plate that would have tied the game, but was not only called out-but kicked out of the game for going ballistic after the call.
   Erstad came up and fouled off pitch after pitch from Mariners reliever Kaz Sasaki. When Kaz threw a forkball that caught too much of the plate, Erstad blasted a sizzling line drive towards the right field corner that caused the  40 thousand or so Angels fans to scream with delight.
  While the trajectory of the ball was too low for a home run, the ball seemed destined to be a game-winning, two-run double as a fast runner, Jeff DaVannon was motoring around the basepaths from first.  But before the ball could get there, a blur of gray and blue streaked by like those old Batman comics-Ichiro
  "He's gonna catch it" I inadvertently screamed.
  Just as the crowd reached a fever-pitch, Ichiro reached out as far as he could and snagged the ball in the heel of his glove in full stride in front of the image of Angels manager Mike Scioscia plastered on the right field wall.  To slow himself down, the right fielder bounced playfully off the wall as the crowd, save a few Japanese fans, let out a groan like they were punched in the gut.  Game over-Batman had saved the day.
October 3, 2011 Batman Saves the Day
  Instead of celebrating, the "rookie" put his head down and ran back towards the dugout like it was the middle, not the end of a game trying hard not to smile. While Munch's eyes were wide, I held my hands on top of my head wondering if that really happened.
  In my 40-something years of going to countless games as a fan and reporter, it remains the greatest play I have ever seen. And that's saying something.  I was in that very stadium on October 15, 1986 for the Dave Henderson or Donnie Moore "one strike away" game and I've seen Piniella, or at least his glove, rob Cey (and me) of that homer in the World Series, I was there during Orel Hershiser's streak.   But this play was absolutely magnificent.
  Since then I have seen Ichi make other great plays, including the game winning hit in the 2009 World Baseball Classic finals in a fierce rivalry with Korea that harkened to Real Madrid/Barcelona or India/Pakistan in cricket. I've seen him hit an inside-the-park home run in the 2007 All-Star game-well okay I saw it in the bowels of the A T & T Park auxiliary press room.  I even spent a few days at the Mariners camp watching him do drills in the outfield-not that I'm obsessed or anything.      But there is something about him that I and many others find fascinating.  The Asian factor is part of it sure.  But there is a deeper reason to it that will be revealed soon enough.
  And  despite him becoming human due to age, I have never been disappointed, until now in the conundrum of-favorite all-time player joins least favorite all-time team.  What to do?
 In one of his "Seinfeld"  monologues@, comedian Jerry Seinfeld said that because teams move to different cities and players go to different teams, essentially all we are rooting for is laundry.  While funny, my rooting interest has become decidedly more complicated thanks to Yankees first base coach Mick Kelleher.
  Last year, after hearing my story about Piniella stealing my ball, Mick introduced me to Derek Jeter, Robinson Cano and a few others. Later, he sent me an autographed ball with not only his signature, but that of manager Joe Girardi and half of the team. He later emailed and said "Maybe this will change your mind".
  Yet I still resisted.   Even during a conversation in Oakland last week prior to the trade,  I told him I couldn't "pull the trigger" just yet.  It's become a running joke between us.
  But now, the Yankees got the only guy I have ever rooted for through thick and thin.  What to do?
 Yesterday,  I emailed Mick and joked that I may have to get that Yankees cap after all. I tried to justify to myself that if the cap was not to wear, but to put on my bookshelf along with my other Ichiro memorabilia, it doesn't  that make me root for the Microsoft or GM of sports. Surely my friends who are Red Sox fans would definitely have some advice for me-yet I'm not ready to go there just yet.
 As I contemplated this late Monday night, an email came through.  It was Mick responding.
 "It's about time Mike!" he emailed.
  After going to bed late, I woke up early  Tuesday morning to contemplate this dilemma further  over coffee, before having an action filled day full of errands. But among all the stops, not one of them was to the sports store.  At least not yet.


   * In the same vein of the kid with the Orioles cap.  A few years ago, the late journalist Lester Rodney, the first white journalist to call for the end of segregation in baseball, told me the story of an African American fan in St. Louis explain to a white fan that he rooted for the Dodgers to beat the Cardinals for the same reason.

#Natto is fermented soy beans that somehow Japanese people love.  Frankly I think it smells and tastes like shit.

@ Here is the link to the "Seinfeld" monologue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WSD6Y2YWj4&feature=youtube_gdata_player

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