The Ichiro Paradox

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Nomo's success—he was the 1995 National League Rookie of the Year and at week's end was 10 wins short of 100 for his major league career—led so many other pitchers to take the leap, that in 2000 Inow devised the current system of player "posting." Instead of losing talented players when they became free agents after nine seasons, Japanese clubs could now sell them to American teams.

Inow sold Ichiro's rights to Seattle for $13 million. The second player to be posted, Kazuhisa Ishii, was signed by the Dodgers in February and was tied for third in wins (11) in the National League through June; but it's the daily success of Ichiro—the first Japanese-born position player to make it in America—that has erased the inferiority complex of his ballplaying countrymen. "Now we feel if you're a good player in Japan, you can be a good player anywhere," says Kazuo Matsui, who's still mulling over whether he wants to be posted after this, his eighth season. "It pushes me even more, having that freedom."

For the next five months, though, all manner of speculation, panic and pride will rain down on Giants centerfielder Hideki Matsui, 28, the free-agent slugger, two-time MVP and former batting champion who is called Godzilla "because I look so scary," he says. The 1.9 m, 95.3 kg Hideki bears the fortunate burden of playing for Japan's oldest, most successful team, an institution combining the prestige of the Yankees and the fan reverence accorded Notre Dame. The Giants always lead the league in attendance and give their stars a profile Ichiro could only have dreamed of when he played in Japan. Giants owner Tsuneo Watanabe has never lost a player to America and speaks often these days about "sports patriotism." But Hideki turned down a long-term contract last year and has spent this season making adjustments in his swing, some say, to prepare for the majors.

The idea that Ichiro's success could spark interest in baseball and blunt soccer's growing popularity seems logical. But it's scant consolation to those who love the proud history of the Japan League. More Japanese kids will want to play, certainly—just not in Japan.

"If Hideki leaves, it's a tragedy," says Jun Ikushima, a Tokyo reporter and co-author with Seattle Mariners reliever Shigetoshi Hasegawa of the book My Way to Study English, which became a best seller in Japan. "Hideki's the best player in Japan now, and the Giants are the symbol of Japanese baseball. It's bigger than Ichiro leaving. We depend on Hideki for so much—his popularity, his dynamism—that if he goes, I can't imagine what will happen. I will feel emptiness. It will be the beginning of the destruction of Japanese baseball."

Fans intent on seeing the best Japanese players will have to follow the trail taken by the stream of jet-lagged Japanese tourists stumbling around Dodger Stadium, Pac Bell Park and Safeco Field. The influx into Seattle has been so pronounced 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."

who 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 stretches. "Same thing every time," says Mariners outfielder Charles Gipson. "He never gets out of the zone."

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.

No one 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.

His 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 he slept. In his first year as a professional he spent most of his free time in the batting cage, with teammates coming and going from breakfast, lunch, nap, dinner to the endless tattoo of his bat on ball.

So now arrives the perfect Ichiro moment. He slaps a ground ball three steps to the left of first base, but he is so fast that Zito never comes close to covering the bag in time, and what would be a sure out for anyone else ends with Ichiro safe again, a paradox in action. "When Ichiro doesn't hit the ball well, it's almost to his advantage," Zito says. "He's a pain in the ass."

The crowd of 42,159 at Safeco Field erupts. Everyone leans forward, waiting for his reaction. But Ichiro gives nothing away. Somewhere in Tokyo a ballplayer forgets his breakfast for a moment and stares, wondering how it feels to be so very rare.

With reporting by From SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

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