Ichiro, Still Hilarious
Dave · May 23, 2008 at 9:04 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Our center fielder:
“Playing on this team and seeing what is happening around me, I feel that something is beginning to fall apart,” Ichiro said, through a translator. “But, if I was not in this situation, and I was objectively watching what just happened this week, I would probably be drinking a lot of beers and booing.”
When did he say this?
Well at least I know I’m doing the right thing. Boy I love Ichi
When did he say this?
To reporters after the game. The rest of what he had to say:
3 – Thank God. That is pure comedy.
At least I get to laugh a little during this devastation of a season.
(applause for Ichiro)
Ichiro has the funniest comments. I love it.
Just a sentence or two from Ichiro! makes it all better.
At least until the next first pitch.
But I could have told you
Ichiro
this team was never
meant for one
as beautiful as you.
2001 great year
2002 blown opportunity (James Baldwin… really?)
2003 blown opportunity (Edgar’s last good year)
2004 awful
2005 mediocre
2006 mediocre
2007 adequate
2008 awful
Welcome to Ichiro’s career. It’s getting to feel more than a little sad.
It’d seem you’d have to have his type of humor to survive the rest of this season.
Well, that or beer. Maybe you should put up a “Buy Ichiro! a refreshing beer for this joke” button.
Is Ichiro the type that would retire if his preformance dropped considerably by the last couple years of his contract?
Any chance Ichiro demands a trade? With Bavasi in charge, I’m sure we’d only get a crate of sunflower seeds in return, but at least he might be able to go to a contender.
That is better than the Cleveland comment.
Ichiro is too talented and hilarious for this franchise.
It is sad that he has to spend his career playing for a franchise that is being run by morons.
Start at the very top if you want to gut this one…too many “veterans”, too many second chances for losers…baseball is a young man’s game. Stay tuned for more “Winless in Seattle”.
God, I wish there were more of him.
Public figures with a sense of humor at all are depressingly rare, let alone one as spectacular as his.
Oh, come now…I’m sure “Heckuva Job” Billy would at least be able to snag some old broken-down 35-YO veteran who had one career season seven or eight years ago for some team which went a round or two in the playoffs in exchange for Ichi.
Perhaps Ichiro would be happier if the M’s traded a few players for a bunch of bats.
Just sayin’.
How the hell did this team win 18 games????
Seattle (AP) – Mariners GM Bill Bavasi traded RHP Felix Hernandez today for a bag of “magic bats” as he attempts to turn around a team with one of the poorest records in baseball.
“What do you say to these bats? They’re magical!” Bavasi was quoted as saying.
Mariners star player Ichiro Suzuki was unavailable for comment. His spokesmen said he was “on a bender” for the indefinite future. Miguel Cairo has been assigned to replace Ichiro in CF. “He’s good with the bat,” said Ms skipper John McLaren.
The magic bats were carried in by ponies.
I’m in Seattle for a wedding, and I’m staying in the silvercloud directly next to safeco. I can see the giant poster of Ichiro, and it makes me sad…
20: Probably the same way Washout once won 18 games in a season…i.e. a bold stroke of divine intervention.
[ot, old news]
[ot, old news]
[ot, old news]
SP Lager (the only Papua beer I can find), the official beer of Mariner fans. It’s apparently terrible stuff. I wonder if you can get it around here anywhere.
Here’s your new medicine:
http://www.sp.com.pg/sp_lager.html
Ichiro is not the greatest Mariner in franchise history. But he is the coolest.
[meta]
It actually makes sense that the new official beer of the Seattle Mariners fan isn’t available. You know what it is but you can’t have any — what could sum up this team better?
Is there any cricket on?
32: I wonder if any of the guys/gals on here from Down Under can buy any?
Star player getting upset. Time to fire the management.
Love Ichiro. And even with his discipline and work ethic, the general crumminess of this organization is getting to him. I dont blame him at all.
The difference between Ichiro (who of course doesn’t give a rat’s ass what management thinks about him; he knows his value) and the “character guys” the M’s always sign is that the character guys are the ones who go out the same way every game, in the midst of a ten game win streak or a ten game losing streak. What we really need are guys who are pissed as hell that they’re losing. In his quiet way, Ichiro is showing he’s one of them.
When you compare that to both Batista and Washburn saying they threw nothing but good pitches, you can start picking out who we need to get rid of.
I think I might have seen it at the beer mart on Aurora and ~105th (I don’t remember exactly where it is) but they have so many random, crappy beers of international descent there that I could very well be wrong. At any rate, it looks like downmarket Red Stripe, which isn’t a good sign.
Despite the fact that it’s most likely not very good beer, I am 100% in favor of an SP Lager meme.
My vote would go for Hamm’s as the “official” Mariner brew, since it already has three essential criteria: (1) local, (2) gritty, & (3) not very good.
“But, if I was not in the situation and I was objectively watching what had happened to this team in the past week, I would probably be drinking a lot of beers and brewing it.”
I like the apparent misquote of what Ichiro said about brewing his own beer. If Ichiro made a brand of beer, it would probably taste interesting to say the least.
Someone get him a 25 once Mac n Jack……..best beer ever mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Back to the comment, a Japanese friend of mine has indicated that the Japanese contingency of M’s ownership will not view this comment in a humorous light at all.
Wonder what kind of beer Ikkyu drinks. Wonder if he is sorry for the advice he gave Ichiro during the recent contract negotiations.
The Japanese contingency in ownership ought to be more concerned with their own failure to hire people who can field a competitive baseball team than with what Ichiro says.
Drayer mentioned last night that one of the reporters asked Ichiro if he had argued in Japanese or English, and that Ichiro gave him a look, and said “In English, or he wouldn’t have understood me”
When you compare that to both Batista and Washburn saying they threw nothing but good pitches, you can start picking out who we need to get rid of.
But, as usual, that’s not the way they’ll go about it
43 – seems obvious to me, too.
I feel for Ichiro. He might be a bit over-hyped, but he approaches the game in the right way. He’s been dealing with this team’s (mis)management for a while, and the fact that he can find a way to keep it light, even at this stage, is more than I can say for his teammates.
Barring catastrophic bad luck, both Batista and Washburn should regress (progress?) to the mean over the course of the season and pitch with better results. Washburn especially has an insanely low LOB%.
But I’m struggling to see hope for the offense and defense. Ichiro has already hit his stride this month (.341/.413/.402 in May – his BABIP was only .262 in April, but is now .389, and his career BABIP is .355, so April was a lot of bad luck) and only Beltre looks to be significantly underperforming his peripherals.
Ichiro may be over-rated as a player (I’m not so sure about that but there is a case to be made for it) but I think he’s under-rated in the clubhouse and as an entertainer. Quotes like this are hilarious and make me glad he still uses Japanese in interviews. I can guarantee he would just rattle off cliches in interviews if he did them in English.
From last year, when facing Dice-K for the first time, I loved Ichi’s quote:
Evidence of how poor a guide BA is for performance:
Consider these splits of Ichiro’s with men on base:
Situation / BA / OBP / SLG
–3 / .281 / .416 / .360
-23 / .219 / .529 / .281
123 / .473 / .481 / .703
Consider how foolish it would be to use BA rather than OBP to describe Ichiro’s performance in the first two situations. “Ichiro is batting only .219 with men on second and third for his career – he is anti-clutch!” It is obvious that people just don’t pitch to him in that situation.
Would the ump toss both Ichiro and Allen Turner if Ichiro brought him out to translate? I guess we’d get to find out just how extensive Turner’s vocabulary is.
But the great thing for Ichiro is that he can argue in English and then insert choice turns of phrase in Japanese. The umpire might suspect he’s being called something colorful, but unless he understands Japanese slang there’s not much he can do about it.