Teammates Hate Ichiro, We Hate Teammates
In his second part of his rebuilding series, Geoff Baker writes about specific hostility towards Ichiro in the clubhouse during the early part of the season. Quoting the relevant portion:
And it was a clubhouse in need of some direction, given the problems engulfing it as the season came undone. When it came to Ichiro, who got off to a typically slow start in April and part of May, the internal turmoil nearly hit its boiling point.
“I just can’t believe the number of guys who really dislike him,” said one clubhouse insider. “It got to a point early on when I thought they were going to get together and go after him.”
The coaching staff and then-manager John McLaren intervened when one player was overheard talking — in reference to Ichiro — about wanting to “knock him out.” A team meeting was called to clear the air.
Now, you might wonder, what could Ichiro have done to foster such open anger? Clearly, he must have offended someone pretty severely.
Ichiro this year had to battle a midseason hamstring problem, and he was shifted from center field back to right because McLaren thought Ichiro was a better defender in the corner. While Ichiro is said to have recovered from his injury, his stolen-base totals dropped as the season progressed. He also did not get to some balls in the gap and the right-field corner at times, prompting more clubhouse complaints that he cared only about piling up hits instead of sitting out to heal properly.
Yep – the explanation given is that teammates want to “knock him out” because he plays when he’s less than 100% healthy. What a bastard. How could he possibly garner the respect of his teammates when he’s selfishly hurting the team by playing at a diminished level and keeping guys out of the line-up who could have helped the team win? If only he would learn how to be a clubhouse leader, such as Raul Ibanez, who would never struggle through pain, costing the team valuable runs in a playoff race while a ready replacement was waiting in the wings.
Oh, wait, that’s EXACTLY what Raul Ibanez did last year. You remember last year, right, where the team managed to stick in the race despite the fact that Ibanez had a .697 OPS the first four months of the season while playing absolutely brutal defense in left field. Remember last July, when he hit .184/.241/.262 as the team was trying to figure out if they were a legitimate enough contender to make a trade deadline acquisition, then later admitted that he had played through a painful shoulder problem that limited his power and affected his swing. Meanwhile, Adam Jones toiled in Tacoma, unable to get any playing time while Ibanez killed the team with some brutal performances.
Why was no one threatening to beat up Ibanez last year? Why is he a revered clubhouse leader while Ichiro is a selfish one dimensional egomaniac?
Because the stated reason is total crap. The players aren’t mad at Ichiro for playing hurt, even if that’s what they’ll state publicly. They’re mad at him because he’s Japanese, or he stretches by himself, or he wears funny clothing, or some other non-baseball reason. I’m not denying that they really do dislike Ichiro – this isn’t the first time this has come up – but I am calling BS on their reasoning. MLB players don’t get aggravated to violence because a guy won’t sit out when he’s hurt. Just the opposite, in fact, has been the case with Erik Bedard, where members of the team reportedly have no respect for him because he wouldn’t pitch with pain.
So, what is the real reason? It could be racially based (let’s be honest, MLB players aren’t the smartest crowd in the world), it could be personality based (“His shoes are pink – how gay!”), or it could be something else entirely. I have no idea, and I don’t pretend to know. But I do know this – I don’t care what a bunch of replacement level, washed up, overpaid and entitled career losers think about Ichiro’s efforts or value, and neither should the M’s front office. If Carlos Silva thinks Ichiro is selfish, then maybe Carlos Silva should look into being more selfish and pitching well enough to win a game once in a while.
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I don’t think I got my point across clearly enough. Maybe I should have said that I thought it was possible that these guys were among the complainers, rather than likely.
My point was not to throw additional names out there and encourage speculation, but rather to do the opposite. With the exception of Silva (who’s already publicly threatened physical harm against his teammates), I think it’s absurd to assume that we know who the anti-Ichiro crowd comprised. We really shouldn’t be trying to link anonymous actions to players based on the extremely limited perspective we get of their characters through interviews and other crap.
I was really just trying to say that we should avoid the temptation to use this report to reinforce our likes and dislikes about certain players.*
*With the exception, again, of Carlos Silva, who is a big fat idiot.
The point of this was really to identify that the stated reason is utter crap. There’s no way that players really have a violent hatred toward Ichiro because he played hurt. We have a long history of how players respond when their teammates play through pain, including on this very team, and wanting to “beat them up” doesn’t even fall anywhere close to the expected reaction.
So, let me ask a question – if you’re a player who hates Ichiro, and you know you’re not going to be quoted publicly unless it’s as an unnamed source, why would you lie about the real cause of your hostility?
If Ichiro really is a fantastically arrogant egotist with all kinds of nasty personality traits that rub everyone the wrong way, wouldn’t you have some examples of this ready to go? Wouldn’t you be more likely to say something like “I can’t stand that punk because he mocked my paraplegic daughter” or “he pissed in my oatmeal”? Wouldn’t you have a tangible, easily presented reason for your anger for him?
According to this, they don’t. They have some BS about him playing hurt, which is obviously not the cause of the anger. So what kind of hostility could a player hold towards a teammate that they wouldn’t want revealed?
I’d say racism is at the top of that list. It might not be, and I’m not saying this is evidence that the guys hate him because he’s Japanese, but there’s no way we can ignore that as a possible motive for totally irrational and unjustified hostility.
I would guess that MLB players are generally pretty ignorant and selfish. They work in a world where education generally has no value and they skip college to play a sport. They’ve never really had to deal with anything besides throwing a ball to some place on a field and hitting said ball with a piece of wood. You don’t have to listen to too many interviews to realize that wisdom and logical thought are things that are lost on your average ballplayer. Ignorant people tend to lash out against people and things that aren’t just like them.
gotta say I’m surprised, from mid-day onwards lots of Ichi-love from the hosts and callers (well, there was the one guy who thinks it’s because ‘he didn’t show up in April or May’)
Dave,
So here’s my question.
Regardless of who is “right” and who is “wrong,” haven’t these rumblings about Ichiro and his teammates been going on for awhile now? Like, before this year? If that’s so, shouldn’t one of the first acts of the new GM be to sit Ichiro down and say “Look, you’re a great player and you’re not going anywhere, but we need to figure out how bridge this disconnect between you and the rest of the team”?
Because if it’s a combination of Ichiro’s actions and his teammate’s attitudes, replacing the other 24 guys on the roster won’t work if the 24 new guys soon feel the same way. Ichiro may be great and his teammates may be (generally speaking) crappy, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not something to the complaints besides jealousy.
WTF? I am totally unable to understand this perspective. What do you think Ichiro should be doing? Clutch strikeouts and caught stealings? Introducing the World Champions of Clutch, the 2004 New York Yankees!
These players make me ashamed to be a Mariners fan.
And the Seattle sports media don’t deserve Ichiro. Philadelphia didn’t deserve Mike Schmidt, and he was stuck with them his whole career. I’m having a hard time reconciling being a Mariners fan with Ichiro being my favorite player, because for his sake, I want him to go someplace where he can win and is appreciated and doesn’t take crap from ignorant writers and fans who just make shit up like the grizzled old “pads his stats selfish doesn’t play for the team” line of hooey that every great player on a bad team has been subjected to for as long as morons have watched baseball and pretended to know something about it. But as a Mariners fan, if he left I would despair.
bermanator, the only rumblings I’ve seen in the past have been from sportswriters who clearly dislike Ichiro. If he has a history of not gettin along with the team, how come we never hear anything more than rumblings, anyway? Surely some ex-teammate would feel he could safely express his opinion.
If his teammates don’t like him, well. I don’t think Reggie Jackson’s teammates liked him much. Roger Clemens. Kobe Bryant. Terrell Owens. Build a good team, and these things stop being a problem. And if you go ahead and confront your star player about the problem, you still haven’t gone one step toward building a good team: you’ve just taken sides, and you’ve probably taken the side of the guys who suck.
Jason Puckett weighs in from the clubhouse, on the clubhouse. Oddly, he didn’t report there was a near-melee.
Paraphrasing here, yes he thinks there is a little bit of jealousy, and what happens in every clubhouse in the league where there is the one marquee superstar– frustrations boil over and it focuses on the one guy who gets the breaks — just like you see in jr high, high school, college… and there is the added layer of players thinking the Japanese players get extras, such as the translators
he thinks the last two years there’s been so much turnover with rent-a-players, young players, and a losing team– no continuity, no leadership, the relationships that were once there are mostly gone. When Ichiro first got here there were personalities that were bigger than his, that deflected that sort of criticisms. He doesn’t have the relationships now as he had with Cameron, Boone, Bone, but that is the transition of the team.
He is exactly like Raul, they are both focused– doing stretches, extra fielding, extra hitting — so locked in to what they are doing before the game, not sitting around on the sofa joking around.
Puckett is also baffled by this perception that because Ichiro achieves his numbers that he is somehow selfish. Isn’t that what every ballplayer is trying to do? Didn’t they try to get Felix his 200th inning last night?
The way most of his teammates hit, he is more likely to be struck by lightning than a punch.
Amen, Scraps. I think this is a new thing, or at least to the extent it’s going public, it’s a new thing. I’m going to be the skunk at the garden party here and blame Baker. Whatever his good points, Baker’s arrival seems to coincide with a bunch of clubhouse discord, and Baker seems to be the one always getting the scoops on the soap operas.
I’m going to say it’s my theory that Baker, skillfully exploiting guys frustrated with a stinker of a season, has turned the ordinary jealousies and petty squabbles of any workplace into a two-bit Lifetime Network miniseries.
What is with you guys and Ichiro? If ANYONE says anything negative about him you guys flip out.
Scraps, that’s an interesting case study of athletes. Reggie and TO had teammates who didn’t like them because they had massive egos. Roger Clemens got special treatment in Houston (and I think New York) about being able to leave the team when he wasn’t pitching. Kobe forced Shaq out of town. In all of those cases, they wound up on teams where the owners acknowledge the special treatment and said, “That’s how it is — deal with it.”
I don’t think in any of those cases there was a sense that the superstar was “right” and the teammates who grumbled were “wrong” (in the Kobe case especially, the CW was the opposite). It was just “that’s the way it is.”
But also, in all of those cases the conflicts were out in the open. Sometimes those are easier to deal with than the ones that are bubbling under the surface. If there’s a perception, for example, that Ichiro has a special relationship with the ownership group, that’s going to be a problem even if the M’s get a whole new roster in the offseason.
@ Smoothdkarr:
If you don’t mind me asking, what is the negative thing that people are saying about Ichiro? Do you think that they have good reasons for saying this? If you are going to accuse people here of “flipping out” and otherwise acting irrationally, you ought to demonstrate why you think that behavior is irrational.
What is it with you guys who can’t stand to see anyone defend Ichiro from unsupported charges and bullshit? If anyone says anything rational you just dismiss them with baseless generalities and motive-bashing. Don’t you know how to argue like an adult?
I love how the idea that Ichiro is selfish, just plays for his stats, and makes his teammates want to physically attack him is apparently trivial — “saying anything negative,” as though all someone had said was that he’s a lousy dresser, or slouches when he walks, or doesn’t know much about turnip farming.
Bottom line:
has Ichiro’s efforts helped his team to win?
I can build a case that they have.
Can someone build a case that they haven’t? If not, then they’re not justified in criticizing him, are they?
I can not find the article that referred to this, but I thought I read a quote from Ichiro talking about quitting if he ever got a beer-belly and couldn’t see his feet. I think this was in response to a question regarding his stretching and other conditioning practices.
I remember thinking that might not go over too well with his weight-challenged team mates…
googling now…
Assuming you’re right, why is it Ichiro’s problem to solve?
If he’s just keeping to himself and playing really excellent baseball, is it his job to make the other players now hate him for that?
If anything, the new GM should sit the new Manager does sand say “Keep your players in line.”
Has anyone actually met Ichiro and spoken to him? Do you have a feeling for what he’s like to be around? The three people I know that have (two Japanese and one American) have all had the same opinion, “He’s an arrogant jerk”.
I don’t know if it’s true, but if so, it might have some bearing on his popularity in the clubhouse.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if every clubhouse in baseball (including the Mariners) is filled with arrogant jerks with just a few exceptions – so it might not be notable…
Only if they make him pull the bus.
I’ve said this before but those 70s Yankees teams didn’t appear to like each other. They would get into fistfights with each other ON TELEVISION. Then when the whistle blew (first pitch was thrown out, whatever), they just went out and kicked your $#$##$# on the field where it counts, and all that other stuff was forgotten. If we were WINNING 100 games instead of LOSING 100 games nobody would notice this stuff or if they did would not care.
I don’t have a problem believing Ichiro is an arrogant jerk — or a part-time arrogant jerk — or that he comes off as an arrogant jerk to people who meet him once. He is certainly extremely, calmly confident, apparently unflappable, centered, and evidently unconcerned with other people’s opinions. If that isn’t arrogance, it’s something like it; at the same time, it’s hard to argue that he hasn’t earned his arrogance. In any case, it ought to be irrelevant to a team of professionals, if that’s the only valid complaint to be made about him.
I was talking to some of the sport camera crew for Fuji TV station during the 2002 olympics and they never mentioned him being a jerk, only that they questioned his sexual orientation before( which was proved when some tabloid used a hot girl to pick him up, which resulted in his wife getting angry).
It is usual for japanese, especially atheletes to have a very horizontal hierarchy where the ‘senpai’ or veterans can be very condescending to the ‘kohai’ or those with less experience.
I think his stand-offish behavior comes from years of being hounded by the press and fans.
He has revealed his humor on japanese shows often, once claiming he had a fetish for girl’s socks ( he was talking to a gravure idol at the tiem).
You respect the Ichiro and god help you if you ever tried to knock him out. Because the first person to lay a finger on Ichiro would be murdered by a angry mob of Mariners fans and blog readers.
Joe Blanton was almost to first to receive this punishment, but Mr. Ellison, bless his heart, decided “I’ll take care of this Ichiro”.
But in all seriousness, I have no idea what to believe. RRS says the Clubhouse is fine and the media says its not. Considering RRS is in the clubhouse more than the media I am going to have to lead towards his statement.
Maybe the Mariners just get grumpy when the Media is around 😉 ;). I don’t know, I know this season is a disaster and I can’t wait for some Bus’s to drive on out of town, but slashed tires and a punctured gas tank.
There have been more than a few reports over the years that various teammates, coaches, managers, media members, etc. consider Ichiro a selfish player to varying degrees. And there certainly have been instances watching the guy play that he is making decisions for personal success rather than for winning that game. Based on that, I don’t think everything be chalked up to just losing and/or personal prejudice and/or jealousy.
such as?
such as?
(I crossed out the part that doesn’t matter.)
Seriously, people keep saying stuff like this in comments when Ichiro’s alleged selfishness is asserted, but they just about never support it.
Also, a huge band of idiots getting together to agree about their biases doesn’t validate their claims. See the KKK.
If you want to support your assertions, go right ahead. Pointing to some other person whose opinion we shouldn’t care about isn’t going to make me care about your opinion any more than I do.
Is this the same story as was being told when it was decided to let Junior go?
We love him, he’s the best…the most exciting player in baseball and–what?
We’re not going to keep him?
Oh, OK…
Well, have we ever mentioned the special treatment he gets? About how petulant he gets about other players having fans… About how we built this whole new ballpark for him and he whines about how it will impact his homerun numbers?
He’s really a selfish jerk and we’re probably better off without him.
We may be seeing the groundwork for an early Ichiro exit strategy…and my nightmare of seeing him in pinstripes–a fear I thought the new contract had erased–is coming back.
I have no doubt that the stories of Junior were true–they simply didn’t matter while he was helping us try to win…and I think he always helped us try to win. It must have been a pain in the ass for teammates to deal with…but suck it up and start playing like Junior and you’ll get your butt kissed too!
Same with Ichiro. Is he different, is he getting special treatment, is he not “one of the boys”? I have no doubt that all that’s true…but, all of this crazy “selfish player” nonsense aside, I think Ichiro has always helped us try to win.
And if the other players think that he’s a pain in the ass to deal with…then suck it up, and do what Ichiro does to help the team try to win and you’ll get your butt kissed too…
If Michael Jordan can put up with Dennis Rodman, then there isn’t a Mariner in that clubhouse that shouldn’t figure out how to thrive with Ichiro as a teammate.
At what point are you going to change the name of this website from ussmariner.com to ussichiro.com?
You guys have good objective opinions about every subject except when it comes to Ichiro. A negative comment about Ichiro usually is followed by 2 or 3 posts blasting whoever said or wrote the negative comments; however, if the exact same thing was said about Carlos Silva for example this would be just another reason of why he was a terrible signing (which he was) and there would be no defense.
If the Mariners can get 2 or 3 good prospects in a trade this off-season (not saying they could)how is that not a good idea? The chances of contending in the next 2 – 3 years is fairly low at which point Ichiro will clearly be on the decline, even though I know players like him age well, still he won’t be the same player anymore.
Sure the guys a good player, but this sites love affair is to the point where when there is a post about Ichiro I have to skip it and move to the next…. which is what I’m sure about 20 of you are going to tell me to do on this one.
I’ll go do that right now.
Dennis Rodman is the one-man refutation of the vast importance of chemistry.
Followed by several commenters criticizing the defending of Ichiro without actually addressing the criticism or its refutation.
Which is more boring? Repeated defenses of Ichiro from stupid attacks, or repeated motive-bashing of the site’s authors by commenters who don’t want to actually discuss the post?
FYI: Wasn’t bashing the authors.
Well played, Derek. Well played.
And of course people do criticize Ichiro here. Dave has many times criticized Ichiro’s throwing arm. Many people here have criticized Ichiro’s bunt choices, and not just the mind-readers who think it says something about Ichiro’s selfishness, but reasonable people who think it’s often a bad strategy.
This point will be ignored.
wallywwu, accusing the authors of being blind Ichiro-worshipers and hypocrites (per your second paragraph) isn’t bashing them?
What are the legitimate criticisms of Ichiro as a results-based performer?
That he gets hits, even when the game is not on the line? That’s something bad?
That he steals bases only when he can? Again–is the better option for him to be thrown out more?
That he keeps to a strict regimen that works for him? What is that other than a personality conflict?
That he doesn’t dive for every ball? And the downside to that is…no triples and no season ending Mike Morse-esque injuries?
That he is still trying to do what he can as a hitter and a fielder to be successful, rather than collapsing in frustration and malaise like everyone else on the team does as the team fails to be competitive for another year? He can’t play every position and do every job–although, he HAS offered to do just that…
I think this site, above all sites, is EXACTLY where a clear-headed obsession with what Ichiro does is undeniably justified.
It isn’t that Ichiro is above criticism–it’s just that his performance on the field is worthy of precious little deserved criticism.
And there aren’t any other Mariners who you can say that about.
That, and he has very good taste in beer. That shouldn’t be overlooked.
I swear, if someone accused Ichiro of eating kittens, and Dave pointed out there was no evidence that Ichiro ate kittens, and Derek noted that unsourced accusations of kitten-eating were shoddy journalism, two commenters would drop in to say Jeez you can’t say anything about Ichiro without you guys getting worked up! Why, if it were Silva who was accused of cat-eating, all you’d say is well, he does have a big gut. Etc.
I agree with Wallywwu. Scraps, “stupid attacks” is an opinion and also a conclusion not inviting much room for discussion.
I’ve seen Silva coughing up fur.
I have to agree with mironos: The bad feelings directed at Ichiro strikes me as too unique and too persistent to dismiss.
I don’t find the alternative theories that have been proposed persuasive. Is Ichiro hated because he’s overpaid? There are overpaid players on every team in the Majors, and none of them seem to rile their teammates to this extent. Is it racism? Why have we not heard of this kind of animus directed at other Japanese (or, for that matter, Asian) players? The negativity surrounding Ichiro seems truly sui generis, and that makes me think that there’s probably something to it.
Sure, it’s possible that a large portion of the Mariners clubhouse are envious bigots; but this can’t possibly be the most plausible theory.
I’m also disturbed by how many people seem to think that Silva must be an unreliable source simply because he’s a bad pitcher. Yes, Silva is a terrible starting pitcher. He has a 6.46ERA. But but none of that bears on his personal integrity or the significance of his feelings about his teammates.
I love how a discussion about some anonymous cowards wanting to physically abuse Ichiro ended up as a complaint that the people here are defending him.
And by “love” I mean “God, people are stupid.”
I swear, if Ichiro committed a serious crime and was found guilty in a court of law, and a writer wrote an article condemning Ichiro’s actions, and Dave wrote a piece defending him, and someone like me asked “why is anyone that has a negative comment about Ichiro attacked by this blog?”, scraps or someone else would accuse me of accusing the blog of “no one can say anything negative about Ichiro without you guys getting worked up”.
dang, would you accept “irrational, unsupported attacks”?
Wow I didn’t think my stupid post would cause so much anger. All I meant was that Ichiro is the one subject on here that doesn’t seem to be too objective. There I said it.
And, wallywwu, I challenge that assessment.
From the same metrics that this site uses to judge all players, there are reasons to support the positive response given here to Ichiro.
Can you make a case for that support being irrational? Can you make a case using the metrics championed by this site that Ichiro is not deserving of the positive response he gets here?
Put another way, “Maybe the reason that so many people say that Scarlett Johansson is hot is because she is?”
dang, are you listening to yourself? You are basically saying that if you said A, I or someone else would come along and accuse you of saying… A. Do I need to spell out why that’s not a parallel to the point I made?