Jon Bois did this better
In 2008, my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Sansone, assigned us a project called the “Get to Know You” Board. We had to answer five or six questions about ourselves, draw a little picture for each answer and put the pictures on these big poster boards. I don’t remember all of the tails, but I do remember one question very clearly. Who is your hero?
The first thing that popped into my little eight-year-old was my parents. They were the obvious choice. My parents are kind, funny, thoughtful and I was 8 so they were the only adults I knew. They are still my heroes to this day, they always have been my heroes. But eight-year-old Matthew had a third hero. A hero that so unique, so fascinating and so good at baseball, that this hero gave my parents a run for their money. Little Matthew had to make a choice. A devastating choice. Matthew had to choose between his parents and Seattle Mariners legend, Ichiro Suzuki.
The Mariners have been there for me to enjoy all of my life, but the Mariners of the 2000’s are foundational to my personality. I didn’t really understand baseball. I didn’t get the rules and I didn’t really watch the games on tv. But I would wake up every morning and steal the sports section of the Seattle Times away from my dad, just to look at the baseball scores. I had to see if the Mariners had won. Then I would read every other score and pick which teams I was rooting for teams based on how much I liked their name. I still get a warm fuzzy feeling looking at the Arizona Diamondback’s box score in the Times.
I was born on June 7th, 2000, at 9:45 am. 9 Hours and 20 minutes later the Mariner’s played their first game with me in the World. Jamie Moyer, one of my favorite pitchers of all time was on the mound. My dad would describe Jamie to me later in life. He told me about how he could only throw the ball 80 MPH and still make batters look silly. He would mimic a hypothetical opposing batters swing and make an “arggh” sound to demonstrate how Moyer’s opponents flailed at what should have been easy balls to hit. Jaime also would go on to become the oldest pitcher in the Major league baseball history to win a game. Ever. He was already 37 years old on June 7th, 2000, well past the age most players retire. Jaime would pitch for 11 more seasons. And on the day I was born, Jaime Moyer lost. The Mariners were blown out by a score of 6 to 1 by a painfully mediocre Colorado Rockies club.
Probably the strangest thing about the 2000 Mariners was that, despite their June 7th loss, they were good. They made the playoffs for the first time since 1997. This was a devastating three-year drought that I’m sure will be the most notable playoff drought the Mariners will suffer. It was the Mariners first time making the playoffs since trading Randy Johnson in 1998. To add insult to injury, in February of 2000, the Mariners also had traded away Ken Griffey Jr. I won’t talk about Ken or Randy much, because they weren’t on the team in the aughts (mostly). But suffice it to say that losing them was… bad. It was bad. They are two of the best baseball players of all time.
Despite losing two of the best baseball players to ever put on a Mariners uniform, the 2000 Mariners still had three stars. They had a 35-year-old Jay Buhner. (Jay Buhner is my favorite second Baseball Player.) They had a 37-year-old Edgar Martinez. (Edgar is my third favorite baseball player.) And they had 24-year-old Mega Star wunderkind shortstop Alex Rodriguez, who has an argument for being one of the top ten baseball players of all time. (Alex is, perhaps, my least favorite baseball player.)
Brief intermission. I’m not really gonna talk about stats much, but there is one stat that I think will be helpful if you aren’t super into baseball. It’s called OPS+. It’s an all-inclusive number that shows how good someone can hit a baseball. If your OPS+ is 100, you are exactly average. If it’s below 100, you are worse than most players. If your number is 125 that means you are 25% better at hitting than the average player which means you are very, very good. If you have an OPS+ of 150 you are one of the greatest hitters of all time.
Jay Buhner was getting old. In 1998 he dropped from an exceptional 131 OPS+ to an average 109. In 1999 he dropped again to 107. But in the year 2000, he had one final gasp of greatness. Were as most players in their late 30’s slide into mediocrity, Jay brought his career back from the dead, hitting a 127 OPS+.
While Jay’s 2000 was a final gasp of solid play, Edgar’s 2000 was nothing short of exceptional. Edgar was like a fine wine. He only got better with age. At the age of 37, Edgar’s OPS+ was 158. People that old never hit that well. That is a big reason why Edgar was elected to the baseball hall of fame in 2019.
Alex Rodriguez was a shortstop. A really good shortstop defensively. Shortstops aren’t supposed to hit well. He had an OPS+ of 163. He was only 24. Alex has some of the best numbers a baseball player has ever had. Ever.
A guy named John Olerud had an OPS+ of 117,which is decent, but no one else on the Mariners had an OPS+ over 100. Getting your OPS+ over 100 is a major accomplishment. Only four Mariners hit over 100 at all and Jay, Edgar and Alex hit 127, 158 and 163! True superstars, especially at their ages.
The Mariners managed to beat the Chicago White Sox in the playoffs before falling to the defending 1999 Champions the New York Yankees, who would go on to win the whole thing again in 2000 (Screw the Yankees). But the Mariners still had three stars. They’d be back.
Then, multiple tragedies struck. The first was Alex. Alex Rodriguez who had been playing for the Mariners since he was 19, left the team. He signed the biggest sports contract in history (at the time) to play for the Mariner’s rival, the Texas Rangers. Mariners fans hate him for that, but they hate him more for going to the hated Yankees in 2004 and then testing positive for steroids. Disloyalty and Cheating aside, Alex was one of the best hitters in the entire league. He made the Mariners offense go. He’d be a huge loss on the baseball diamond (If not in the clubhouse).
And the Mariners didn’t know it, but they had also lost Jay Buhner. His 2000 season had been his last gasp. In 2001’s spring training, he hurt his foot. He couldn’t play. On June 14th, 2001, Jay Buhner underwent season ending foot surgery. Jay miraculously managed to make it back in October but retired immediately after the season ended. Alex might have been a better baseball player, but Jay was an incredible guy. He worked hard, played harder and everyone loved him, from teammates to fans. His shaved head gave him the nickname “the bone” and he would host head shaving nights where he would shave a fans head for charity. He would do this thing called blurping, where he would make himself vomit just to get people around him to sympathy vomit. He was everyone’s best friend.
December 2000 was my first Christmas. My gift from my parents was a baseball. A baseball signed by Jay Buhner. On the Authentication tag, my parents wrote:
“Merry 1st Christmas Matthew. We hope that whatever you do in life, you do it was the same dedication, effort and integrity that Jay Buhner brought to the Mariners in the 90s. We love you. Mom and Dad”
No more Alex. No more Jay. Edgar was still there and still was kicking ass, but the man was 40 now. The Mariners had only one star left, and he was one of the oldest players in the entire league. Could the 2001 Mariner’s reach the heights of the 2000 Mariners with only one aging star? No, of course not. They needed another.
Enter Ichiro. My hero. My favorite baseball player. Ever.
The Mariners signed Ichiro when he was 27 from Japan. Ichiro was a household name there. He was already well on his way to being the best Japanese baseball player of all time. In 1994, Ichiro had a batting average of .385! That means he got a hit 38.5% of the time. 2000 Alex Rodriguez only had a batting average of .315.
Baseball was HUGE in Japan, but no baseball player had ever successfully made the leap from the NPB to the MLB. Everyone in America said that Ichiro wasn’t going to be able to adjust the far superior MLB. Even beloved mariners manager Lou Piniella said he wasn’t going to hit as well as did in Japan. Lou said he could hit .300 in America and not to put pressure on him to do anything more than that.
In his rookie season, Ichiro hit .350. That was the highest in the league. He got 242 hits. Only 8 guys had gotten 242 hits in baseball season. Ever. And all of those guys? They played in the 20’s. The 1920s. No one had hit more than 241 baseballs in a season since 1930. Ichiro did it in his first season. (The only man to do it since 2001? Ichiro. Again. When he broke the all-time record for hits in 2004 with 262. In the 130 years of professional baseball no one else has more than 260 hits.)
His first season ever! After a month it was clear that Ichiro was going to be the MLB rookie of the year. By summer, he was a shoe in for the All-Star Game. By October? He was the best player in the league. Ichiro became the second player ever to win both Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable player in the same season.
What was his OPS+? 126.
Ichiro’s OPS+ was like, just ok. It pales in comparison to our old friend Alex Rodriguez who had an OPS+ of 160 with the Rangers.
But Ichiro won MVP.
Was A-Rod the better hitter, by most modern metrics? Definitely. Is Alex Rodriguez’s position as shortstop almost universally considered more valuable than Ichiro’s position as right fielder? Absolutely.
But perhaps the most 2000s thing in this article is the fact that sports writers at the time, the people who voted for MVP didn’t care about numbers. They cared about winning. I could talk about how dumb this is, ESPECIALLY in baseball, where a single player has an extremely small amount of impact on whether or not a team wins. But I won’t. Because in this case, it was good.
Alex’s 2001 Rangers, the team he abandoned the Mariners for, the team that gave him one of the biggest contracts of all time won 73 games and lost 89. The 2001 Mariners? The team that had just lost four of its biggest stars in the last four years? A team that people thought was at the end of their peak? Those Mariners?
They won 116 games. No baseball team has ever won more than 116 games in a season. Ever. EVER! Baseball has been played for such a long time, I can’t emphasis how absolutely insane this is. Ichiro was the best player on one of the best teams of all time.
Here are a bunch of Ichiro facts that I like.
Ichiro took better care of his body than basically anyone who ever lived. He uses rare workout equipment only manufactured in Japan. He stretched every day. He would stretch before every at bat.
Because of this preparation, he was able to play baseball professionally from 1992 to 2019. That’s 27 years.
In 2017, someone asked Ichiro what he will do with all his free time when he retires. Ichiro’s response? “I think I’ll just die”
Tom Brady is the greatest NFL quarterback of all time. Tom is currently playing pro football at the age of 45. Tom loves football so much he got divorced over it. Tom Brady is iconic for being an athlete that stays in good shape. In 2018, Tom texted Ichiro, asking him for his stretching routine. Ichiro’s response? “Who the Fuck is Tom Brady”
There is an old joke that if you send a package to Japan with just the name “Ichiro” on it, they’ll get it to him. He’s that famous.
Ichiro doesn’t talk all that much. I like that in a guy.
Ichiro just kind of… hangs out with the Mariners now. Most retired athletes live in their mansions with their celebrity wives, maybe they’ll go on tv once a week. Ichiro just goes to the ballpark and helps the 2020’s Mariners with batting practice.
Ichiro visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. It honors the leagues that Black men played in before Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier. These are some of the greatest baseball players of all time. People like Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and Cool Papa Bell, who major league baseball refused to acknowledge for so long. Ichiro said almost nothing as he toured the Museum. At the end of his tour, he immediately wrote a check in donation. It was the biggest donation the museum had ever received from a player.
If you went to Safeco field for any game between 2001 and 2009, all of the aughts, Ichiro Suzuki would be there in right field. Players get about four chances to hit a baseball a night. Ichiro hit the ball 35% of the time. If you went to Safeco in the aughts, you were almost guaranteed to see Ichiro get a hit. If he didn’t get a hit, then he would be making a spectacular catch, or stealing a base or throwing the ball from the warning track to home plate to gun down a runner.
Safeco was and still is my favorite place on earth. I loved the garlic fries. I loved running up and down the ramps (pictured) and I loved Ichiro. More than anything.
So when 8-year-old Matthew had to choose a hero?
Sorry Mom and Dad but it wasn’t that hard of choice.
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