Hit man

  • Saturday, August 28, 2004 9:00pm
  • Sports

SEATTLE – Just when Lee Elia thought he’d seen it all, along came Ichiro Suzuki.

It was 2001, Ichiro’s first spring training with the Mariners.

Elia, who has made his living in professional baseball for more than 40 years, was then a hitting consultant for the M’s.

One day in camp Ichiro felt he needed to work on his bunting, so he stepped into the batting cage to face a machine that spits out tennis balls at speeds up to 130 mph.

With the velocity turned down to the mid-90s, Ichiro laid down about 25 bunts. Nothing particularly amazing about that. What was remarkable was how the ball came off the bat. “He would bunt that tennis ball and make it stay,” Elia said.

In other words, he would tap it so lightly that it would stop after a few feet, no easy feat.

Thirty minutes later, Ichiro stepped into the batter’s box to lead off the game and – wouldn’t you know – dropped down a bunt that died and nobody could make a play on. Upon reaching first base, he looked over at the Mariner dugout and did a little salute to Elia as if to say, “That’s for you.”

Three years later, Elia – now the hitting coach for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays – still marvels at the English Ichiro put on the ball that day. “It was as good as I’ve ever seen,” he said last week, when the Rays were in town to play the Mariners.

Ichiro’s bunting finesse wasn’t all that impressed him. Each tennis ball had a dot the size of a quarter on it and inside the dot was a number. “He could distinguish that number,” Elia said.

Which helps explain why Ichiro has established himself as one of baseball’s finest hitters.

With a solo home run in the ninth inning of Thursday night’s game against Kansas City, he became the first player in major league history to have 200 hits in each of his first four seasons.

In a summer of dismal Mariner baseball, he is a major reason to come to the ballpark, to see a master batsman pursue the all-time single-season record for hits and his second batting title.

Following Saturday’s doubleheader against Kansas City (he had four hits in 10 at-bats), Ichiro had 206 hits – 51 shy of the record by George Sisler in 1920 – and a .365 batting average, 19 points higher than Melvin Mora of Baltimore.

We needn’t remind you that Ichiro was in the starting lineup for both games. “I would not want to be (manager) Bob Melvin and try to take him out of the lineup down the stretch,” chuckled Ted Heid, the scout who signed Ichiro.

He doesn’t sit well, which speaks to his professionalism as well as his conditioning. Of the 615 games the M’s have played over the last three-plus years, Ichiro has appeared in 601.

“He’s a very proud person, extremely regimented and very systematic,” Elia said, “and he has a tremendous work ethic.”

Take Saturday for example. Two hours before the first game, Ichiro walks onto the grass in shallow right field.

He lays down his glove, jogs to the fence in left field, turns, runs backwards for several yards, does some jumping jacks as he moves, then settles into a nice easy run to the right-field line.

There he sits down on the grass and begins a series of stretching exercises that last for 15 minutes. He follows that with 10 minutes of throwing, another light run interspersed with some high leg kicks. Then he picks up his glove, tosses a ball to some fans in the seats along the first-base line, sprints to the dugout and disappears down the steps.

Now you understand what Melvin was talking about the other night when he said, “Ichiro prepares every day like it’s going to be his last.”

His last game is a long way off. And if he continues to hit as he has in his first 600 games, baseball fans everywhere are in for some special treats in years to come.

“The only question is his legs,” Heid, speaking from Arizona, said. “If the legs start to go, he won’t be able to get those infield hits. At that point you’ll see the natural maturation of a hitter and he’ll start hitting the long ball.”

Which he can do. And it isn’t lunacy to think he can hit 25 to 30 home runs a year. “The year he was asked to do that in Japan, he did it,” Heid said, alluding to his 25 homers in 1995.

A better question might be: Is there anything Ichiro is incapable of doing? “I honestly feel on a given day, if there’s something he wants to do, he can do it, regardless of who’s pitching,” Elia said.

He again harkened back to Ichiro’s first spring training. Then manager Lou Piniella was a little concerned that he hadn’t seen the left-handed hitting newcomer pull the ball, and he asked Ichiro about it. The first time he came to bat that day, he hit a pitch over the fence to dead right field. Then went back to spraying the ball all over the park.

He sees holes in the outfield and fills them with hits. He does it with a bat mastery that is akin to Minnesota Fats wielding a pool cue.

“People say it’s not always pretty,” said M’s batting coach Paul Molitor, “but in some ways his approach is almost slow-pitch-softball-like, where he can identify the pitch and see where the holes are in the field and know what swing he has to pick out of his bag of tricks to get that ball in that direction.”

As a .306 lifetime hitter and a recent Hall of Fame inductee, Molitor knows a thing or two about handling a bat. But even he is somewhat awed by Ichiro’s skills. “He can almost take off something on ground balls,” Molitor observed. “Rather than hit a bullet to the hole at shortstop, he’ll feather it to the hole at shortstop because that’s going to give him two or three extra steps down the line.”

So how do you coach a man with a .336 career average? You don’t. You give him positive reinforcement.

“He likes acknowledgement of his accomplishments, not from an egomaniac standpoint, but more of one that is just recognition of his work,” Molitor said. “I can’t even think of what I’ve tried to talk to him about in terms of the mechanics of hitting.”

If pitchers thought they had Ichiro figured out when he tailed off dramatically in the final two months of the 2003 season and hit a career-low .312, he’s let them know that they’d better refigure their thinking.

It’s that pride factor again. That and his intelligence.

“It’s not fair to judge his intellect with baseball players,” Heid said. “He may be way above any human being.”

Figure out what the problem is and fix it.

Ichiro has – in dramatic fashion.

If you watch his eyes when he steps to the plate and goes through his ritualistic setup, he seems so locked in that nothing would distract him.

“Baseball is about a one-on-one confrontation with the pitcher,” Heid mused. “The Japanese have a word for it: Shobu. That’s what it’s all about.”

A Japanese writer explained that “Sho” stands for winning, “bu” for losing.

In his duels with pitchers, Ichiro Suzuki is taking “Sho” to another level.

He has done it with wonderful hand-eye coordination, outstanding speed (43 infield hits and 29 steals before Saturday) and a strong, accurate arm.

All this in a lean, pliant, small-statured guy who, pound-for-pound, might be the strongest player on the M’s.

He has fashioned his own conditioning program and is very devout when it comes to weight training.

“His body is sacred,” Heid said. “He has no body fat and his endurance is off the charts.”

He is listed at 5 feet 9, but appears taller up close.

In fact, Heid says Ichiro is 71 inches tall.

“I’ve been there when they’ve measured him,” Heid said, “and he’ll say, ‘See, 5-11.’ He’s very proud of that.”

In the eyes of many, he’s 10 feet.

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