Ichiro, a vision of hitters past

By Dave Kindred of The Sporting News

It’s spooky, the way Ichiro Suzuki hits. There’s an elegance that cannot be explained. We see him at bat. We see him small and lithe, 5-foot-9, teenager lean. We see him in the lefthanded batter’s box, waiting.

Here’s what’s spooky. It’s as if he’s not there. It’s just the bat. The bat moves, and he moves with it, all silky, easy, inevitable. Most guys, it’s the other way around. They muscle up to move the bat. With Ichiro, it’s so easy it’s as if he, like us, is a witness to his wonders.

He hits line drives everywhere. His speed is so good that a ground ball two steps to a shortstop’s right is a base hit. So he’s not Barry Bonds? Who cares? For those who prefer little ball, Ichiro is big stuff.

At last count, through Thursday’s games, he had four 5-hit games, six 4-hit games, 23 3-hit games and 45 2-hit games. He had been shut out only 27 times in 157 games.

With 49 walks and 35 stolen bases, Ichiro becomes a constant presence in every game.

For each of his four seasons in our major leagues, Ichiro has had more than 200 hits. It may be a touch misleading to praise him as the first hitter to do that; he arrived at age 27, a veteran, already Japan’s best. Even so, four consecutive 200-hit seasons has rarely been done on this side of the Pacific. Ty Cobb never did it, nor did Pete Rose, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams or Stan Musial.

And it says here that Ichiro’s current run at one of baseball’s mythic records—257 hits in a season—has been more interesting, if not more sensational, than Bonds’ run at Mark McGwire’s record of 70 home runs. How long did McGwire hold the record, three minutes? In contrast, for the last month of this season Ichiro chased a record that was set seven years before Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, set the same year that George Halas put down $100 to start the Decatur Staleys, the year of Man o’ War, Bill Tilden and George Gipp.

It was 1920.

The man was George Sisler.

A St. Louis Browns first baseman, 27 years old, 5-11, 170 pounds, a left-handed hitter with speed, Sisler hit .407 in 154 games that season with 49 doubles, 18 triples and 19 home runs. Theorist Bill James’ summary of Sisler that season: “About as great of a player as you can be.’’

Two years later, he hit .420 with 246 hits in 142 games. His 15-year career average of .340 was that low only because he played the last seven years with eye problems. Surgery on sinus passages caused double vision that forced him to sit out 1923. He never fully recovered, though he did have three more 200-hit seasons and 2,812 hits total.

Yet until Ichiro moved toward his 250th hit, Sisler seemed lost in the mists of history, perhaps because he never moved with Ruthian swagger or the disputatious profanity of Cobb.

Branch Rickey considered Sisler a modest man, adding only a slight disclaimer: “Justifiable ego, however, made him a great player.’’

Sisler’s belief in his hitting theories was so certain that should anyone dispute them, Rickey said, “Sisler would simply feel a sense of sorrow for the critic.’’

Historian Robert Smith called Sisler “sharp-eyed, crafty.’’ He wrote that Sisler “spent 10 years building up the fiction that he could not hit a high inside pitch (he used to swing at and miss such pitches occasionally, just so he could count on getting one when a hit was needed).’’

Great at bat, Sisler also was, as Ichiro is, an outstanding defensive player. Rickey, his manager with the Browns in 1915, Sisler’s rookie year, remembered his stab of a wild throw from shortstop John “Doc” Lavan. Sisler managed to get his gloved hand in front of the wayward missile while stretched flat out and falling to the earth, “like a toppling log.”

As to how Sisler could make that stretch and catch without his toe leaving the bag, the Mahatma had a metaphysical explanation: “Only a player with a mysterious, inner glow of baseball greatness could have held on to the ball and the bag under those conditions.”

Ah, yes, mystery.

Some things defy explanation.

In the winter of 2001, Ichiro went to Cooperstown. He gave a bat to the Hall of Fame in recognition of his achievement of becoming the first Japanese position player to play in the U.S. major leagues.

While there, Ichiro picked up another man’s bat.

It was Shoeless Joe Jackson’s famous Black Betsy. Ichiro put his hands around the bat handle and held Black Betsy at his left hip, the barrel vertical and resting against his left shoulder, easy, casual.

When Hall of Fame vice president Jeff Idelson saw a photograph of Ichiro in that pose, it reminded him of another picture. So he tacked both on his office wall. The other showed Ty Cobb, holding a bat at his left hip, its barrel vertical and resting against his left shoulder, casual.

One man born in 1886, the other in 1973.

Their eyes had an eagle’s look.

Idelson said, “Eerie.”