Between the Horns: Coping with the trade

“It’s like seeing your dad in a cocktail dress.”

That’s how a friend of mine described the feeling of watching Ichiro Suzuki jog out onto the field at Safeco in the New York navy and gray.

“This round’s yours,” he added, then got up and dragged his feet all the way to the bathroom. He’s a lifelong Mariner fan, if it needs to be said.

It’s a burden to love a team. It’s illogical, and it is sometimes unhealthy. To nurture that connection—to have one’s mood altered by a box score—doesn’t make any sense, at least on the surface.

And yet the one characteristic shared by all those who have come to love a team is that they long ago lost interest in explaining themselves. None of it matters, but then one day you stroll past and find something that inspires you, and you come back for more. It’s not family, but it’s a feeling that’s vaguely similar. There’s no sense in trying to explain it, I suppose. It simply is.

Ichiro Suzuki arrived in Seattle in 2001 after nine seasons in Japan’s Pacific League, and went right to work seducing an entire fan base. He was an icon in Japan who was almost completely unknown in the United States before news of Seattle’s feverish preemptive negotiations began to circulate and the team paid millions just to talk to him.

At the time, the Mariners were still coming out of the Griffey era—those fragile seasons in the nineties when it seemed like the very best and worst were possible at any given moment—and needed a spark. They got Ichiro.

As it turned out, he was good. Really, really good. Ichiro began his stateside career by winning the Rookie of the Year and American League MVP awards, leading the majors in batting average and stolen bases and immediately settling in as the core of a team that won a record-tying 116 games.

He was a menace out in right field, a tortured artist at the plate and a crowd favorite in Seattle from the moment he showed up. Unfortunately, the team couldn’t keep up with him, becoming increasingly emaciated as the seasons wore on.

The decline was subtle at first, but then it came on all at once. Ichiro was left to try and make something out of what was left—to put a good face on a lost cause. He continued lifting up singles like he always had, going through that same bizarre ticks and twitches and shoulder rolls that endeared him to Mariner fans all those years ago, grinding his way through the schedule every year on the way to 65 consolation wins.

Finally, after a decade, it was just too heavy a burden to bear. Ichiro had been determined to go out swinging, but there was nobody to keep the cuts from bleeding out anymore. Lost-cause seasons had become the rule.

“He just had enough. What’re you gonna do?” my friend asked.

I nodded in concession. Even having forged no deep spiritual connection with the Seattle Mariners, the sight of Ichiro sporting an overlapped NY insignia is unsettling. The combination seems fundamentally out of sync in a way that is received visually but processed through the stomach—it just feels wrong.

But no, I assured my friend, I certainly can’t blame him for it. At 38, Ichiro wouldn’t survive another rebuilding effort in Seattle. There was no other way, and he knew it.

“If it were me, I’d do the same thing,” I said. And I would. But I can tell that doesn’t make it any easier.