ICHIRO: God in a Godless Land

Or: The Search For That Which We Cannot Destroy

This past Tuesday Ichiro Suzuki was elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame, receiving 99.7% of the vote. The occasion serves as a capstone to possibly the most important baseball career since Jackie Robinson. I am quite confident I will never, ever see anything quite like Ichiro, who manifested from half a world away to dominate the sport by slapping singles at the very height of the steroid era. As such, I felt compelled to write a few quick thoughts on what he is to baseball, and to me.

ICHIRO stands alone.

Ichiro Suzuki is 51 years old. I wonder which foods give him bad gas. Whatever they are, they have to exist. I’m 43 and eating has increasingly seen me ducking and weaving through culinary delights long-enjoyed like a foot soldier at Passchendaele. There has to be something he likes, but he knows that will leave him waking up at 2:30 AM with a stomach in full revolt. I wonder if he ate it this week. I wonder if he’s experiencing gastrointestinal distress in this photograph.

ICHIRO, the outfielder with the first name on his jersey, the all-time hit king in the history of professional baseball, the wall-climbing, blaster-firing, game-and-world-altering icon who has spent the entirety of his existence dedicated to two things - dominating at baseball and giving great quotes - has never had gas. ICHIRO never eats, and never sleeps. He goes into stasis in the same atmospheric containment chamber he keeps his bats - his weapons with which he does battle against the world - and simply powers down.

I wonder about Ichiro Suzuki. What puts him in a foul mood? Has he ever wondered what his life would be like had he not been a baseball player? What are his hobbies? Does he have hobbies? Is he a book reader? How would he feel about the allegory of empire held within the volumes of Steve Erikson’s Malazan Book Of The Fallen? Would he see what a perfect comparison his public image is to that series’ character Anomander Rake; an eternal god of unfathomable power and majesty who conceals that power at almost all times in order to walk the world of mortals? How does he feel about that public image? Is it exhausting knowing the slightest bit of normalcy; of typical, everyday humanity expressed would shatter the visage of his outward-facing deification?

Does Ichiro Suzuki ever get tired of ICHIRO? Does he wish that he could have a conversation in public in which he wasn’t expected to be the funniest and most interesting person in the room? What does he do to release the pressure that comes with such immense expectations, born of a life of impassable accomplishment and consistency? Where does he go to break down? Because we all need to break down.

There is no room in 2025 for gods. Long past is the world that allowed for the hedonistic lechery of Babe Ruth to exist in shadow so that the public could enjoy him unblemished. To be famous is to be seen, and to be seen is to be scrutinized; to be pinned under the bright lights and have every day, word, and action dissected by a classroom of billions. We are not allowed heroes in the traditional sense. Anything we love from afar exists in one of two states: pre- or post-the Fall from Grace.

Consider Shohei Ohtani, who is almost certainly the greatest baseball player I will ever see. A man of incredible privacy who only uses social media to begrudgingly admit that he does things like “have a wife”, Ohtani nonetheless saw his otherwise spotless public image drug through a scandalous betting scheme involving his employed interpreter. There is no player I’ve experienced whose on-field abilities transcend mortality the way Ohtani’s do, and yet he remains fallen, fallible, human.

It is my belief that that same scrutiny; that deeply-human impulse to examine, measure, weigh, poke, prod, and analyze is the byproduct of a deeply-coded need to search for something greater; for something we cannot see or touch. We seek proof of the unprovable, and we’ll destroy ourselves to find it. To be human is to exist within that contradiction. Like Jacob and the Angel in the desert, I think the best we can hope for is a stalemate.

ICHIRO, then, is the manifestation of that impasse. We could press on it, past it. We could destroy ICHIRO. Ichiro Suzuki: Dude Who Gets Stuck In Traffic And Has Opinions On Taxes, lies somewhere just beyond that horizon. But, for once, we have never had the appetite for that. We have allowed ICHIRO to exist, unopposed and unassailable, filling our need for belief in something greater than ourselves. The deep dives we do on him are mostly concerned with how funny and cool he is, because that’s what we want to hear about. We have collectively decided The Real Ichiro is the dude who swears a lot before the All-Star Game. We have sat at his feet, unquestioning and rapt, basking in the wisdom of a sort of Baseball Moses.

I wonder if Ichiro Suzuki can measure where he stops and ICHIRO starts. He has been both for so long; at least 30 years now. He wakes up every morning a retired man, well into middle age, allowed to exist with unfathomable wealth as he runs around outfields catching flyballs and smashing high school windows. His back may hurt when he wakes up. Perhaps he has to take vitamins to supplement his diet. His doctor may have noted a few concerns that require a follow up. We will never know, and we will never care. He has been granted godhood by our need to revere someone beyond a level that a man can attain. He is, and will always be, ICHIRO.

And ICHIRO stands alone.