Mariners' Ichiro wants to make the play, not look good doing it

The days of joyous discovery are long past. No longer do we rub our eyes in amazement at what we just saw from Ichiro — the bat wizardry, the rocket arm, the lightning first step out of the box, seemingly while still swinging.

No, entering his eighth season with the Mariners, Ichiro is now a fixture, an established major-league star, an enduring Seattle icon. It's starting to feel like he has been here forever.

By the end of the 2009 season — two years into the five-year extension he signed three days after being named most valuable player of the All-Star Game — Ichiro will have played precisely half his 18-year professional career in the North American major leagues.

He wore a Mariners uniform when he had an MVP rookie season in 2001, set the major-league hits record in 2004, won two batting titles and seven Gold Gloves. It will be in a Mariners uniform he'll reach 3,000 combined career hits (late in 2008, if he holds to form) and take aim at Pete Rose's career mark.

Ask Ichiro if he finds it amazing that seven years have passed so quickly, and his answer is typical of the verbal fencing that has marked his translated comments over the years (he still declines to conduct interviews in English, despite his increasing mastery of the language).

"If I was amazed, that would mean that part of my mind was thinking I might have retired at this point, or gone back to Japan at this point," he said through interpreter Ken Barron. "But that thought never crossed my mind, so it doesn't surprise me at all."

The evolution of the response to Ichiro's American career has been instructive, from astonishment, to awe, to — inevitably, because this is a staple of our culture — picking apart his game.

Fans, analysts and the media love to point out what he doesn't do — walk enough, hit for enough power, steal enough bases, dive for enough balls, run into enough walls, provide enough leadership.

It is an outlook that Ichiro addresses impishly, but with devastating self-assurance.

"If someone makes a statement [of criticism] that is beyond my imagination, something I didn't realize, that definitely I take in," he said. "But most of the time, it's below what I've been thinking."

Take, for example, the frequently heard refrain that Ichiro is reluctant to dive for balls. He has a ready response, followed by an eye-opening anecdote.

"People who say that don't understand that, in pretty much every case, you have a higher chance of getting the ball by running through it than by diving or sliding," he said. "There are a few cases, if you get the timing exactly right, where sliding you have a better chance, but it's very select.

"People who say that probably think that sliding into first base is faster than running through it. People who say those kind of things probably get more enjoyment from looking at those kind of plays, but they probably don't know there's a better chance to catch the ball [the other way]."

Nevertheless, toward the end of last season, Ichiro decided on a whim to do it the hard way.

"I actually slid and caught a ball, one which I could have caught without sliding," he said. "It was just a routine play for me, but I purposely slid and caught it just to see people's reaction.

"What happened was, everyone came up to me and said, 'Good play, nice play.' On TV, they even had it as a 'Web Gem.' To me, it was pretty funny. That was proof to me of what I was saying."

Did the reaction tempt him to keep making the gaudy dives to receive the adulation that comes with it?

"That definitely crossed my mind," he said. "I thought, 'Well, in situations where the play is not crucial to the game, I might do it.'

"But I have a policy within myself. I understand as a professional player, you are worth more making a hard play look easy, than a person who makes a play look more difficult than it needs to be.

"I take more worth in making a play look easier."

That policy extends to crashing into walls while chasing down balls in the outfield; his supposed reluctance to do so is another frequent criticism.

"Actually, that's not true," he said. "I crash into walls when it's needed. Of course, in Fenway, where the wall is rock solid, I'm not going to. But in places like Safeco, I have no problem with crashing into walls and making plays. But in a situation where there's no need to crash into it, I'll avoid the wall."

Such a prudent attitude has had a tangible benefit for the Mariners: Ichiro has never been on the disabled list with Seattle and has played in all but 18 of the Mariners' games the past seven seasons.

Mindful of his superfluous dive that drew accolades last year, Ichiro added with a smile, "If it's important for me to crash in after catching a routine fly, I'll do it."

Most of the raps against Ichiro involve the nature of his offensive game, which can be confounding to the sabermetric crowd. Just ask Nate Silver, one of the pre-eminent statistical minds in the country, having invented an entirely new evaluation tool — PECOTA — that is increasingly used by teams to predict future performance.

Silver readily admits that PECOTA — which stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm — is annually flummoxed by Ichiro.

Amazingly accurate in most cases, PECOTA predicted Ichiro would hit .309 in 2004, his record-breaking season. Last year, PECOTA forecast a .310 average, .353 on-base percentage and .400 slugging percentage for Ichiro (he racked up a .351/.396/.431 line).

This year, it has him down for a .304 average, .346 on-base percentage and .384 slugging percentage, well below his career marks of .333/379/.437. Silver admits he probably lowballed him again, not surprising for a system based on comparable historic performances since World War II.

"There's not a lot of players with the same hitting approach as Ichiro in the post-World War II era," Silver said in a phone interview. "You have to almost go back to Ty Cobb, literally. Maybe you can look at Tony Gwynn, but that's one comparison out of many. It's Cobb, Max Carey — guys you see in Cooperstown. We miss low on him almost every year."

Silver's assessment of Ichiro's place in the baseball hierarchy is based on looking at his total game.

"I wouldn't call him a superstar-level talent with the bat," he said. "But when you consider defense and baserunning, plus the fact he plays 162 games — an underrated ability — the combined package makes him a very valuable player.

"With the bat alone, there's probably 30 or 40 players in the majors with more production on a per-at-bat basis. But when everything is taken into account, he can legitimately be tabbed a superstar."

In 2004, the Mariners' hitting coach, Paul Molitor — a 3,000-hit Hall of Famer — tried to convince Ichiro that more selectivity at the plate was the way to go.

Ichiro dutifully gave it a whirl — and was hitting .255 when April ended. Molitor wisely told Ichiro to do it his way; he went on to hit .370 and surpass George Sisler's 84-year-old season hits record with 262.

It was sweet vindication for someone who once told The New York Times that he only cares about one statistic: "Getting as many hits as you can during a season."

At some point, of course, Ichiro's blazing speed, so vital a part of his game, will decline to the point that he will cease getting the 40 or more infield hits a year that spike his average.

At age 34, in fact, it's fair to wonder if that process has already begun. But Ichiro is such an adaptive hitter that, like Tiger Woods totally revamping his swing, he could reinvent his game by becoming more selective and consciously hitting for more power. Anyone who has seen Ichiro take batting practice knows the raw power is there.

Typically, he deflects the question and redirects it.

"Speed is a very important skill in my game, but more than that, if the day ever comes where I start getting a gut, that's the day I will quit baseball," he said.

When that statement is greeted with a laugh by both the reporter and Barron — Ichiro's diabolically low body-fat measurement is the stuff of legend — he interjects quickly, "That was actually not a joke. I think that's important.

"Baseball and golf are the only sports where the athletes can have a gut and still play well. None of the other sports is like that except perhaps sumo, which is a special case.

"I really don't like the fact that baseball has that image. That's why it's important for me not to fall into that image."

Asked if it embarrasses him to see portly, out-of-shape players, he replied, with an amused glint, "I can't say that, because there's people like that that are actually out there."

For someone whose game can be as nuanced and subtle as Ichiro, he views the new wave of statistical analysis with a surprisingly jaundiced eye.

He said a similar phenomenon existed in his latter days in Japan, but as with those who offer ill-conceived criticism, "this was another thing that did not go beyond my realm of imagination."

He added: "The game goes on, and you have these statistics and everything. But at the end of the day, the computer and all this data cannot go above human emotions and feelings.

"If you do that statistical side too much, it seems like you are choking some abilities that humans carry. You wind up choking natural human ability by using the statistical side.

"The whole process is boring."

One word that will never be associated with Ichiro, in his eighth year or 80th, is boring.

Larry Stone: 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com