In Japan, baseball is king and the
retiring Ichiro Suzuki is ‘like Madonna’
TOKYO — Yusei Kikuchi, a 27-year-old left-handed pitcher with a 96-mph
fastball, made his major league debut Thursday as the Seattle Mariners’
starting pitcher during the second game of their season-opening series at
Japan’s Tokyo Dome against the Oakland Athletics. It was a historic moment — he
became the first Japanese player to make his major league debut in his home country
— but Kikuchi was still in the shadow of Japan’s biggest baseball star, Ichiro
Suzuki.
Suzuki, who led the Japan Pacific League in batting seven times before
joining the Mariners in 2001 and going on to win an American League MVP award,
make 10 all-star appearances and collect 3,089 hits in the major leagues and
4,367 total between the United States and Japan, was the main attraction here.
Then he announced his retirement Thursday after the Mariners won the second
game in 12 innings, 5-4, a fitting end for a surefire Hall of Fame career.
"I have retired from baseball,'' he said through his interpreter.
“I’m very thankful to the fans and to the Mariners and all the people who work
for the Mariners. I’m very thankful to them.''
His exit in Tokyo allowed the country that adores him to shower him with
love.
"He is not just a baseball player [in Japan]. He is like Madonna
and Michael Jackson,’’ former teammate Shigetoshi Hasegawa said before the
opening game. “This year the favorite athlete is this guy. Still. He is still
huge here. And he’s 45 years old.’’
Suzuki left Thursday’s game after his final at-bat in the top of the
eighth. His teammates hugged him on the field while fans roared. He waved and
smiled in appreciation. Well after the game had ended, he circled the field,
acknowledging the many who stayed to cheer him one last time.
"It doesn’t get better than tonight,'' Suzuki said. “Nothing can
top what happened for me tonight. It doesn’t get better than this. There is no
happiness more than this tonight.''
Suzuki always has said he wanted to continue playing until age 50, but
his career has been in decline for years. He hit just .205 after re-signing
with Seattle last season before being let go in early May. The team allowed him
to return this season, mostly because of the opening games in Japan. He had a
poor spring training, going 2 for 25, then went 0 for 6 in two exhibition games
in Tokyo and 0 for 4 in the two regular season games.
"The original plan was we would go to Japan. That was what was
promised,'' Suzuki said. “But toward the end of spring, I wasn’t able to
produce, so I knew that this would be it for me.''
Regardless of his performance, Japanese fans went nuts for him here, not
only when he played but even when he arrived at the airport. Many wore Ichiro
jerseys. Five fans right above the Mariners dugout wore orange shirts with
“Ichiro 3,000 Hits” printed on them. One woman held up a sign that read:
“Ichiro is life.”
“I’m really happy he is my teammate,’’ said Kikuchi, who cited Suzuki as
his favorite player. “I get to talk to him, but I still get nervous, and my
heart starts beating."
These were Suzuki’s first games in Japan since Seattle and Oakland
opened the 2012 season here and the fifth MLB opener in Japan overall — the
others were in 2000, 2004 and 2008. And in Japan, baseball is huge, the
country’s most popular sport.
Baseball got its start in the country in the 1870s after American
schoolteachers brought the game to students. A few American college teams then
began traveling to play Japan universities in the early 1900s, with the
University of Washington becoming the first in 1908.
The Koshien high school baseball tournament started in 1915 and is still
held in both the spring and summer. It is enormously popular, drawing sellout
crowds and receiving as high as a 60 percent TV rating throughout Japan. Author
Robert Whiting described the event as a combination of the Super Bowl and World
Series.
Sadaharu Oh, Yu Darvish and Suzuki all played in the tournament, with
Suzuki even pitching. Daisuke Matzusaka once threw 250 pitches in a 17-inning
game, then tossed a no-hitter just two days later in the final. The Japanese
also won the first two World Baseball Classics, with Suzuki driving in the
winning run in the 2009 championship game against South Korea.
Japan’s professional league got started in 1935, a year after Babe Ruth,
Lou Gehrig, Lefty O’Doul and other major leaguers played there against amateur
teams.
The first Japanese player in the American major leagues was Masanori
“Mashi” Murakami, who pitched for the San Francisco Giants in 1964-65. There
wasn’t another in MLB until Hideo Nomo signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers in
1995, but now there have been nearly 60 Japanese players who have come over.
But the most accomplished and popular — by far — is Suzuki.
Even though Japan will host the 2020 Olympics, with baseball returning
to the Games after being dropped in 2012 and 2016 and not being included as a
medal sport until 1992 (it was a demonstration sport in seven previous
Olympics), Suzuki has said he is not interested in playing.
“No. This is the end for me,” he said Thursday of the possibility of
suiting up for the Olympics. “We decided this would be the end for me in
baseball.''
He isn’t entirely sure what he will do next. “It’s tough to think about
it right now,” he said. “But all the things that I have learned, if I could
share it with kids or major league players, if I can be of any help, that’s
what I would like to do."
He will be missed, and not just in Japan. Mariners teammate Dee Gordon
teared up when Ichiro left the game.
"Selfishly, I wanted him to keep playing,'' said Gordon, a two-time
all-star himself. “That’s my boy, my friend. I’m going to miss him. I’m going
to miss the offdays, getting to eat with him. Coming into the stadium after the
season is over and he’s working out. I will miss our conversations. I’m going
to miss him. The first day I met him I was star-struck.
“He was my favorite player.”
The same could be said for many in attendance for Thursday’s farewell, a
country saying goodbye to the king of its most-loved sport.
Read more:
Welcome to Mariners’ ‘holistic’ spring training: Meditation, yoga and
30-foot pitchers
Mike Trout, baseball’s $430 million man, is actually underpaid
Clayton Kershaw is ‘motivated by greatness,’ but at 31, can his body
keep up?
Amid MLB rule changes, a sign of thawing labor relations
Manny Machado-Padres already feels like a solid marriage
02
The Hottest Way to Read Short
Stories? With Chat Fiction
A strange wailing noise is coming from Tiffany’s basement. It sounds
like a baby crying. “Do you hear that?” she texts her mom. “I’m not home,” her
mom replies. “Wait till I get back.” The crying gets louder. “It’s coming from
the basement,” she messages. “Don’t go down there, Tiff,” her mom types back.
“I’m warning you.”
In less than 30 words, the above exchange has fired up 24-year-old
Jessica Moore’s imagination. What could be in the basement? Why is Tiffany’s
mom being so secretive? What’s going on? She quickly taps her phone screen to
find out.
This story, titled Where Is She?!, is one of 1,200 or so
told-by-text-message narratives on storytelling app Hooked. Moore downloaded it
a few months ago and has been addicted ever since. “There’s something so
immediate about reading like this,” she says. “It feels like the in-story
action is happening to me as well.”
These bite-size stories take the form of conversations between people …
in a way that feels natural, and a little naughty.
In recent years, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing over how today’s
youth prefer Netflix to a good book, but the breakaway success of Hooked and
similar apps offers a new narrative. Just as Amazon’s Kindle changed the shape
of books, now story chat apps are changing the way teens and millennials get
their stories. Like Snapchat and Instagram (let me snap that on my insta), this
new way of consuming has its own catchy moniker: chat fiction.
These bite-size stories take the form of conversations between people —
friends, dates, parents, etc. — in a way that feels natural and a little
naughty — like you’re snooping on someone else’s private chats. The writing is
taut and compelling, and there’s an urgency to the narrative, with so little
space you need to get to the point quickly — perfect for the ADD generation.
For Hooked, stories are created by their in-house writing team — which includes
a former New York Times editor — who specialize in by-the-seat-of-your-pants
narratives, with readers frantically tapping the screen to find out what
happens.
This storytelling format is “an organic representation of how people
communicate each day,” explains Kevin Ferguson, Hooked’s chief business
officer. This tap-to-reveal format lends itself especially well to certain
genres; advancing the narrative forward by taps provides an element of suspense
that works really well with horror and romance. No surprise then that those are
the most popular stories on the app. “Right now we’re in the era of the
reboot,” he says. “But there’s so much opportunity to tell new stories, and
technology can really enhance that.” By going mobile, Hooked connects to
readers in their favored environment and challenges them to reevaluate the
nature of a story.
Launched in 2014, Hooked has reached more than 100 million readers
through their app and Snapchat channel and has 40 million active monthly users,
the majority of them ages 13–25. To be sure, people who read chat fiction are
generally not reading Game of Thrones–length tales. The average story length on
Hooked is around 1,300 words — intentionally short, to be quickly consumed on
the go. But they also offer many serialized stories — essentially “chapters” —
so you can get a meatier read. There’s an audience for that as well; in late
2018 Hooked released Dark Matter on Snapchat, a 32,000-word paranormal thriller
series. It was so successful that they’ll repeat the format this year.
Most of the chat fiction apps work on a subscription model — freemium,
to a level, but you have to wait 15 minutes to read more, or subscribe for
around $4.99 a week ($39.99 a year). Subscribing also comes with perks; you can
opt in to story narration or sound effects and access visual imagery such as
selfies, which gives readers added insight into the action. But do people pay?
Ferguson declined to answer, but Moore says no, not in general. She did pay for
one week early on, but now she’s content to wait out the advertising to advance
the story.
Hooked, which has raised $6 million so far and boasts investors like
media titans Snoop Dogg, Mariah Carey and Jamie Foxx, is not the only chat
fiction clamoring for eyeballs. There’s Yarn, with stories that include tales
from the Marvel Universe and the CW hit Riverdale; Tap, where you can read and
upload your own stories; Cliffhanger, which takes a choose-your-own-adventure
approach; and Amazon (which launched its own chat fiction contender, Amazon
Rapids, in 2016). But Hooked remains the most popular.
It’s not impossible to imagine Hooked being used to teach kids in the
future — imagine Shakespeare reimagined in text form! Of course, reading
bite-size fiction isn’t the same as reading an actual book, but it’s an access
point. Moore says she hasn’t read this much in years. “It doesn’t feel like
work when I read this way,” she says. “I never have time to read books, but
these snack-size stories are perfect for my lifestyle.”
03
Venezuela is key topic between Trump
and Caribbean leaders
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