The Meaning of Ichiro Read Online Free PDF Page A

“father” in Japanese. It was not exactly a compliment.
    At Meiden, Ichiro perfected his unusual batting form—now pointing the bat toward the pitcher’s mound before going into his
     leg-in-the air swing. And what an effective way to hit it was. Over a three-year high school career, Ichiro hit for a galactic
     .502 average. Despite his flyweight physique, he also had 19 home runs with 211 RBIs and 131 stolen bases. Ichiro struck out
     only ten times in 536 official high school at-bats and not one was a swinging strikeout. According to Meiden records, he connected
     solidly on 97 percent of all the pitches he swung at. Ichiro also pitched on occasion, displaying an exceptional fastball
     and deft control of a curve, until an injury sustained in a bicycle accident adversely affected his throwing form. Ichiro
     took Meiden to the venerable Koshien Tournament twice, losing on the next to last day in his junior year and qualifying for
     the spring invitational, but being eliminated in the regionals, the year following.
    His sharp batting eye and lightning reflexes combined with a spookily placid temperament earned him the nickname
uchjin
or “spaceman” from his teammates. Another nickname was
no-tenki
(“No Weather”), a tribute to his disciplined cool. In fact, a Shiga University research team once included high school star
     Ichiro in a series of tests of Alpha 2 brain wave activity designed to determine an athlete’s ability to relax under pressure.
     He was tested ten times over a ten-month period between June 1991 and March 1992, including the day before the opening of
     the notoriously tension-filled National High School Baseball Tournament. Ichiro’s scores registered a super-serene rating
     of 91 percent, far ahead of the other subjects, who averaged around 60 percent.
    In 1990, when his team was eliminated at Koshien, he was the only boy on the entire team (indeed perhaps the only boy on all
     48 losing teams) who did not shed a tear. But then, as one cynical sports writer pointed out, “He had had a batting average
     of .625 in the games. All the pro scouts were watching him. So what did he have to cry about?”
    Ichiro had hoped to go high in the November 1991 professional draft, but was taken in the fourth and final round—the 36th
     pick overall—by the Orix BlueWave of the Pacific League, based in the bustling, historic port of Kobe, just west of Osaka.
     Kobe is a twinkling gem of a city nestled between green mountains and blue ocean (and a temporary break in a relentless coastline
     of concrete seawalls and shoreline hydropods, of the type that helped make Japan’s “construction state” famous). Number 36
     was a somewhat ignominious rank given his high school stats, but scouts were a little dubious about his preshrunk physique—120
     pounds on a 5′9′′ frame. He was so slight that he appeared years younger than he actually was, or, in the words of one bemused
     American who had seen him interviewed on TV, “He looked like a fifth grader.”
    All Orix was willing to pay for a signing bonus was $43,000.
The BlueWave
    Orix’s pint-sized manager Shozo Doi believed in what was known as the
totei seido
(apprenticeship system), long evident in many areas of Japanese society from small factories to large corporations and government
     offices. To Doi,
totei seido
meant baseball rookies should endure a certain amount of pain and suffering and should not be allowed to experience too much
     success too early. Doi liked to cite the case of his former teammate on the Yomiuri Giants, Sadaharu Oh, the man who had hit
     868 career home runs, a world record. Oh struggled hard on the sidelines during his formative years in the pros. That kind
     of tempering had built character, Doi would say, which, in turn, helped Oh develop into a great batting star.
    Thus, after Ichiro, in his first season as a professional, had led the Japanese minor leagues in batting with a .366 average
     in 58 games and compiled a