Ichiro Suzuki
Ichiro Suzuki
Ichiro Suzuki, often referred to mononymously as Ichiro, is a Japanese professional baseball right fielder for the Miami Marlins of Major League Baseball. He has spent the bulk of his career with two teams: the Orix Blue Wave of Nippon Professional Baseballin Japan, where he began his professional career, and the Seattle Mariners of MLB in the United States. After playing for the Mariners, he played two and a half seasons in MLB with the New York Yankees. Ichiro has...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionBaseball Player
Date of Birth22 October 1973
CountryJapan
With the World Baseball Classic, this year is a bit different. Our goal will be to win the tournament and after that I'll start thinking about the regular season.
Physically, I'm fine. All I have to do is start playing games and get my timing back, those kinds of things. Physically, it's no problem at all. Mentally, we all have to pull ourselves together as a team. We're now playing with 'Japan' on our chests and we need to concentrate more.
Physically I'm fine. All I have to do is get my timing back, those kinds of things. Physically it's no problem at all.
I won't maintain that emotional level. I guess I'm lucky we have another week left in spring training, and that will give me an opportunity to recover.
I won't know until I wake up (today).
I was able to hit a home run in my first at-bat and I was glad to do it. I didn't have that in mind but I knew we should score first and maintain the lead.
I thought it was a close play. I'll leave it up to the umpire to call.
That was embarrassing. If I'm satisfied with the way I played today, I might as well quit.
I wasn't surprised ... there's many situations where the runner on first runs in those situations.
I would like to see the success of this event lead to baseball being back at the Olympics, but I can't see myself participating in any effort to bring baseball back to the Olympics.
My comments seemed to stir up a lot of things but they are going be interpreted in many ways anyway and I'm fine with that. I felt the weight of shouldering the Japanese flag and this primarily brought out my emotions in this tournament.
I think we have to rethink, because now we are on the big stage, and the Americans are a big-stage team. In the Asian round, we felt we had to worry about not only winning, but playing good for the (home) fans. Here, we have one purpose only.
We couldn't disregard what our manager was saying. We weren't persuaded by the outcome. That's why we didn't.
We couldn't disregard what our manager was saying.