The recently announced quasi-retirement of Outfielder Ichiro Suzuki has led to numerous career reviews of the Japanese in the American media. An anecdote underlines how focused the future Hall-of-Famer is on baseball and how little he is interested in American football.
Ichiro played for the Miami Marlins until the end of the season. And as the journalist Peter Gammons reported in a column for The Athletic, everyone there was enthusiastic about the Japanese. Manager Don Mattingly, for example, praised his daily workout through nine stations and his special stretching program.
This stretching program had also been heard of outside the MLB. As Gammons reported, Ichiro received a text message during Spring Training 2017 about which he talked to his coaches. It came from a number he didn’t know. The message writer said he received the number from Alex Rodriguez and would like to meet the Japanese guy and study his stretching system.
A coach then asked for the name of the author of the message. Ichiro scrolled to the end and said: “Some guy named Tom Brady. Who the fuck is Tom Brady?”
It was indeed the legendary New England Patriots quarterback who had just won his fifth Super Bowl weeks earlier. But not in baseball, Ichiro’s sport.
This article was published without previous view by the Major League Baseball.