-
Bradford Doolittle
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Hall of Famers coming to Cooperstown — the newbies and the veterans alike — are typically subject to a fairly regimented schedule. They have a garden party. Ozzie Smith holds an annual charity event. There’s a golf tournament on Saturday morning. They roll down Main Street on Saturday night during the Parade of Legends. Finally, there is the induction itself.
Ichiro Suzuki, a 2025 inductee, took part in much of this, but even though he is an avid golfer, he did not play in the golf tournament. It turns out that doing so would’ve meant that he wouldn’t be able to maintain his usual workout routine. So he headed out to one of the numerous Little League fields a few miles outside of Cooperstown and got in his work.
At 51 years old, he follows the same routine he always has. He played long toss, did his stretching and running, played catch with Billy Wagner’s son — an aspiring ballplayer himself — and took batting practice against Wagner.
When asked why, Ichiro kept it simple.
“Because I love it,” he said.
That much has been clear, not only through his 19-year MLB career but well before it and since. His induction weekend was not the first time Ichiro made the pilgrimage to Cooperstown — he has been here many times. Each trek he made as a player was to view and study different relics that held special meaning to him.
“You just don’t see players come to the Hall of Fame, while they’re actively playing in the winter time — seven, eight times, because they just want to touch the bat of the guy whose record they broke,” Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch said, “or be here in the freezing cold and snow to see this place.”
Ichiro didn’t limit those travels to the stops in Cooperstown — he famously visited the gravesite of Hall of Famer George Sisler after he broke Sisler’s single-season hit record in 2004 — but the beauty of the Hall of Fame is that it ties all of these interlocking stories together, linking the stars of the past with the stars of the present with the stars of the even more distant past, and in some cases, the stars of the future.
For a person like Ichiro, who is deeply interested in historical artifacts and the stories they represent and what they mean and the stories they represent, there is no better place than Cooperstown, and there is no better ambassador for Cooperstown than Ichiro.
“The history of baseball is very important,” Ichiro said. “We’re able to play the game today because of players of the past. I really want to understand them and know more about them. I think we all need to know the game of the past, things of the past, so we can keep moving it forward.”
Ichiro’s plaque there suggests the closing of a historical, cultural and symbolic loop that brings together two great baseball cultures.
It was the converging of paths, joining the practice of yakyu, the game Ichiro began playing at age 3, and the pastime of baseball, the game he still plays — with ritualistic abandon — at 51.
For all of the cultural significance and the historic nature of Ichiro’s induction, it’s this work ethic and his meticulous nature that is almost certainly going to be his greatest legacy. And it’s one that spins into the future, as he blazes a path to serve as a guide for the Japanese and American stars of the future — and present — to follow.
Before Shohei Ohtani, there was Ichiro. Before Ichiro, there were many, but none who followed the path that perhaps only he could see.
EVEN BEFORE SUNDAY, Ichiro Suzuki had a Hall of Fame plaque on a wall. That one was hung in January at the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame Museum, located within the Tokyo Dome.
The contrast between Cooperstown, a tiny rustic village in upstate New York, and Tokyo, one of the world’s largest and most dense cities, couldn’t be more stark. But the baseball galleries within them look very similar, right up to the shape and size of the plaques themselves.
This is no coincidence. The American version came first; the very concept of a Hall of Fame is a purely American convention. So when one was built in Japan, back in the late 1950s, it was an early sign of the dissolution of differences between the two leading baseball cultures.
The differences, convergences and exchanges between the two is the story told in the Hall of Fame’s stunning new exhibit “Yakyu | Baseball: The Transpacific Exchange of the Game.”
“This isn’t just an exhibition about baseball in Japan,” said RJ Lara, the curator of the exhibit. “This isn’t just an exhibition about baseball in the United States. It’s about how the two countries and how baseball in two countries has come together and exchanged equipment, ideas, concepts, players, teams.”
Baseball’s roots in Japan trace to the 1850s, the game exported there by visiting Americans and seafarers. For decades, even as the popularity of baseball spread, it remained a strictly amateur practice, with the college level seen as the pinnacle of the sport into the middle of the 20th century.
While baseball grew into America’s pastime as a source of joy and play for anyone who could toss a ball or swing a bat, in Japan, at least in the early years, yakyu was viewed as a martial art. In fact, the first thing you see when you walk into the exhibit is a suit of traditional Samurai armor, full of red and gold — a gift from the Yomiuri Giants to Los Angeles Dodgers president Peter O’Malley in 1988.
Yakyu, one of the Japanese words for baseball, describes a game that evolved from the American version and still differs in mainly intangible ways and strategic preferences. The gap between the two has narrowed, as the success of Ichiro, Ohtani and others strongly suggests. But it might never completely disappear.
The “Samurai Way of Baseball” — as author Robert Whiting described it — meant a painstaking focus on practice and repetition, a heavy emphasis on fundamentals and a standardized version of the game in which every discrete act had a precise method behind it, and everything was about the team: the “wa,” as outlined by Whiting in the seminal “You Gotta Have Wa.”
Starting around 1905, teams on both sides of the Pacific began making the voyage to compete against one another. But the biggest influence on the professionalization of baseball in Japan came in 1934, when a team of American barnstormers stuffed with future Hall of Famers — including Babe Ruth — toured the country, drawing huge crowds nearly everywhere they went.
Plans for a professional league were already being hatched, and the success of the 1934 tour helped to cement them. The Yomiuri Giants were founded in 1935, and, as longtime Tokyo resident Whiting put it, grew into a behemoth that became as popular as the Dodgers, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox combined. It set the stage for Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima and the legends who laid the foundation of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) — and the collision of Japanese and American baseball that the exhibit celebrates.
THE YAKYU EXHIBIT has three centerpieces, and appropriately the first one you encounter focuses on Hideo Nomo. (Ichiro is the second and, though you can probably guess who is the third, we will come to that a bit later.)
Nomo was not the first Japanese-born player to make the transition to the major leagues: The seal was broken in the mid-1960s, when Masanori Murakami pitched two seasons for the San Francisco Giants. There was a lot of rancor in Japan over the move, and after two seasons, Murakami went back to Japan. Meanwhile, greats such as Oh and Nagashima stayed put, both spending their careers with Yomiuri, thanks to the reserve clause in place in Japan, as well as a societal pressure to remain true to Japanese baseball.
Oh talked in later years about how he would’ve liked to have played in the majors, but he just couldn’t do it. The taboo against jumping the pond remained in place until the mid-1990s. This was when Nomo “retired” from his team in Japan, a ploy cooked up by agent Don Nomura to exploit a loophole. Nomo ended up with the Dodgers, and Nomo-mania was born.
Nomo was heavily criticized at the time in Japan, and doubt existed in America about whether a Japanese player could truly make the leap. Nomo more than proved his ability to make the transition, and did so with such verve that it swept through Southern California and beyond, and also captivated audiences in Japan. The practice of baseball fans on the other side of the Pacific rising in the early morning to watch MLB began at that time.
The exhibit features some of Nomo’s equipment, as well as videos of hitters flailing at his nasty splitter. There are also some model baseballs with which you can try to simulate the grips Nomo used on his various pitches, including that splitter.
Jack Morris was in the midst of praising the nastiness of Nomo’s splitter when fellow Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith interjected, “You should try to hit it!”
NOMO’S DEBUT SEASON in 1995 preceded the now-celebrated 1996 Japan tour, which saw an MLB all-star team that included Smith, Morris and Cal Ripken Jr. play an eight-game series against players from the NPB, then called All-Japan. Ripken had gone on a similar tour in 1986, and a decade later he already noticed a marked difference in the caliber of play from his Japanese opponents.
“Going over there, you kind of look and shake your head and go, ‘These people are crazy about baseball,'” Ripken said. “They were talking about drawing 60,000 fans for a high school championship game.
“I thought the Japanese were always really competitive and very serious. They wanted to do really well. They wanted to beat us.”
One of the opponents of the all-star group in 1996 was Ichiro, and that experience for the Japanese star, in combination with the phenomenon that Nomo created, began to turn his head toward the other side of the Pacific. He wanted to test himself.
“The excitement I felt in that series was definitely a turning point,” Ichiro told author Narumi Komatsu in “Ichiro on Ichiro.” “Instead of something I just admired from afar, the majors became a set goal of mine.”
Ichiro had become a phenomenon in his home country, his face splattered on billboards all over Tokyo and beyond, as he exploded on the scene by becoming the first player in Japanese professional history to record 200 hits in a season, setting the since-broken record of 210 at age 20. He hit .353 during his nine years for Orix, which would far away be the all-time highest average in Japanese history if he qualified for the career leaderboard.
He did it in his own way, forging a path unlike any players before him. He famously refused to change the batting stance he’d used since high school — much to the chagrin of his first manager with Orix.
Ichiro also donned the name “Ichiro” on his jersey, departing from Japanese tradition. Suzuki is a common name in Japan and his club felt that would make him all the more marketable, which it did. To this day, in baseball everywhere, when you hear the name “Ichiro”, you know exactly who’s being referenced.
Bobby Valentine, who initially bucked against tradition when he went to manage in Japan, eschewing conventions such as marathon practice sessions and incessant meetings, saw things evolving, especially when he prepared for his first stint with the Chiba Lotte Marines in 1995, the year Nomo debuted with the Dodgers.
“That was the year after Ichiro was Rookie of the Year for Orix in 1994,” Valentine said. “Every night, all the coaches got together and looked at video and looked at charts, trying to figure out one guy, Ichiro.
“He showed me what he could do. I asked him for an autographed bat and told him that he was one of the best players I ever saw.”
Later, when Valentine was managing the New York Mets, he unsuccessfully lobbied his front office to pursue Ichiro.
“I was told at the end of the day, that they didn’t want a singles hitter in the outfield,” Valentine said mournfully. “And I said, ‘What if you get 200 of them?’ I swear. And he got like 240 of them.”
AT TIMES, IT has been far from certain that the paths that came together through Ichiro on Sunday would indeed merge. That part of the story isn’t overlooked in the yakyu exhibit.
It’s depicted in a couple of very different ways that relate the baseball sliver of the story of the years during and after World War II, including the post-war period when the United States occupied Japan under the supervision of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
One object from the war years is the most melancholy relic in the exhibition, and indeed perhaps in the entire Hall of Fame.
It is a handmade, wooden home plate that once was part of Zenimura Field at the Gila River in Arizona internment camp during the war. The field was built by Kenichi Zenimura, a baseball advocate born in Hiroshima who spent most of his childhood in Hawaii.
The home plate is a a solemn reminder of how the forces that too often keep nations apart can’t be overcome by baseball alone. But if baseball can’t keep nations from conflict, conflict can’t keep people from baseball.
“It was the anchor of the Gila River community, and that’s how we like to describe it,” Lara said. “During these tragic, incredibly hard times at this camp in Arizona, it was the anchor that brought the community together, around a single baseball diamond that they built with their hands.”
After the war, when the occupation of Japan began, much of the country, and especially Tokyo, was in ruin. The battle for the ideological soul of the country was well underway in those early years of the Cold War, and the influence of communist Russia was of chief concern for the Americans.
MacArthur thought that reigniting the dormant cultural elements of Japanese society might help to calm things down and help make some headway in turning heads from the encroaching communist influence. With many of the country’s cultural institutions in rubble or ashes, sports, especially baseball — which can be played outside and a sport the Japanese already loved — was the answer.
Author Robert K. Fitts describes the sequence in “Banzai Babe Ruth.” League play resumed in 1946. Things improved enough that in 1947, Japan celebrated Babe Ruth Day at the same time that the major leagues were honoring the dying slugger. Quality of play began to recover but the overall fervor around yakyu still fell short of the pre-war years.
In 1949, on a suggestion from MacArthur staffer Cappy Harada, the project was turned over to Lefty O’Doul, who had fallen in love with Japan on a 1931 tour with other major leaguers and played a key role in helping convince Ruth to join the 1934 tour.
O’Doul, manager of the San Francisco Seals, brought his Pacific Coast League squad to Japan after the 1949 season to tour the country. The Seals were welcomed with a parade and, over the course of four weeks, helped boost the morale of a struggling nation. One evening before a game, for the first time, the flags of the United States and Japan were raised together, bringing many fans to tears.
Japanese journalist and historian Tadao Kunishi sees the O’Doul tour as one of the turning points in the evolution of Japanese baseball, especially in its gradual move toward becoming more like the American game.
“During that time, Japan was still doing the rebuilding,” Kunishi said. “We did not have much entertainment, and baseball is outside. So many movie theaters were burned down, so they cannot play, but baseball is outside, and anybody can go there. And really [Lefty] O’Doul brought the joy of watching baseball.”
A veritable baseball Forrest Gump, O’Doul always seemed to be in the middle of baseball history. He pitched for John McGraw. He converted to hitting and one year batted .398 in the National League. He managed and mentored life-long friend Joe DiMaggio, whom he brought along on a later, much-celebrated tour of Japan. He saw the potential of Japan as a baseball nation from the start.
“He said it was just a matter of time that Japanese ballplayers are going to be playing in America,” said Tom O’Doul, Lefty’s cousin. “And they’re going to be playing American baseball because they’re good and they respect the game. And that’s what happened.”
Though you don’t need to attribute the eventual boom in Japan — baseball and beyond — entirely to Lefty O’Doul and baseball, those tours proved to be a turning point in the ongoing exchange in the sport between Japan and America, which had seemed hopelessly severed.
THE THIRD CENTERPIECE of the yakyu exhibit, along with Nomo and Ichiro, as you probably have guessed, is the display for Shohei Ohtani, who is in the midst of a Hall of Fame career, and thus years away from joining Ichiro in the Japanese and the American plaque rooms. But he will get there.
Ohtani’s display looms in the back of the room behind Ichiro and indeed, from a certain angle as you stand there and look upon Ichiro’s uniform and bat and shoes and batting glove, a little lower to the left and against the wall behind him, you see an image of Decoy, the most famous dog — and literary muse — in all of baseball.
As for the player himself, Ohtani’s display is a stunning piece of museum technology. Depending on which angle you take to look at his image, you might see him pitching or hitting for the Los Angeles Angels, doing the same for the Dodgers, or celebrating the end of Japan’s victory in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, which he clinched by fanning Mike Trout for the last out.
The rise of Ohtani is also a chief part of the legacies of Oh and Nagashima and Nomo and Ichiro. By now, 74 players have made the transition to the major leagues — not all with resounding success, but many have reached All-Star status. All you have to do is look in the financial ledgers and the contracts that have been dolled out to the likes of Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki to know how Japanese stars are valued today.
For his part, Ichiro does think that the differences between yakyu and MLB have softened, but they still exist — and they should.
“It usually takes a few years for Japanese baseball to pick up the things that happen in major leagues,” Suzuki said. “It’s definitely getting closer.
“I don’t think that Japan should copy what the MLB does. I think Japanese baseball should be Japanese baseball in the way they do things, and MLB should be the way they are. I think they should be different.”
And yet in so many ways, Ichiro himself was the bridge. He was yakyu and he was baseball.
Ichiro, who will generally give frank answers about himself and his thoughts about baseball, almost always deflects when asked about the thoughts or impressions of others. He still does it.
When asked about his role or his sense of how Japanese fans are reacting to his induction to Cooperstown, he says he doesn’t know. When asked about his relationship to the current Japanese stars in the major leagues, he says that he sees them at the ballpark when they come through Seattle.
He doesn’t get any more detailed when asked about the path that he has opened up for other Japanese stars, but he does open up a little when discussing his role in spreading knowledge to the next generation of players on both sides of the Pacific.
“The players need to tell the younger players about the game,” Ichiro said. “That’s a responsibility that those who have played this game have. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to help in that aspect, but it’s something I’d really like to do.”
As much as anything, Ichiro’s legacy is helping to bring the paths of two different baseball cultures together.
“We used to say that yakyu and baseball are different games with the same rules,” Kunishi said. “Now yakyu and baseball is the same game and the same rules.”
As far as legacies go, that’s not bad, even if the process remains ongoing. In the meantime, Ichiro will be there, connected with Cooperstown and Japan alike, making sure that no aspects of all the history he has been a part of will be lost.