A Different Ballgame : He Has a Million-Dollar Season in Japan, but Won’t Get Near That

How much would an American baseball team offer a 20-year-old rookie center fielder who set a record for reaching base safely in consecutive games, broke the old mark for the most hits--with an average of 1.6 a game--batted around .400 nearly all season and lifted his team into pennant contention?

In Japan, the price is $120,000.

No, that’s not the pay per hit, or per game. That’s the salary for the entire 1994 season.

Ichiro Suzuki, a 6-foot, 165-pound left-handed leadoff batter, started the season so obscurely that his team, the Orix BlueWave of Kobe, figured it had to do something to set him apart from tens of thousands of Japanese with the name as common as Smith.

So they sewed only his first name on his uniform.

By June, Ichiro needed no further promotion.

As his average shot above .400 and he launched an on-base streak of 69 consecutive games--in three of those he got no hits but was walked--Japan suddenly had a new national hero.

By September, as he approached 200 hits, fans started chanting, “Ichiro! Ichiro!” every time he came to bat.

A 200-hit season is rare enough in American baseball with a 162-game season. In Japan’s 59 years of baseball, where seasons have been limited to 130 games since 1966, no one had ever had more than 191.

Ichiro broke that mark in his 116th game, passed the 200-mark with four hits in game 122 and finished the season with 210.

Only at the end did he suffer a slump. From .396, his average fell to .385, and in games 127 and 128--for the first time all season--he went two games in a row without a hit.

Randy Bass’ 1986 Japanese record of .389 fell out of reach.

Even so, Ichiro failed to get a hit in only 13 of 130 games. His average was 62 points higher than his closest rival in either league.

Ichiro credited a new manager with enabling him to burst into full blossom by eliminating the “confrontations and differences of opinions” of last year, when as a member of Orix’s second team--the equivalent of a minor league team--he batted .188 in a brief stint with Orix’s first team.

“I found a new emotional leeway this year,” he said.

Ichiro also credited his father, Nobuyuki Suzuki, 52, who operates a small electronic parts factory in Nagoya.

“He played catch with me every day,” Ichiro said in a TV interview. “He came to see me play in games every day. He bought all sorts of equipment for me. He went through a lot of trouble for me.”

Waiting for the pitcher to deliver, Ichiro twirls his bat with his right hand. Then he grasps the bat with both hands and lifts his right foot as he begins to swing and follows through, the Japanese say, “like a pendulum.”

Spraying his hits all over the field, he is as graceful punching a low, outside pitch down the left field line as he is pulling a waist-high strike past the first baseman down the right field line. Near the end of the season, Japanese reporters tracked 55 of his hits to right field, 47 to left and 51 from left-center to right-center. Even his infield hits were almost as evenly dispersed.

Outfielders play him straight away--and deep.

“A batter gets his balance through the knees, the hips or the arms,” said Isao Harimoto, one of Japan’s all-time great hitters. “Ichiro gets his through both his legs and his arms. Very few players do that.”

Ichiro’s swing is faster, and he begins it with the ball closer to the plate, than did either Harimoto or the legendary Sadaharu Oh, according to sports-research experts at Tsukuba University.

If Ichiro played in the U.S. major leagues, he might have trouble with the speed of American pitchers, said Suguru Egawa, a former star pitcher for the Yomiuri Giants who is now a commentator.

Ichiro disagreed.

“As long as the ball is thrown by a human being, I have the confidence to hit any pitch, no matter how fast it comes,” he said.

“But I’ve never even thought of playing in the major leagues. If I did, I’d probably only hit .250.”

Between October and December last year, he played in the triple-A Hawaii winter league and batted .311. The main trouble there, he said, was getting used to a wider strike zone.

By current standards, even a .250 average would make Ichiro a bargain to an American team at his present salary. Ichiro’s contract, signed last year when he played for the Orix’s second team, called for only $80,000, but as a first-team player, he will get the guaranteed minimum pay of $120,000.

No one questions that Ichiro is in line for a hefty pay increase next year--but it might be no higher than $300,000, according to Egawa.

“Any more than that for a sophomore player would make him stand out too much” in a society with a strong egalitarian sense of keeping up with--but not surpassing--the Joneses, Egawa said.

Egawa recalled that after both he and the Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela had won 20 games for the first time in the same year, “my salary didn’t even double. His went up 10 times.”

Even as average Japanese wages in all fields--now about $55,000--have shot past standards in the United States, baseball pay here lags behind. Egawa estimated that average pay runs about $350,000, compared with more than $1 million in the United States.

Ichiro indicated he was thinking of more than keeping up with the Joneses. “There is no previous example with which to make a comparison,” Ichiro said of his 1994 performance. “I expect a raise for which there is no precedent.”

Shown a list of Japanese baseball’s 101 best-paid players, all receiving $460,000 or more, he was asked if he thought he deserved to join their ranks. “Of course!” he replied in very un-Japanese style.

He also said he was thinking of moving out of the cramped Orix dormitory room he now occupies and perhaps buying a house.

Japan’s tradition-minded owners only recently have started loosening the purse strings for home-grown players--Americans playing here earn more than most Japanese.

After years of demands from players and facing the pressure of competition from a new professional soccer league--which offered million-dollar salaries in its first year--owners in 1993 finally gave ballplayers the right of free agency, 17 years after it had happened in American baseball.

Hiromitsu Ochiai, 40, first baseman for the Central League’s Yomiuri Giants, took advantage of it and got $3.7 million, $1.6 million more than any other player this year. The one-time triple crown winner, however, batted only .280 and hit 15 home runs, only two more than Ichiro.

Two years ago, there were only five players earning $1 million or more in Japan. This year, the number shot up to 29.

By comparison, Oh, who hit 868 home runs in his career--113 more than Hank Aaron’s 755--never got more than $800,000, calculated at the current exchange rate, and never made it to the top of the best-paid list in a 22-year career that ended in 1980.

Egawa said Japanese owners were wary of the track record of salaries multiplying by 20 times under the U.S. free-agent system and predicted they would “make sure that won’t happen here.”

“Japan is very good at looking at the United States and deciding what to do,” he said.

Players are allowed to exercise the free-agent right to change teams only once in their careers and only after 10 years. As a result, changing teams, like changing jobs in Japan, is still the exception.

Egawa said he understood the arguments of both the players and the management in the U.S. baseball strike. But he said such a strike would be most unlikely in Japan. Although strikes are permitted, Japanese customs and social pressure work against such radical actions.

“Harsh public criticism” of Ochiai, for instance, is likely to ensure that his $3.7-million windfall winds up as an aberration, not a precedent, Egawa predicted.

Ichiro, for his part, said he saw nothing wrong with fat American salaries for players “who have that much talent and put on a performance for the fans.” But he, too, called the thought of a baseball strike in Japan inconceivable.

Economic factors also stand in the way of skyrocketing salaries here. Only three teams own their own stadiums, and national television revenue is minuscule for 10 of 12 teams in the two leagues, Egawa said. Only Yomiuri and Seibu Lions games are regularly shown on national TV. Most owners write off their teams’ losses as advertising for their companies’ main business in other fields. Orix, for example, is a leasing company.

Whatever his salary next year, Ichiro will be forced to deal with fans’ expectations “to shoot for a .400 average,” Egawa predicted.

To achieve it, Ichiro will have to stop going after bad pitches and accept more than twice the walks he got this year, 51, the former pitcher said.

“Ichiro can hit virtually any pitch within his own huge strike zone--and that’s the way you get more than 200 hits,” Egawa said. “But if you’re aiming for a .400 average, you’ve got to be more choosy. Even for Ichiro, the average for bad pitches that he turns into hits is lower than for the strikes he hits.”

Ichiro said he understood Egawa’s criticism.

“I don’t consider a walk useless, but I’d rather get a hit,” he said.

Ichiro Suzuki at a Glance

Accomplishments of Ichiro Suzuki during 1994 Japanese season:

* Had 210 hits, breaking record of 191.

* Reached base by hit or walk in 69 consecutive games.

* Had hits in 117 of 130 games.

* Batted .385, short of Randy Bass’ record of .389.

*

Megumi Shimizu of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.

Tomiuri Shinbun