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
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.
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 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 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).
Many people have this image of me. For a long time, I cared about that.
There are a lot of people who get it wrong, ... The size of your body is not necessarily related to the power you can generate. I wish people would understand that.
There are many issues. But a lot of players pay attention to this event. I'm sure you can improve aspects in the three years before the next event takes place.
We didn't prepare as well as we might have, ... There are a lot of fans who paid to see us play today. As professionals, we should prepare ourselves as best as we can to go out there and play in the best shape we're capable of playing.
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.
If we were in the Kingdome or something, maybe that would be special.
This was not perfect so far. But I believe a lot of people in the whole world paid attention to baseball.