You'd think Cleveland had enough gripes to ruminate over, what with the NBA Finals sweep and growing popverty rates and all; but Ichiro Suzuki's gotta kick em while they're down! Ichiro's most recent media blurb went in regards to Seattle's makeup game in Cleveland last week, and how he feels about having to be there to play baseball:
"To tell the truth, I'm not excited to go to Cleveland, but we have to. If I ever saw myself saying I'm excited going to Cleveland, I'd punch myself in the face, because I'm lying."
WAAAHAHAHA. Good one. So lemme get this straight--you'd actually pass up the opportunity to visit a state where it is officially "illegal to mistreat anything of great importance" and "fish for whales on Sunday"? C'mon! But if we follow this logic you have to hope that Ichiro never gets sent back to Japan for any reason. He'd probably kill himself. Aaanyway, I think it's that time to look at more historical Ichiro mis-quotes:
[This, from after he missed a fly ball a couple weeks ago:]
"The ball became the same color as the sky,'' he said, through interpreter Ken Barron. "So, I wasn't able to see it ... I was sending mental signals for the ball not to come my way, because during that time of day it's impossible for me to see the ball so I lacked mental signals. I lacked in that area.'
"Usually, I don't send mental signals," Ichiro replied. "So, because this is the first time, I thought, please don't come my way."
[On discussing the Mariners struggles mid-season last year:]
"If there is a problem, we need to notice what creates the problem. The problem usually isn't just on the cover. You need to look much deeper. For example, if we're talking about a tree and the tree has a problem, you need to look at the root. But you cannot see the root. The mistake is to keep watering the fruit. That's not going to solve anything."
Asked what he'd miss about Japanese baseball, Ichiro once said, "There is nothing I will miss about Japanese baseball. Off the field, I will miss my dog." Asked his dog's name, Ichiro said, "I would not wish to say without first asking its permission."
As he does after every game, Ichiro rubs a six-inch wooden stick up and down the sides and bottoms of his feet, massaging the pressure points. Once when asked the name of the device he was using, he said, "Wood."
When asked what he would like to do on an off-day, Ichiro answered, "I want to watch American kids playing baseball in a grass field, running around, and getting hoarse in the voice with my wife."
"If I'm in a slump, I ask myself for advice.”
"The Japanese have a strong tendency to suppress their own feelings. That's the Japanese character. They kill their own emotions.”
[Or the one about when when he broke up a tie 12 or 13 innings in:]
"...when I was playing, inside my head I was saying, ‘I want to go home quickly,’ and I swung and hit it because I wanted to go home,” Ichiro said through interpreter Ken Barron. "Today I thought, ‘I want to hurry up and get something to eat,’ and I swung and I hit it."
Once at a Mariners/A's game, fans in the right-field bleachers taunted him with racial shouts and and threw quarters and ice at him. Afterward, asked what happened, Ichiro said — "Something came out of the sky and hit me." Asked how much money he collected, Ichiro said, "I couldn't tell if it was rain or money coming down." Asked if something like this had ever happened to him in Japan, he said, "Of course it happened there. Anytime you come in as a visiting team, things fall out of the sky. The gods once threw an aluminum can at me."
In the end, I can't tell if each case is a continual broken record of bad translating, or if Ichiro is really just f-ing with us and he purposely comes up with this stuff so that when he goes out to party with drinking buddies Kenji Kohjima and the dudes from MXC they have enough stupid-American jokes to go around. Either way, dude cracks me up.
"Baseball wrong! Man with four ball cannot walk." ~Ancient Ichiro Proverb
1 comment:
bahaha
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