You heard it here first: Ichiro Suzuki, the baseball player, is going to kill someone. Be it his wife, his father, his mother, or even himself – there will be death by his hands in some way, shape, or form, one of these days.
ESPN has been getting a lot of praise recently for this story they just dropped about the tumultuous winter of 2017, where the 44-year old Ichiro was not sure whether or not his professional baseball career was over or not. But because he’s this machine-like creature of habit, trained and conditioned since he was a kid to play baseball, he doesn’t know what else to do, other than train and prepare for the next season, regardless of his employment status or not. Completely on his own, no less, away from his wife and his parents, whom it’s revealed he has a completely fractured and broken relationship with the dad that put him on the path that made Ichiro into Ichiro.
During the span in which the article is being written, Ichiro is signed by the MLB team in which his career started, the Seattle Mariners, and the prodigal son is returning home, for what is in all likelihood his final season.
But it’s the journey of uncertainty in which Ichiro embarks on that really makes me question his grasp on reality, and paints a picture of a kind of sad existence of a person whom has achieved greatness and immortality in the world of baseball, but is apparently completely out of touch and a total stranger to what the real world outside of baseball is actually like.