TOKYO — Ichiro Suzuki is all about baseball, but he’s much more than that in Japan. Back home, he’s a wellspring of national pride, much like Shohei Ohtani now. His triumphs across the Pacific buoyed the nation as Japan’s economy sputtered through the so-called lost decades of the 1990s and into the 2000s.

No one has ever walked through these doors with the sport-changing, Hall-changing, planet-changing possibilities of Ichiro.

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Ichiro Suzuki is a first-ballot Hall of Famer ... Last week, Susuki became the seventh first-ballot inductee into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in Tokyo. While Suzuki will be the first Japanese player to be immortalized at Cooperstown, he almost ...

Ichiro Suzuki could have been immortalized as a first-ballot Hall of Famer nearly a decade ago. He was last a full-time starter in 2012, at 38. He logged his 3,000th hit in 2016, when he was 42. Still, he made us wait three more years to celebrate his retirement.

Ichiro Suzuki is expected to be the first Japanese player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and possibly only the second player chosen unanimously after New York

TOKYO (AP) — Ichiro Suzuki is all about baseball, but he's much more than that in Japan. Back home, he's a wellspring of national pride, much like Shohei Ohtani now. His triumphs across the ...

Ichiro debuted in Major League Baseball in 2001 with the Seattle Mariners, the first Japanese position player to span the Pacific and an instant star. Left-handed pitcher Hideo Nomo preceded him, and Hideki Matsui came just after, both boosting the country’s confidence in a period of national malaise.

When he had moved there for school, he figured he was putting his baseball fandom on the backburner. He had fallen in love with the sport in his native Tokyo, where Nippon Professional Baseball is a popular pastime.

Global baseball's hit king Ichiro Suzuki became the first Japanese-born ... "Ichiro is a superstar who has inspired the hopes and dreams of many," Tokyo's top government spokesman Yoshimasa ...

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Baseball legend Ichiro Suzuki isn't overlooking the fact a single voter prevented him from becoming the second unanimous Hall of Fame inductee in the sport's history. Suzuki, who was inducted ...