Until There Is No Ichiro Left

Ichiro is a Marlin, and the winter is cold and dark and long.

Sluggers' late career scripts are pre-written, provided they can still slug. It's harder to know what the twilight holds for Ichiro, whose slap-and-scamper routine has him just 156 hits shy of 3,000 in the Majors; add his days in Japan, and the total is already 4,122. What becomes of that coiled-spring grace as he ages? He's 41 years old now, and his diminution is plain, if characteristically sui generis. As the universe tends toward entropy, so too joints, muscles, slash lines, careers. We know what happens to 41-year-old baseball players—this is an age of declining speed, slowing reflexes, and a short hop to total irrelevance—but we do not know what Ichiro will do at 41 and beyond, because we've never seen a player quite like Ichiro.

Heroes, at the end, tend to wander. It's not so uncommon, but it still looks strange. It looks like the Babe in a Boston Braves uniform. It looks like Frank Thomas in a Blue Jays cap. It looks like Ichiro, at a press conference in Tokyo, slipping on a crisp white Marlins home jersey with black, orange, yellow, and electric blue highlights. The only thing that looked right was when he, for the benefit of photographers, turned his back, revealing his first name (absent on the Yanks' nameless togs), and the number 51, which he'd worn for his nine seasons with the Orix BlueWave and 11 in Seattle, before switching to 31 in New York, where 51 still semi-officially belongs to Bernie Williams.

When Ichiro was traded from Seattle to New York three summers ago, I wrote, "It makes perfect sense in every measure but the sentimental one, which of course is the first one to register," and that's true again now. Ichiro might be a perfect fit as Miami's fourth outfielder, where he'll have ample opportunity to pinch hit and to platoon against righties, to fill in should injuries bite, or simply to tutor Miami's young core. But while the idea of Ichiro passing along knowledge to Giancarlo Stanton is kind of a delicious one, there is still the sense that this is not the way things were supposed to go. It just doesn't look like we might have expected it to look.

But what would look right? The heart does love a homecoming, so perhaps Number 51 returning to the now-competitive Mariners, where he'd help King Felix, Robinson Cano, Nelson Cruz, and Kyle Seager win the AL West for the first time since Ichiro's magical rookie year in 2001? There's symmetry to it, but while baseball doles out symmetry from time to time, it only does so in teasing portions, never in the generous helpings that we'd hope.

Anyway, Miami is not purgatory, let alone hell. The Marlins are a real team playing in the real and quite competitive National League East; they could actually contend for a Wild Card slot. But despite an active offseason, and the commitment signaled by making Stanton one of the richest athletes on the planet, skepticism is still the norm among a fan-base repeatedly burned by sell-offs, lousy teams, empty stadiums, and the ambient cynicism that attends everything done by one of the worst owners in sports. South Beach might be a glamorous address, but Marlins Park is not. This is where Ichiro is going.

For many Ichiro adherents, his Yankees tenure was a challenge, but not an insurmountable one; we found a way to cheer for him without cheering for the Yankees. These are the strange rules we draw for ourselves as fans, the stabilities we cling to in an inconstant world. The agreements, detentes, and motivations which determine who we cheer for in a given game are as convoluted as those which plunged Europe into the First World War, and are similarly based not on logic, but on sentiment, grudges, history, and chance.

Now my favorite ballplayer is going to South Florida because that is what he deems best among the opportunities presented him. Spring is out there, somewhere, but we have ample time to get used to Ichiro the Itinerant, the wandering 40-something part-timer chasing a round number. It's the least I can do for a player who's given me 14 years of thrills. It may not be enough to get me to buy a bright orange Marlins cap, but those 14 years are enough that I've considered it.

Since he erupted onto our domestic diamonds that last Edenic pre-9/11 spring and summer, Ichiro has offered a pleasing opacity. He has been a quiet and stoically unreadable fixture in constant warming motion, his unending stretching, bending, lunging, and flexing providing a silent castigation of unpreparedness and sloth. He's been so constant for so long that watching him decline seemed unthinkable, and indeed still largely does.

His inveterate dedication and the manner with which he has approached the game—at once spiritual and scientific—lend him an air of timelessness. Who but the most dedicated fan-cum-historian could have even named George Sisler before Ichiro chased down and finally overcame his single-season hits record of 257 across the summer of 2004? But even as all that remains true, the gray continues to creep up his dome and down toward his chin, his numbers have dropped a tick and then another tick, and maybe, just maybe, more balls fall around him in the outfield than was once the case.

All of this raises the fear in some of us—and who knows, maybe the man himself—that he'll show up to the park one day and find that time has simply overtaken him, that his skills have slipped below a respectable level, and that a swift exit will be the only somewhat dignified recourse left. Then, one day not too long thereafter, Ichiro—prolific hitter, scholar of baserunning, and the best right fielder a good many of us have ever seen—will go into the Hall of Fame, likely on the first ballot, and almost certainly wearing a Mariners cap, his legend undiminished by his sorry denouement.

But what seems a shade more likely, and far more just, is that we'll see concentrated bursts of Ichiro-ian brilliance, as opposed to the sustained artistry to which we've become accustomed, a sporadic continuation of his absurd and idiosyncratic mastery of the game. This was the trend in the Bronx, and will continue to be the case in Miami. Not a lessened Ichiro, but simply less of him, until finally, one day, there is none.