The best — and only — good thing about the M's

By Friday morning (August 22), most of the big questions had been answered. Barack Obama had picked, but not yet announced, his running mate, and John McCain had gone home (it was anyone's guess as to which home) to contemplate his.
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The Zen of Ichiro. (Wikipedia)

By Friday morning (August 22), most of the big questions had been answered. Barack Obama had picked, but not yet announced, his running mate, and John McCain had gone home (it was anyone's guess as to which home) to contemplate his.

By Friday morning (August 22), most of the big questions had been answered. Barack Obama had picked, but not yet announced, his running mate, and John McCain had gone home (it was anyone's guess as to which home) to contemplate his. In sports, the news from Beijing was that the Americans had failed yet again to win major Olympic gold medals, losing to various fourth-world countries in thumb-wrestling, lawn darts, and synchronized cherry-pit-spitting. Locally, the main sports story no longer was whether the Seattle Mariners would lose 100 games this season. With 35 left to play, the possibility existed that the team still could lose 116: precisely the number the M's won in 2001, the last time the club made the playoffs. No, the Big Number was 200: Would Ichiro Suzuki get that many hits for the eighth-straight season? It's the only question sustaining the Seattle franchise, which limps to the September 28 finish line with a depleted starting-pitching corps and a cast of triple-A players seemingly auditioning for double-A roster spots next year. The night before (August 21), Ichiro hadn't disappointed the 25,611 fans gathered to watch the hapless ballclub flat-line for the seventh straight time. The 2-0 loss to Oakland featured seven M's hits. That three of them came from Ichiro surprised no one. Entering the August 22 contest, Ich had 169, all but about three of them seeming to have been infield singles. He'd raised his average to .315 and had reached the major-league lead for total hits. He needed 31 in 35 games to make it yet again to a plateau that some of the game's great hitters never reach. It was in keeping with the Zen of Ichiro. The whole organization can be (and has been) collapsing around him, but he remains serene, focused and professional to the end. Given that the American League will produce a 2008 batting champ with a lower-than-usual average (Joe Mauer of the Twins was leading at .324), the prospect exists that Ichiro actually could win the crown for the third time. Some sports pundits have been advocating trading Ich for god knows what or why. The occasional rap is that he isn't an RBI guy or a home-run hunk and he doesn't get enough bases on balls. It's like saying you never go to Robert De Niro movies because he can't sing. Maybe the Suzuki skeptics instead ought to look at it this way: In the absence of Ichiro this August and September, what exactly would there be to sustain our interest other than the prospect of John McCain discovering another half-dozen homes he didn't know he owned?

  

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