Guillen’s heavy, but not heavy bad, Ichiro fallout, catchers bruised
Ichiro! fallout as Hargrove says it won’t be a distraction (PI notebook). Vidro’s taking balls in the infield. Don’t think about it too much, it burns the brain. Also, Jose Guillen is a little heavy, but that doesn’t matter:
“He’s a little heavier than he would like and we would like,” Hargrove said. “We’ve got plenty of time. We’re not worried about it. He’s in great baseball shape and we’re just trying to take a few pounds off.”
Such great shape that they want him to lose 5% of his body weight.
Ted Miller in the PI offers this baffling paragraph on Ichiro:
Lucky for him a divorce and new start is possible via free agency. The only choice for fans is to scratch their eyeballs out and run screaming through the streets if the home team is impaled by the rest of the American League West for a fourth consecutive season.
That’s a sort of… weird set of images to put together in two sentences. Moving on, time to make ding Ichiro for not having a great relationship with the press.
The breaking news Tuesday wasn’t so much that Ichiro is contemplating bolting Seattle but that he spoke about it openly and clearly — through an interpreter, of course — and without the haikus, riddles and circular responses he typically employs.
…
What, no musing about a metaphoric tree with neglected roots, see his 2006 All-Star Game media session?
Here’s the thing. I know Ichiro’s not all Ibanez/Bloomquist/Dan Wilson/whoever, happy to hand out warmed over cliches after every game. He’s been extremely reluctant to criticize the team, from incompetent manager to the lack of effort or talent by his teammates, and when he’s even approached it, it’s been extremely circumspect.
If the story here is the contrast of Ichiro making more open statements that can clearly be read as discontent, there’s a story. What’s the point in making fun of him? When has he ever spoken in haiku? Or riddles? Here’s your haiku.
Ted Miller column
wafts in with gentle spring breeze
wince at acrid smell
What’s more, if you’re interested at all in looking harder at this, you can find many examples where Ichiro’s taken intelligent questions and given careful, articulate answers that provide insight and offer a glimpse into his thinking. For instance, take David Shields’ excellent (and really long) interview with Ichiro, which unfortunately is now behind a registration wall, he talks at length about a variety of interesting baseball thoughts.
Is that it, then? Is it that Ichiro says “It was a fly ball, I caught it,” delivering a flat understated answer to a flat question? That he doesn’t instead say “well that was a really well hit ball and when I saw it come off the bat I knew it was going to be close and I ran as hard as I could and I almost ran out of room but I was lucky enough to get there and put my glove up to make the play”?
Why then bring up haikus? Is Ichiro cryptic to Miller, like a short poem? But that’s in the riddles. Is it because the haiku is Japanese? I don’t understand this column, or why the column goes that far to tweak Ichiro for something he clearly doesn’t deserve.
Moving on. I guess the PI is still refusing to wire Jim Moore money to get back from Florida, because he’s continuing to locate and hassle former Mariners. Today it’s Eddie Guardado. Isn’t there something we can do? Buy him a bus ticket, anything?
Geoff Baker, in his continuing quest to come home with RSI, writes about the rough day for catchers, and Guillen. Also, his thoughts on a possible Ichiro trade.
They have two young center fielders, Jeremy Reed and Adam Jones, who will need playing time in coming years to show what they’ve got. Seattle could have traded Reed, Jones, or both this winter but balked. OK then, what’s the plan now?
This implies the team has a plan, which we’ve clearly seen consists of a couple items they write down on a grocery list notepad and then proceed to check off at the off-season supermarket. Veteran starter (2). Veteran DH with power from the left side. Veteran reliever…
Oh, and Bloomquist is going to play most of the time at second until Lopez is ready to take over. First person to correctly predict the date, author, and newspaper to run the first “When will Willy get his chance to start?” article gets a year’s free subscription to USS Mariner.
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First person to correctly predict the date, author, and newspaper to run the first “When will Willy get his chance to start?†article gets a year’s free subscription to USS Mariner.
February 26th. Mrs. Bloomquist. Port Orchard Independent.
That’s a pretty good haiku. I note that it has exactly 17 syllables in 5-7-5 arrangement.
Miller’s a pretty good writer. Hargrove’s a pretty good manager. 2006 Mariners had a pretty good year.
If you count a KJR caller, I’d say about 10:15am. Today.
5-15-07
Never forget.
Don’t get started with the Haiku. I remember a few years ago and I think it was PositivePaul doing every post on the PI thing in Haiku. I’ll bet he had to quit when he reported to his boss in Haiku!!
I never found Ichiro hard to understand, even his tree thing was real clear…
Steve Kelly, the Times, March 9.
And now Curt Schilling is so jealous about the media coverage Ichiro got that he’s trying to upstage it with his own impending free agency.
That’s the easy part. Derek also squeezed in a seasonal reference, which is required of every traditional haiku.
Otherwise, haiku could read like this:
Haikus are easy
as long as you don’t worry
about making sense
well, as Willie B starts in the charity game, I’m guessing the first week of March, and I say the Mariner Mailbag.
oh, and Ted Miller isn’t the only one mocking Ichiro for the occasional elliptical anwers– just yesterday there were at least 4 different people, including the Go-To-Guy in Florida, crabbing about it during the day on KJR … and as it was the first day in a while that I ended up hearing a lot of KJR, I hate to think what it might be during a ‘normal’ week.
I’d like to know how someone like Lefton would translate Ichiro’s more cryptic remarks, as opposed to Ken Barron, who has been his voice the last year.
Larue talks to Little Tui
Well, if he weighs 200 pounds, that would mean losing 10. I’d say that ought to be doable by season start.
would 5 lbs be 5%? he’s suppsed to get down to 195, I thought.
5 lbs is 5% of 100.
both Baker and Drayer look at the possible Grover line-up.
Guillen only weighs a hundred pounds? I thought they said he was fat.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my rightfielder. 10 pounds at the start of spring training isn’t a big deal. I imagine a lot of guys come in needing to lose 10; that isn’t a story.
That’s a pretty good haiku. I note that it has exactly 17 syllables in 5-7-5 arrangement. “February 26th./ Mrs. Bloomquist. /Port Orchard Independent.”
I count 7-4-7 = 18 syllables….
It makes me happy to see Guardado pissed at Hargrove, whether he is right or not.
…I remember a few years ago and I think it was PositivePaul doing every post on the PI thing in Haiku…
Wow — you have a great memory. That was my Senryu protest, inspired by the very musings of Peter and Jeff (when they ran Baseball Musings long before being assimilated into USSM), so you can pretty much blame them. I suppose it was so obnoxious that it was memorable. I was basically posting every comment in Senryu until the M’s won three games in a row. That was a loooong stretch of posting in Senryu, IIRC…
Man, it’s totally funny reading about Guardado’s ire towards Hargrove:
Uh, Eddie. Gotta tell you something. While I’m not exactly a Hagrove fan, I don’t think he’s lying. You still haven’t worked things out. I’d actually suspect that if you ever did — even partially — Hargrove would precisely love to have you back as the closer.
If only WFB could close.
After reading #11 I was all, “Wow–I’m not the only one who’d like to know how a decade-younger, urban, pro basketball superstar interprets Ichiro’s comments!?” Then I realized it said “Lefton,” not “Lebron.” So I guess I am the only one.
well, Ichiro might like to know what Lebron would make of his thoughts…
About those two beat-up catchers of ours: You can’t do much of anything about a foul tip that bounces off the mask and caroms off the throat or neck (ouch!!!), but that injury Jeff Clement suffered was probably unnecessary and speaks to how much of a rookie catcher he must still be.
Whoever the catching instructor is should have already told him to put his frickin’ throwing hand behind his back until he’s ready to handle the ball…i.e., while he’s CATCHING, don’t leave it dangling alongside the leg or foot, it’ll get hurt that way. Obviously I didn’t see it happen, but I’ll bet that’s how.
it wasn’t hit by a ball, he got clobbered by Morse:
“Jeff Clement, who was hit by the backswing of utility player Mike Morse. Morse hit Clement’s glove, stinging the left middle finger. Clement left the workout and later had a precautionary X-ray that was negative.”
…besides it was Clement’s glove hand. He might be able to put the throwing hand behind his back but he’d have a lot of passed balls if he kept his glove hand behind his back.
My guess (not having seen it) is that it was probably a pitch a foot inside that Clement and Morse both reached for. Which probably says more about Morse’s hitting than about Clement’s catching.
I see…. :~