Part of that is Oakland is actually a terrible offensive team.

Speaking of Dice-K … who is this new phenom out of Japan … ‘Dice K 2.0′ … Yu Darvish?

well, Deanna of Marinerds describes him as “the best Iranian-Japanese pitcher in the history of baseball, and the ace pitcher for the Nippon Ham Fighters”

Is this guy really going to cost 75 million just to talk to? No wonder idiot GM’s are willing to pay 16.5 mill to Richie

The translation is usually laughably nonsensical.

So Ichiro was probably saying the Japanese equivalent of “I’m looking forward to it”

It’s hard to say, sometimes phrases are impossibly idiomatic, and sometimes the speaker really is saying something offbeat.

I’m reminded of the Japanese admiral before the Battle of Midway, when the Japanese Navy sent out a massive fleet expecting to catch the Americans by surprise and capture Midway. Someone asked “what if the Americans know we’re coming?” and the admiral replied “One touch of an armored sleeve”. Which sounds impossibly inscrutable until you’re told it was a common saying, the equivalent of “we’ll brush them away” or in more modern lingo “we’ll kick their butts and take names”.

For these Ichiro quotes, I don’t know whether it’s hard-to-translate idiom or zen-like Ichiro-ness at work.

P.S. The Americans DID know the Japanese were coming, caught them by surprise, and pummeled them in one of the hugest upsets of WW II. Kinda like what Felix did to Matsuzaka’s home debut last year.