Ichiro Suzuki is all about baseball, but he is much more than that at home in Japan. Ichiro is a wellspring of national pride — like Shohei Ohtani now — and his fame across the Pacific was therapeutic as the national economy sputtered through the so-called lost decades.

Ichiro Suzuki is the Japanese Zen master who was so dedicated to baseball that he carried his bats in a moisture-proof case and apologised to their creator when he broke one. "In Japan we take care of our instruments,