Well we’re 15 games through the young season and the M’s are already below .500. Nobody is batting over .300 in the whole M’s lineup and Hector Noesi just went through a dreadful outing in which he needed relief after just one and a third innings.

To be honest, I predicted before the season that the M’s would probably close to 100 games (again) this year. With that in perspective, 7-8 through the first 15 games really doesn’t look too bad. However, considering that five of those seven victories are against the Oakland A’s, one has to question how the M’s will fare against legitimately tough opposition. It would be great if the M’s could grab one of the two wild card spots and break their ten-year long playoff drought, but I think M’s fans sooner or later will just have to accept that this year is another rebuilding year.

Just as in the previous few years, the offense is as poor as ever. Yesterday, the M’s went 1 for 13 with men in scoring position and lost 7-3. While the relief pitching was excellent, only giving up two hits, Noesi dug the M’s in such a deep hole early on that defeat was pretty much inevitable from the start.

The Ichiro experiment up until now has been running decently; he is the team’s RBI leader with nine and he even has more home runs that Albert Pujols (that ought to change soon). However, his batting average is at a pedestrian .274. Through 15 games, sample sizes are obviously very small, but it is worth noting that Ichiro this season is hitting the best percentage of line drives of his career, at nearly 30 percent. So what’s with the low batting average?

Ichiro has hit into a lot of hard outs this year (as I started writing this post, he just lined out to the shortstop) and he simply hasn’t gotten good luck on batted balls. His BABIP is below .300, which testifies more to his bad luck than his declining speed. Hopefully, he gets rewarded for his good contact in the near future.

As for the rest of the guys, Justin Smoak and Miguel Olivo (just to name a couple) have been black holes of sorts on offense, consistently striking out and hitting into double plays with men on base. Solo homers and Ichiro RBI singles will only take the team so far; they need reliable smart, clutch hitting. If the offense continues to struggle like this, the M’s will have a ton of trouble winning games unless they give up two or fewer runs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnaQ46yEZSg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2X1-IKQeMA&feature=related

I honestly hate it when bleacher report has those “5 reasons why…” or “50 greatest (fill in the blank)” sorts of articles. Not only are they formulaic, but generally the writing for bleacher report is really bad, really opinionated, and not statistically well-researched. Hopefully none of those qualities apply to me (even though I did try my hand at a few bleacher report articles back in the day…).

Well here’s my take on Ichiro’s situation. First of all, I don’t think it’s that much of a demotion for Ichiro to be batting third. I honestly think it’s a bit of a privilege because it means that the team trusts Ichiro to potentially be a solid run-producing middle-of-the-order hitter. Considering he is “only” a singles hitter, it must mean the team thinks he’s really darn good at doing what he does.

However, a singles hitter such as Ichiro usually starts getting bad around this time. After all, Ichiro is 38 years old and maybe even close to retirement. But let’s wave those aside for now and get to my five conclusive reasons why Ichiro can come back this year.

1. He can make adjustments

Wow, that almost seems anticlimactic after I very clearly stated I don’t want to write like bleacher report. But it’s true. Ichiro can make adjustments and he’s as good as anyone has ever been in this category. Getting 200 hits over a six month period is not an easy thing to do. Yet Ichiro has done it 10 times. Six months is a long time and there are plenty of occasions when things just aren’t going for you. But Ichiro can turn an 0-fer into a 1-hit game, a 1-hit game into a multi-hit game simply because he always has his foot on the gas pedal and he never stops running hard to first base.

Ichiro has had plenty of different swings throughout his career, each of which has worked to a high degree of success. But the reason why he had to even make changes was because he was willing to try something new, something that might work for him even better. It takes a lot of guts to depart from a swing that yielded 262 hits in one season. Yet he did manage to change and he did manage to bat .350 a couple more times in his career.

According to Larry Stone of the Seattle Times, Ichiro has already started to make adjustments for this season. According to Stone, “Watching him pretty closely this week in batting practice, however, it became clearer and clearer that a major transformation had taken place. For one thing, he has a much wider, and more balanced, stance. For another, he’s not lifting his front leg, not perceptibly. . And, putting it all into action, he seems much more intent on scalding line drives than the “slap” style of old.”

It will certainly be interesting to see how Ichiro performs as a “conventional” hitter this season.

2. He failed last year

To put it bluntly, then yes, Ichiro did fail last season for the first time in his baseball career. But for someone like Ichiro who works so hard for his success, you’d have to think that last season must have been an odd experience for him. He fell short of 200 hits by quite a bit. But if anything, failing does give rise to lessened expectations. He didn’t get 200 hits, but it’s not as if his life ended on the day last season ended. His life went on just all of ours did.

Not only that, but fans won’t be (as) disappointed if he happens to fail again. In fact, many fans are already writing him off for this year. Some think he might bat .300 again, but nobody expects him to bat .340+ or anything crazy like that (besides myself). Lesser expectations might be just the thing for Ichiro after sustaining such a high level of success for 17 seasons. With a lighter burden, maybe Ichiro will have less stress and less pressure to replicate such seasons as 2004 and 2009. And if he just goes out and plays baseball, I’m sure he will find it liberating and maybe, just maybe, easier to perform.

3. He’s batting in the 3-spot

No longer is Ichiro’s sole purpose to get on base. He now needs to be dependable and drive in runs. This means he can’t (or at least shouldn’t) swing at as much junk as he’s been swinging at over the last few years. Because the M’s have sucked at driving in runs so much the last few years, Ichiro has felt even more pressure to get on base. After all, you need baserunners to score and if he didn’t get on base, nobody else would. I think the overall terrible quality of the M’s, along with the fact that he was batting leadoff, really made Ichiro’s pitch selection worse.

This year his situation is different. His duty now will be to move runners over and bat them in. Better pitch selection should help Ichiro  get into better counts and hopefully get a look at some fat, juicy fastballs. Ichiro’s always been a good bad-ball hitter. But a pitch in the strike zone is always better to hit than something that’s two feet outside.

4. This is his contract year

If Ichiro needs any extra motivation, it’s this. If he doesn’t do well this year, the Mariners might not sign him and, who knows, maybe everyone will overlook him and force him into retirement. Ichiro certainly doesn’t want this. He’s always wanted to play well into his 40s if he could help it. Thankfully, Ichiro has typically done well under pressure. If he thinks with a “This could be the last dance” sort of mentality, he might just have an extra bit of focus and edge to perform this year. But I guess that in a way nullifies my last point. After all, didn’t I say that he would be liberated to just go out and play ball this year? Nevertheless, the fact that he has already failed and thus has the increased liberty to fail again, coupled with the fact that he needs to perform this year, should give his attitude an interesting dynamic and drive his concentration as high as it’s ever been. He’s never been threatened with the possibility of retirement until now. And hopefully, he’ll stave off those conversations for at least another couple more years.

5. He’s Ichiro

He’s already racked up 3706 hits in his professional career. He’s won 9 batting titles and he’s led his league in hits 12 times, not to mention he’s had 11 200-hit seasons. The man is an unprecedented hit machine and he has the track record to prove it. He’s still the same person and he deserves the right not to be doubted after this much success. Sabermetricians have never been able to predict his performance and I think he will prove everybody wrong again this year. People thought he was done in 2004 when he was batting under .300 in June and he wound up batting .429 after the all star break. People thought he was done in 2006 when he seemingly fell apart in August, only to get hot in September and lead the league in hits (again). In fact, the Seattle Times said, at the end of that year, that Ichiro would never bat .330 again. Go figure. Even Seattleites doubt him after all these years. In 2008, Ichiro “struggled” to bat .310, yet the year after, Griffey returned to Seattle and Ichiro had a monster .352 year. Just say he’s done and he’ll make you look like a fool. Can we still say, though, that he has it in the tank to defy us one more time? Well history hasn’t said otherwise.

Whew. It’s been ages since I last blogged and I honestly don’t think I have the same fire as a fan as I did two years ago. I’ve been busy wondering what to do with my life, while trying to graduate on time, so it’s been difficult to find time for Ichiro over the last few months. I’ll try my best to give Ichiro updates, but don’t expect too many posts from me this season.

Anyhow, I left all of you last season with a rather odd post, about Ichiro proving his character in a season where he just couldn’t get hot. And if you were actually looking to my blog to see whether or not he wound up with 200 hits, you probably were disappointed with where I left off. In essence, I gave my readers a five month long cliffhanger. Did he or did he not get 200 hits?

Well the fact is he didn’t. He wound up 16 hits short and now people are wondering how in the heck he’s going to come back this season. Ichiro’s said himself that he doesn’t really plan on changing his game plan this year. So how can we expect him to return to his 2010-level of greatness, let alone his magnificent feats of 2009?

Let’s first get to what will be required of him if he is to get another 200-hit season. It will be harder than ever to get 200 hits this year because Ichiro is now officially batting in the 3-hole. Every place down in the lineup means approximately 15-20 fewer plate appearances (or so I’ve heard). Considering that we’re talking about Ichiro here, plate appearances are essentially interchangeable with at bats. So, in the past, Ichiro has batted around 691 times per 162 games. Let’s say that Ichiro plays all 162, which he has done three times in his MLB career. Instead of getting 691 at bats, he might only get roughly 655. And to rack up 200 more hits would require him to bat .3053 for the season. Not impossible considering he is only two years removed from batting .315.

At this point, I think I’ll save whether or not Ichiro can really come back for my next blog post. If you have read all my stuff since the beginning, you’ll probably be able to predict what I’m going to say…

With the M’s postseason fate once again sealed, there is now only one more reason to keep fans riveted to their radios and televisions, the exact same reason that has been motivating them in September for the last decade: Ichiro’s chase for 200 hits.

Yet as the familiar “I-CHI-RO” cheers cascade from the center field bleachers at Safeco Field, Ichiro Suzuki, the wiry, diminutive, mysterious Japanese star with 10 straight 200-hit seasons credited to his name, does not acknowledge the crowd, nor does he even give the impression that he’s aware that he’s being watched by millions of people on television.

Instead he goes right on to his unusual routine. Squat, stand, go to the batter’s box, swipe at the dirt with his feet, do a windmill motion with his arm, pause when the bat’s pointing straight in the air, breathe, tug the sleeve, and, finally, get ready for battle.

He watches the first pitch go right down the middle for a called strike and then goes through his routine again. For the second pitch, he again watches it cross the plate, this time on the outside corner. After doing his sleeve tug (again), he gets back into his stance and fouls off a couple pitches. The riveting suspense is finally ended, somewhat unceremoniously, when he grounds out weakly to the second baseman.

But the saga does not end here, for Ichiro, after grounding, out, rounds first base and heads to the dugout with his head held stoically high. He heads down the dugout stairs, removes his helmet, affectionately removes any blemishes on his bat, takes off his batting gloves, puts on his hat, and takes a seat on the bench where no other Mariner cares to sit alongside him.

This whole little series of actions has been the story of many of Ichiro’s 2011 at bats, which is why his average currently stands at a mortal .277. As he tries to run out groundball after groundball, it’s obvious how much he cares about getting his hits. And the fact that he is not getting them and there is no one who can possibly understand him or sympathize with him is as tragic a scene as you’ll ever see in baseball.

While it’s typical for great players, especially singles hitters, to decline with age, it’s hard not to believe that Ichiro’s different.  Ichiro does everything to make us think he’s not just another baseball player. He seldom shows emotion and does not act extremely warm toward his teammates, nor does he listen to advice from his coaches.

When he gets a hit, he does not give a fist pump or a clap of celebration, but instead removes his elbow protection and batting gloves without so much as a raise of the eyebrows. After making amazing catches against the wall, he does these almost childlike somersaults before landing on his feet and taking a deep breath as if to say, “Wow, I thought that ball might get away from me for a second.” And when he’s giving interviews, he says some of the most intriguing, confusing statements seemingly just to make us wonder if he’s incredibly wise or if he just wants to confuse us.

Who exactly is this athlete that Seattle has embraced, yet simultaneously kept at a distance, for the last 11 years? Is he a prima donna or is he actually humble and respecting of his peers? Does he actually try to be unique or is he simply misunderstood? If Ichiro has wanted his audience to think he was unique, then I think he’s succeeded. By withholding his every instinct, he has defied every stereotype that we could ever place on a human being. It’s because he’s so unusual that we have to sometimes sit back and wonder, “What drives this man to do the things he does?”

If it were truly wins that motivate Ichiro, then he would have left the Mariners long ago. If his primary goal was performance, then one would think that he would have shown some visible form of anger this season. If he cared about pleasing his fans, he would probably at least try to be more friendly toward the media. Not only that, but he would also want to defend his efforts to those who criticize him. When Joe Mauer was told he was being “soft” about injuries this year, he bristled at the accusation. Yet Ichiro has done nothing to argue his case this season, through speech or facial expression.

No, Ichiro does not try to defend himself in conventional manners. But this makes sense because Ichiro has always behaved not to others’ standards, but rather to his own self-devised code of conduct. What Ichiro cares about more than anything is maintaining his dignity. While hits are more important to him than to any other player, he would accept himself far more readily if he had 170 hits and kept completely silent, than if he had 230 hits and revealed the depth of his inner turmoil.

And during 2011, when everything has been going wrong and people have asked for him to be traded, he has stood firm. At no other time has Ichiro proven his character and strength of conviction more than now. Not only is he extremely independent, but he is also as mentally strong as any athlete I have ever seen. When someone believes this firmly in what he does, all you can do is admire and respect him.

Some people may say that Ichiro reveals absolutely nothing to us because he doesn’t give interviews. Well, if you were paying attention to this season, I don’t think you could have a better, more representative example of who Ichiro is than by just watching him play right now.

As of right now, on mlb.com gameday, Ichiro is 3 for 5. But according to many twitter accounts, the last ROE was changed to an infield hit, which would make today a four-hit outing. If this is indeed true, Ichiro has very much helped his own cause in his road to 200 hits. Over the last two games, he is 6 for 8 with two homers. He needs 33 hits in his last 18 games to reach the magic number of 200. Though accumulating 200 hits probably won’t also imply a .300 average this year, it would still keep Ichiro’s most important historical streak alive. We already know that he won’t extend his All Star streak, and it’s almost certain that he probably won’t win this year’s Gold Glove. In other words, these last 18 games could very well decide how we will judge his 2011 season a decade from now.

After suffering from his first 0-fer since August 16, Ichiro came back strong today with a nice multi-hit performance in a 4-3 M’s loss. He doubled to right, singled up the middle, and was robbed in his first at bat by a backhanded pick from Howie Kendrick going to his right. That could have been the 32nd GFP (good fielding play) that he’s been victim to this year. Talk about conspiracy.

He did, however, record his 35th RBI of the season. Hopefully he can pick up a few more so that he doesn’t have a sub-40 RBI season for the first time in his career. I know that his RBI totals look pretty pathetic compared to some other leadoff men (like Jacoby Ellsbury). But surprisingly, with men in scoring position this year, he’s not batting too badly. Ordinarily .288 would be pretty decent with RISP, but considering that Ichiro has only four extra base hits in those situations this year, it makes sense that he is in position to possibly set a new career-low in RBI.

Ichiro’s performance today: 2 for 4, RBI

Hits/Game needed for remainder of season to reach 200: 1.692

Thanks to a 2-run go-ahead homer by Mike Carp in the bottom of the eighth, the M’s defeated the Angels 5-3 last night. Ichiro contributed to the win with two doubles and two runs scored. He went two for four to raise his average to .275 and improve his hitting streak to 12 games. Right now, he needs 47 hits in the final 29 games to reach 200 for a record 11th straight time. That means he needs to average 1.6207 hits/game for the rest of the season. Considering he averaged 1.6273 hits/game for an entire season (in 2004), 200 still looks very possible.

Ichiro’s performance today: 2 for 4

Hits/Game needed for remainder of season to reach 200: 1.621

During his time with the Mariners, Ichiro has always been famous for being amazingly good at putting the ball in play on nearly any given pitch. Because he makes contact so often, it makes sense that Ichiro would be victim to the most good fielding plays among all major league players.

However, way back in 2006, when I just began appreciating Ichiro, I had a hard time believing that all of the times he was robbed of hits were mere coincidences. You can read my earliest entries if you would like to know my thought process at the time. It just didn’t make sense to me that someone as strategic and calculating as Ichiro could be thwarted mercilessly so many times, while other players of less hand-eye coordination seemingly got hits on every line drive they hit.

Thus I coined the term “Ichiro Conspiracy.” According to this “conspiracy,” all major league players would plot to help Joe Mauer win the batting title over Ichiro. It sounds pretty stupid and silly now, but, believe me, I was firmly convicted of its existence during my first years as a baseball fan.

But with the recent article about Ichiro written by Rob Burckhard, my dormant feelings about the “conspiracy” were reawakened. According to the statistics kept by Baseball Info Solutions, Ichiro has been victim to a major league-best 31 good fielding plays as of August 24, plays that without the supreme effort from a fielder, would result in hits. In other words, he has been the unluckiest batter in the majors this year. If 15 of those GFPs were actually hits, his batting average would be .301 and he would be on pace for over 204 hits. If all of those GFPs went for hits, his batting average would be an excellent .330.

Do I actually still believe the “conspiracy” is real? No. But I do appreciate this new statistic very much. Now I can at least claim, without any doubts, that Ichiro’s performance this year can be attributed to abnormally bad luck, not just age.