Fast times

Sporting News, The, May 21, 2001 by Michael Knisley

Led by electric Ichiro Suzuki, the Mariners are overwhelming teams with speed and finesse, leaving all of baseball grasping for words to describe their start

Lou Piniella is facing his biggest challenge in a week, and it's bugging him, bugging him, bugging him. He has tried every twist and turn he knows and used every strategy in his book, which is one of the biggest in the business by now, chock-full of maneuvers gleaned from 16 years as a player and another 15 as a manager on the roads of baseball. Today in Toronto, none of it seems to work. He's a frustrated man.

Finally, he throws up his hands and admits defeat, lie is reduced to looking for help from, of all quarters, the local media. The manager of the best team in the majors 'fesses up: He doesn't have all the answers.

"What's a word for `take off'?" Piniella asks. "Four letters. Second letter is `o.'"

This crossword puzzle, the one befuddling him, is a four-letter word for a large shaggy animal-a b-e-a-r. Good thing for Piniella the baseball game is about to begin. Good thing for him the baseball game is about to begin with Ichiro Suzuki leading off for Seattle.

Thanks largely to Ichiro--he prefers to go by his first name-at the top of the order, the games have been the easy parts of Piniella's days and nights so far this season. His beloved crosswords, his favorite pastime on the road occasionally may drive him nuts, as this one does last Friday in Toronto, but when it comes to the Manners, winning solutions have been a breeze.

Seattle ended the weekend with a 28-9 record and an outrageous 11-game lead over Anaheim in the American League West.

It's the middle of May and way too early for concession speeches from the Angels or the A's, although the Rangers, 15 games out mad in disarray, might be ready to wave the white flag. But Seattle has played the season's first six weeks with a near-foolproof formula of pitching, defense and speed that would seem to leave little room for vulnerability once the summer begins to wear on.

"It starts with our leadoff guy," Piniella says about Ichiro, who already is as much a sensation in Seattle as Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez or Randy Johnson ever were as Mariners. "He gets on base. He gets his hits. He scores runs for us. Those are the sorts of things that are contagious."

Ichiro, the first Japanese position player to make into a starting role in the major leagues, leads the league in hits and is on a pace that would give him 258 by the end of the season. The major league record is 257, by George Sisler of the St. Louis Browns 81 years ago. It probably isn't reasonable to expect Ichiro to keep that pace going, but he likely can stay within reach of Rodriguez's team record of 215 hits in the 1996 season.

Ichiro is also the league's best hitter with runners in scoring position, batting an implausible .567 in those situations through Saturday. That's well over 100 points higher than what the Red Sox's Manny Ramirez, second in the league in that category, is hitting.

But the numbers tell only part of the story. Ichiro has only two home runs through the first six weeks, but he already has established himself as one of the most disruptive forces in baseball. He is so fast from home to first that 15 of his first 55 hits were ground balls that didn't leave the infield, a trend that has defenses as flummoxed as Piniella was in the face of last week's crossword.

Last weekend in Toronto, Blue Jays shortstop Alex Gonzalez and second baseman Chris Woodward each played four or five steps closer in on the infield dirt during Ichiro's at-bats. He nonetheless managed two infield hits in Friday night's 7-2 Seattle victory. One of them was a ground ball straight to Gonzalez, who fielded it cleanly and hurried a throw into the dirt at first.

"I had to rush it," Gonzalez says. "But he would have beaten it out anyway. He had that throw beat even if it was right at (first baseman Carlos Delgado's) chest. That's his game. He chops the ball and tries to beat it out."

The infield single sent Carlos Guillen from second to third. With Ichiro, who is third in the league in steals (11), dancing off first with second base open, Joey Hamilton threw a wild pitch, allowing Guillen to cross the plate. Nothing fancy, but a run scored.

Two innings earlier, Ichiro's infield hit off third baseman Tony Batista's glove started a three-run inning for the Mariners. Hamilton bristles at the suggestion that Ichiro might have unnerved him, but he undercuts some of his logic with his explanation.

"No, he's not a distraction," Hamilton says. "I'm getting sick of people asking me if he is a distraction. The guy is fast. He slaps the ball around the infield and he gets down the line. That's all there is to it. He's no distraction."

For the most part, the Mariners are winning with what Piniella calls finesse baseball, which means moving runners, executing in hit-and-run situations, hitting when it counts and pitching better than anybody this side of Pedro Martinez. Through last weekend, they had lost only one series all season--to the Blue Jays, who took two of three in Seattle early this month. Last weekend in SkyDome, the Mariners balanced that, sweeping three from Toronto.