Seattle Mariners: Can Ichiro Suzuki Recover from a Disappointing 2011 Season?

For the past 10 years, Major League Baseball experienced fewer surer things during the summer than Seattle's Ichiro Suzuki batting over .300 with 200 hits, making the All-Star team and winning a Gold Glove.

Not uncommon was it to believe in Seattle that the Mariners right fielder would amazingly have more hits in a baseball season than the city would have rainy days if a calendar year. He has been that predictable and that prolific. 

Blame it on El Niño or global warming, but suddenly in 2011, Ichiro has become as unreliable as the local meteorologists. And his weathered performance this year has been generating some cause for concern for Seattlites. 

Nestled in the cozy corner of the Pacific Northwest, there isn’t much light shined on those whose talents and achievements are otherworldly. And sadly, the attention is even dimmer when those once-great players perform poorly. Were Ichiro to have played for, say, the Yankees, he would have been the apple of New York’s eye for the past decade; but he’d also be the sourest fruit on the back pages throughout this rotten season that he’s had thus far. 

Maybe, for his pride, it’s been a good thing that he’s tucked away in a region and on a team that nobody is paying mind to. At least he’s able to escape the mounds of criticism he’d have received if he in fact did play in a larger market. 

Part of the reason, however, that there is less media awareness of Ichiro’s season-long slump is the assumption that he’d actually turn it around, and by year end, he’d have put up the same gaudy numbers that fans are so accustomed to. Who out there did not believe that somehow, some way, Ichiro would be sniffing 200 hits and at the very least be batting .300 by September’s end? 

And yet now that September is in fact halfway through, and the season is about to set, one can’t help but realize that, short of a miracle, Ichiro will not reach those perennial benchmarks that he met every single year he has been in the majors. And all that can be asked is, what gives? 

First and foremost, we have to remind ourselves that Ichiro, though in his eleventh season in MLB, previously played nine additional seasons in Japan. Twenty seasons total of professional baseball? Wow.

He will turn 38 next month, an age that for mere mortals is the end of the end, not the beginning of the end. Even the great Rickey Henderson saw his number drop dramatically in the season prior to his 38th birthday, from a .300 batting average in 1995 to a .241 batting average in 1996. So it’s not altogether astonishing to see that the demigod Ichiro has slowed a bit. 

The bigger question obviously shouldn’t be, “Is Ichiro in the midst of decline,” but rather why and how? 

ESPN’s Jim Caple notes that Ichiro has hit, for him, an extremely low number of infield hits, which is typically his bread and butter. With his false-start swinging motion and sprinter’s speed, it’s like he’s running downhill, turning cheaply hit ground balls into routine base hits.

This season, however, he hasn’t been beating out as many choppers, attributed to both extremely talented defense from opponents and a general slowing down with as much tread as Ichiro has.   

Still, he speed hasn’t disappeared that noticeably, as he notched his 40th stolen base on the season. He’s just not able to get up the line with as much celerity as he used to.

More glaring than some of his other stats is the fact that Ichiro has grounded into a career-high 10 double plays so far this season. Which is also a sign that Ichiro’s blessed pitch recognition, bat control and bat speed are also waning. That is as troubling an omen as any when evaluating a hitter’s descent. 

These alarms have seeped into Ichiro’s overall comfort at the plate. No longer spraying opposite-field liners or dumping his patented shallow singles up the middle with regularity, he has gone out of his comfort zone, swinging at more balls out of the strike zone, trying to get cheap hits. This has caused his power numbers—albeit never very strong to begin with—to dip further than ever before. 

Quite the singles man throughout his career, Ichiro has never been married to extra-base hits. But this season he is on pace to hit only 29 of them, by far a career-low for the right fielder. He has been unable to get into a groove, instead chasing his lovable 200-hit plateau. This has had a counter-effect, ultimately leading to, by Ichiro’s standards, a very ordinary .272 batting average and a shocking—horrifying—.647 OPS. 

These are not the numbers of a player who just last year led the AL in hits for a fifth straight season and appeared in his 10th consecutive All-Star Game—as a starter. In fact, his 2011 campaign has seen him draw comparisons to the dainty-hitting Juan Pierre. Ouch. 

This makes for an interesting offseason for a Mariners club that is mired in an incredible slump out west, having lost 100 games twice in the past three seasons. The team-wide anemia at the plate last season was one for the ages, and surprisingly, the Mariners offense almost has gotten worse this year.

The lack of winning and playoff contention—one season finishing better than third place in the past eight seasons—has got to eat away at Ichiro. Though he has been accused of playing for his own stats, there’s the defense that he wouldn’t have to if the team as a whole was actually competitive. 

Which will makes for an interesting upcoming offseason. Ichiro is signed through the 2012 season, but the Mariners have to see clearly that he is one step closer to a rapid decline. Though he is still better than most average outfielders, he is not the player that he was both on the field in the batter’s box.

Thus, will the Mariners be willing to offer him a long-term contract? They certainly cannot shell out another $18 million per season. However, he is still the face of the franchise and has an international fan base that would lose interest in the Mariners should he not return after 2012.

There will likely be talk of a contract extension this offseason, but the Mariners are not in any hurry to evaluate such a decision.

In the meantime, Ichiro needs to regroup this winter and make the necessary adjustments to his mechanics that will allow for him to compensate for the areas in his play that have contributed to his poor season. He obviously has the know-how to make such modifications, but can he rediscover the wizardry that has made him the hottest thing in Seattle other than a cup of Starbucks?

Should he not make that magic next season, it’s likely that the baseball world might not even know.

If an Ichiro falls in the forest of the Evergreen State, does his collapse even make a sound?