[新聞] Baseball Rock Star Who Played Yankee Stadium
Hideki Irabu: Baseball Rock Star Who Played Yankee Stadium
http://tinyurl.com/3ek8d4n
(版標沒辦法塞這麼長的標題,那個標題是NY Times原來的文章標題)
On the night Hideki Irabu first pitched in New York City, 51,901 fans
squeezed into old Yankee Stadium along with a news media contingent of almost
300, at least a third of which were Japanese. In Japan, the morning
television audience exceeded 30 million.
On two sides of the world, Irabu was a baseball rock star with magnetic
appeal — figuratively and literally.
He beat the Detroit Tigers that night, July 10, 1997, with 30 small magnets
taped to his right arm, the point of which was to help improve blood flow and
relaxation. Over six and two-thirds innings in a 10-3 victory, he struck out
nine, was given a curtain-call salute by the crowd and appeared well armed
for success with a four-year, $12.8 million contract and what his catcher,
Joe Girardi, called “probably the hardest splitter I’ve ever seen.”
But it was a long way down from that starry, starry night, apparently all the
way to Irabu’s death at 42 in Southern California, where he was found
Wednesday at home by a friend. Ed Winter, the assistant chief coroner of Los
Angeles County, said Thursday that the death was being investigated as a
suicide.
In a 2008 interview with The New York Times, Irabu’s agent, Don Nomura, said
of his former client, “He has a good life.” A home in Rancho Palos Verdes;
a wife, Kyonsu; and two children — so what went wrong?
Bobby Valentine, who managed Irabu for one season in Japan, said the issue
was more what didn’t go right and that indisputably was Irabu’s six-year
career in the major leagues after nine dominating seasons in Japan.
“Honestly, I really think he had a hard time dealing with that,” Valentine
said in a telephone interview.
Two years after Hideo Nomo was a rookie sensation with the Los Angeles
Dodgers, Irabu decided to follow him to the United States despite having two
years remaining on his contract with the Chiba Lotte Marines. The strong-arm
tactic was perceived by the Japanese public as one of betrayal, but Irabu,
born to an absentee American father and a mother from a hardscrabble slice of
Okinawa, was a committed rebel with a cause.
He wanted to pitch for one, and only one, team in the United States and he
succeeded in forcing the San Diego Padres to trade his rights to the Yankees.
The deal on the San Diego end was made by Larry Lucchino, who went on to more
confrontations with the Yankees from the Red Sox’ front office and branded
George Steinbrenner’s organization as the “evil empire.”
The good news for Irabu was also the bad news. He ultimately got what he
wished for.
“My surmise is that Irabu was somebody who had a really tough time growing
up in a very tough neighborhood as a mixed-race person, which in Japan’s
homogenous society can be difficult,” said William Kelly, a Yale
anthropology professor and author who has written on Japanese sports and
culture. “He had a thick skin and independent streak and coming to the U.S.
he probably miscalculated, thinking that players with an edge were admired.”
Eventually the reality and rigidity of the Yankees — not to mention the
oppressive pressure — cast Irabu as a pariah within his own organization. He
won a combined 24 games in the championship years of 1998 and 1999 but never
started a playoff game and was shelled in his only postseason appearance.
Disappointed in what he had paid for, Steinbrenner didn’t help by pinning a
forever label on Irabu — fat toad — when the 6-foot-4, 240-pound
right-hander failed to cover first base in an exhibition game and was deemed
overweight and unworthy.
“It may be that Nomura did not serve him well as an agent,” Kelly said. “
In the end, Irabu might have been better off in San Diego.”
Valentine agreed that Irabu was “set up to fail” in New York, but that he
often was guilty as charged by Steinbrenner in terms of failing to get the
most out of his ability.
“He was a world-class pitcher and he wasted a lot of time doing things he
shouldn’t have been doing,” Valentine said in a telephone interview. Asked
for an example, Valentine said, “He liked to drink beer.”
After pitching for the Yankees and Montreal, Irabu returned to have success
in Japan but wound up in Southern California after he retired. In the 2008
interview, Nomura said Irabu preferred the relative anonymity in the United
States and preferred that his children get an American education.
He also had apparently not yet given up on baseball — or drinking. In 2009,
at 39 and between arrests in Japan for assaulting a bartender and in Los
Angeles for driving while intoxicated, he signed to pitch for a team in an
independent league.
“He was excited to come back to baseball,” Hideki Okuda, who interviewed
Irabu for a Japanese publication, Sports Nippon, said Thursday in a telephone
interview. “He wanted to prove himself in the independent league and thought
that he would have a comeback again in the major league or in Japan.”
Okuda also said that it was likely that Irabu felt a profound sense of
failure, given the success of Nomo and other Japanese players — namely
Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki — who came after.
“Remember, people called him the Japanese Nolan Ryan back then,” he said. “
Such high expectations. High pressure. Famous owner. But the only thing I can
say is that it was his choice.”
這篇文章算是對伊良部秀輝在洋基時期蓋棺論定的緬懷文章.....
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08/03 22:12, , 1F
08/03 22:12, 1F