Q5. There will be some turnover of players over the course of the next few years, but there will remain a core who will remember the issues that they had with Ichiro. Is it in the teams best interest to move Ichiro and perhaps remove a potential thorn from their side?

I think that, within a year, most of the players who have had the biggest issues with Ichiro will be gone. [Washburn & Co. - Dr D]

I do think there will still be players who take issue with how he plays the game, unless he becomes more open to them and explains why he does the things he does. No one takes issue with his work habits. It's that some of them perceive that he doesn't play the game the right way. That he sacrifices team goals for numbers and there is a huge difference in these two things.

Also known as "Tony Gwynn disease."

Gwynn's teammates always accused him of caring about his base hits and not about the club -- "We lose and he gets three hits, he's chatting up the clubhouse. We win and he goes o-fer, forget it. He's ticked."

This kind of thing drives ballplayers up the wall. And they perceive Ichiro of being this way, mostly because he simply is so blasted intelligent that he isn't understood well.

The ex-ballplayers in the booth can barely contain their rage when there is a man on 2B, 0 out, and Ichiro bunts SAFELY for a base hit. So you know that in the clubhouse they're doing the same thing.

The sabermetrician understands that Ichiro is helping the team, and Ichiro understands that. But the ballplayers, not familiar with the RE charts, think that Ichiro has hurt the team. This is the kind of disconnect that drives the resentment.

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Between two English-speaking players, like with Gwynn, somebody would walk by and make a snide little swipe about the decision, and Gwynn would stop it. At least for a while.

But Ichiro evidently doesn't communicate with his teammates -- partly out of contempt, I'm sure -- and so the situation festers.

Tony Gwynn-Itis, under a pressure cooker.

But as Geoff says,

By the same token, the players who've had the biggest issues with Ichiro refuse to address him directly. They bicker behind his back. That's a problem as well. Even with the teams I played on in the amateur football ranks, everyone knew that, if you had a problem with someone, you tell them to their face and try to get past it. It's called being a man. You don't sit and bicker under your breath.

Geoff is a football player, not a baseball player, and so he (like me) sees a lot of this behavior as catty -- taking place in the wrong-gender clubhouse, so to speak. :- )

The solution isn't going to be Ichiro offering a class in Baseball 101. As stated, the solution is going to be the team becoming younger around Ichiro, his teammates having stars in their eyes about him so to speak, and a winning team wiping away a lot of the bitterness.

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I found this clubhouse report to be very encouraging.

I didn't realize that it might be possible to overcome the racial and cultural bias against Ichiro and Johjima, but after considering Geoff's thoughts, things look different. Maybe it is just a question of washing out 30-something, loser-accustomed, catty veterans, and putting younger players in around these Japanese samurai.

As with Bedard also, personalities become less important, as the games become more important. For Ichiro, for Bedard and for others, their ability to perform begins to outweigh their people skills, precisely to the degree that the games become more important.

Winning cures a lot of things :- ) not least because it puts people's heads in the right spot.

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Absolutely amazing, BTW, that the interim-GM refused to unload Jarrod Washburn's salary last year -- apparently because the other clubs held the line on the prospects coming back. Can't lose face by caving in, y'know.

There aren't many GM decisions that I rip as not having a reasonable logic behind it, some way or other. But *THAT* was a decision well worthy of criticism.

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This is a Big Idea that Geoff points out for the Mariner blog-o-sphere to chew on: that the sour chemistry can be replaced, as the handful of 30-ish "veteran leaders" are flushed out with the cool, clear water of the Jeff Clements, Wlad Balentiens and Brandon Morrows.

It's almost never commented on, but this is the type of thing that M's management has to consider, when choosing between a Jerry Hairston or a Tug Hulett, an Endy Chavez or a Wlad Balentien. The personalities in the clubhouse are indeed a factor for real-world roster architects.

Good stuff,

Dr D

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