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His friend and former Orix BP pitcher, Koji Okumura, says Ichiro's swing has changed over the years. He now opens his hips and shows his chest to the pitcher earlier. "His eyesight is deteriorating," Okumura says. "He's trying to adjust to survive. He knows his death as a baseball player is getting closer."
Confirmed, then, that he's now both more upright and more open in his stance and confirmed that it likely produced the short-term gains in both walk rate and BA in late 2017