
How do NHL teams pick their captains?
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Ryan S. Clark, NHL reporterJan 23, 2024, 07:00 AM ET
Close- Ryan S. Clark is an NHL reporter for ESPN.
Fixing whatever was wrong with the Vancouver Canucks became Rick Tocchet’s priority when he was hired by the team last January. And fix them he did, as they won 20 of the final 36 games of the 2022-23 season.
Tocchet was also charged with another task by the Canucks’ front office: finding the next captain. Going through the search prompted him to step back. He wanted to see how players reacted after the Canucks won or lost. If Tocchet voiced his displeasure with the team’s performance, he wanted to see how particular players approached practice the next day.
“I saw a lot of players grow over those three months,” Tocchet said. “Then came the hard decision: Do you wait a year? Is the guy we’re going to pick, is he ready? Are there a bunch of guys that are ready? Or do we wait? That was the big decision. Do we wait or do we pull the trigger because we have a guy who’s emerging.”
Ultimately, the Canucks chose Quinn Hughes as their next captain. But what was the process they used to get there? Who were the stakeholders involved in the decision? How long did it take? And how much did it help to meet Hughes’ parents before giving him one of the most important roles in the NHL?
These are just a few examples of the types of questions NHL franchises must answer when selecting a captain.
A deep dive into this process is even more relevant this season. The Canucks were one of six teams to choose a new captain, while five teams have yet to name one. That means 11 teams — or more than one-third of the NHL — faced some sort of captaincy decision within the past six months.
What one team might seek in a captain could be different from another; the selection process can vary too. Some franchises seek input from numerous voices. Others prefer a smaller circle. There have been times when either the front office or ownership makes the final decision. Others leave it up to the coach.
Even that part of the process raises questions about whether players should have a more active role in determining who becomes captain, now that player empowerment has taken on greater importance in professional sports leagues.
“A lot of people take pride in it,” New Jersey Devils captain Nico Hischier said. “It’s a huge honor if a team has the faith and the confidence in you to lead the team. In the hockey world, it’s an honorable thing to get that because it comes with such a high standard.”
CAPTAINCY WORKS DIFFERENTLY in the NHL than in the other three major men’s professional leagues.
Major League Baseball teams have named captains in the past, though they don’t typically wear a letter. The only current MLB player with a “C” for “captain” on his jersey is Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez.
The NBA is the same. In 2022, the Golden State Warriors had the C on one of their classic edition jerseys. But prior to that, the last team to have a C on its jerseys was the New Orleans Hornets in 2011-12. In both cases, multiple players wore the C while being on the court together.
In the NFL, teams are allowed to have as many as six captains. A few teams rotate the role weekly. This season, rookie quarterbacks Anthony Richardson, C.J. Stroud and Bryce Young became captains for their respective clubs.
The NHL is more static by comparison. There’s only one captain who wears the C on his sweater, while alternate captains wear an “A.” Captaincy can change, however, if a player gets traded, steps down from the role or has it stripped.
While the NHL has had a history of young captains, some of whom were teenagers when they took over, there has never been a rookie that has worn the C in modern league history.
“I’m not going to lie, I’m not sure if at 22 that I was totally ready for it,” Seattle Kraken general manager Ron Francis said. “You’re learning kind of on the job. As a young kid, you’re trying to establish yourself in the league and help the team win. There’s a lot of other things that go along with being a good captain, and as a young kid, you try to balance that.”
Francis said a challenge that came with being a young captain was talking to players who had more experience. The Hartford Whalers were in a transitional phase when they named Francis their captain. That year, the Whalers had nine players younger than 22 who played more than 50 games. They also had 10 players older than Francis who also appeared in more than 50 games.
“It’s not an easy thing at times,” Francis said. “But anytime you get to wear a C for an organization, it’s very flattering.”
Tocchet and Carolina Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour elaborated on how much linking age to captaincy has changed over time. Tocchet was a 27-year-old with eight seasons under his belt when the Philadelphia Flyers named him captain at the start of the 1991-92 season.
Tocchet said being a 27-year-old captain at that time was considered young because there were so many captains in their 30s. In Tocchet’s first season as captain, he was the seventh youngest in the league. Trevor Linden was the youngest captain, at 21. But there were 14 older than 29.
“Now the trend is a little bit different,” Tocchet said. “Most of the teams are going younger, or it’s one of those cases like with [Alex] Ovechkin or [Sidney] Crosby for years where they have been mainstays. Same with [John] Tavares and the Islanders. Now, you’re getting more of the Brady Tkachuks in Ottawa and Hughes for us who are the star players that are emerging as leaders.”
It’s a contrast from when Brind’Amour first became a captain. He was an alternate at 24 with the Flyers but didn’t become an NHL captain until he was 35, with the Hurricanes.
“A lot of it, too, was the guys I played with were great leaders,” Brind’Amour said. “How it came about with us was when Ron Francis left and it was like, ‘Now, I’ll take it over’ kind of thing.”
Back in 2003-04, the average age of an NHL captain was 32. The league had five captains who were older than 40 with the oldest being 43-year-old Mark Messier. The youngest at the time was Patrick Marleau, at 24. In 2013-14, the average age of a captain was 29. The oldest at the time was Martin St. Louis, who was 38, while the youngest was Gabriel Landeskog at 21.
The NHL’s current captaincy demographics reflect Tocchet’s point about a shift. Ovechkin is the oldest captain, at 38, while there are three captains — Nick Suzuki, Hughes and Tkachuk — who are each 24. Although the average age for a captain this season is 31, there are quite a few players who inherited the role at an early age.
Crosby and Ovechkin were at the vanguard of that shift when teams started naming younger captains. It was a trend in the 2010s when players such as Dustin Brown, Ryan Getzlaf, Mike Richards and Jonathan Toews inherited the captaincy before they turned 25. It continued when Landeskog and Connor McDavid were named captains as teenagers.
While Crosby and Ovechkin are the longest-serving captains in the NHL, they’re part of a group of 12 current players who received the C before they were 25. It’s a group that also includes Aleksander Barkov, Jamie Benn, Dylan Larkin, Steven Stamkos, Hischier, Hughes, Suzuki and Tkachuk.
Those players are all considered the best player or among the best players on their team and currently have (or had at the time) long-term contracts.
How important are those factors in choosing a captain?
“What you want in a perfect world is a player that the other players can emulate,” Florida Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “Not necessarily to emulate the skill, but the work ethic. So, there are some captains that are disconnected slightly from the group because nobody can do what they can do. Some of these elite guys are just freakshows.”
Like McDavid?
“I don’t even want to use his name, because Connor may also be the hardest-working guy on the ice and I don’t know that,” Maurice explained. “But what you want as a coach for your 13th forward and your seventh defenseman is to say, ‘I don’t expect you to score 50, but I expect you to try as hard as he’s trying.’ For a coach, the value of having that kind of person as your captain is invaluable.”
Colorado Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said whether it’s a captain or an alternate captain, the goal is to find someone who wants success for the team and not just themselves. Getting to that point takes time, Bednar said, because the first few years are about a player just trying to survive in the NHL before they can take the next step.
“It’s an ideal situation if your players wearing letters and your leaders in the room can be your best players,” Bednar said. “That’s who the team is following and relying on. In [Nathan MacKinnon‘s] case, he’s playing 23 [minutes] a night. In Cale [Makar‘s] case, it’s 25 to 30 a night. … These guys are on the ice the most. We’re relying on them the most. If they’re our strongest leaders, I feel comfortable not only with them focusing on their own game but being able to help the team. To me, that’s the ideal situation.”
FOR AN ORGANIZATION to have its best or one of its best players feel comfortable taking on such a large responsibility is not always a given.
The Canucks quickly learned that was never going to be an issue with Hughes.
That became evident during the defenseman’s rookie season. He was averaging nearly 22 minutes of ice time, which was the second most by a Canucks player. Hughes was second in 5-on-5 ice time among defensemen and had the most power-play minutes.
Such a heavy workload allowed Hughes to reach a certain conclusion.
“I feel like whenever we weren’t playing well, it was because I wasn’t playing well or [Elias Pettersson] wasn’t playing well,” Hughes said. “So I feel like I’ve been a leader in that sense for a long time, and I feel like that’s been on my shoulders. Over the years, I’ve just felt confident.”
Canucks center and alternate captain J.T. Miller said the moment he realized Hughes could be named the team’s next captain came when Tocchet arrived. The Canucks entered the 2022-23 season with the expectation they could take the success they had under Bruce Boudreau and harness it into a postseason appearance.
The opposite happened. They struggled to find consistency under Boudreau, which led to his firing and Tocchet’s hiring. A coaching change was only part of the equation, with the team trading captain Bo Horvat during the season as well.
“[Tocchet] challenged the leadership group to be better and demand more of ourselves and our teammates,” Miller said. “Quinn went from being pretty quiet to a big voice in our locker room. It was not any one thing in particular. He, day by day, got better and better growing into the role, and he’s just going to continue to grow in that regard. The last 20, 30 games of the year, he was the guy driving the boat, and it’s why we all have his back and why we all believe in him.”
Even though Hughes understood the responsibility and had the support of teammates such as Miller, there were still no presumptions about who would wear the C. Because Tocchet had been a captain himself and was the head coach of the Arizona Coyotes when they named Oliver Ekman-Larsson their captain, he knew what he wanted out of his next captain.
“To me, more than ever, it’s about being an example,” Tocchet said. “It’s going on the ice early. If things aren’t going well, are you doing the right things? You get blown out, are you leaving the room when the media wants to talk? Are you hiding? These are things that I pick up. Everyone is a great leader when things are great. But when things aren’t going great, what kind of leader are you?”
Tocchet said the primary stakeholders with a captaincy decision are usually the head coach, the GM, the team president and ownership. He said there can be more voices but that it’s also about finding a balance.
How does it work among those stakeholders? Do they vote? Do they arrive at a consensus? Do they decide that one person gets to have the final decision? And if so, who is it? Is it the owner because it’s their team? Is it the coach, GM or president?
“Imagine if we had five people sitting there and we had five different answers,” Tocchet said. “It’s like, ‘Who wins?’ I’ve never had that situation. If you had five different people with five different answers saying who they want as captain? I don’t know who wins. I think management and ownership would tend to say it’s the coach’s room, and they give the coach the final say, I would think. But thank God because we didn’t have five different answers.”
In the Canucks’ case, it was chairman and owner Francesco Aquilini, team president Jim Rutherford, GM Patrik Allvin and Tocchet who made the decision. Tocchet said that Aquilini, Allvin and Rutherford all agreed that it should ultimately be the coach’s choice.
Tocchet checked in with former Canucks coach Travis Green, a close friend, for his take. Green told Tocchet that Hughes came to the rink and put in the work.
Tocchet mentioned that when the Canucks were going through a difficult stretch last season, he watched how Hughes got better. He watched how Hughes stepped up in the midst of uncomfortable moments and said things that Tocchet knew weren’t easy to voice.
“Even to some of his buddies on the leadership group, that was uncomfortable for him,” Tocchet said. “Would he have said that a year prior? I don’t know. I just saw his emergence.”
Tocchet said that Hughes, Miller and Petterssen were all players who “had the qualities” to be the Canucks’ captain. What stood out about Hughes for Tocchet was the fact that he “knew where he stood in the organization” and was willing to take the next step.
“It’s coming to the rink early and not just showing up for practice,” Tocchet said. “It’s staying after practice and working with a young kid or picking up a kid for lunch. Not being selfish. Those were the little things that I saw emerge. It just insulated what I thought in terms of a guy who could be a great leader for this team.”
Aquilini, Allvin, Rutherford and Tocchet periodically spoke throughout the summer about the captaincy decision facing their team. Tocchet said they were leaning toward picking Hughes but had one last thing they wanted to do before finalizing their decision.
They invited Hughes and his parents out to lunch to learn more about him and his background.
“I think that’s the final cherry on top. It’s about their values. His dad’s a terrific guy, and his mom was terrific at lunch. I think that kind of sold it that we made the right decision,” Tocchet said. “I respected that Jim [Rutherford] really wanted to have some kind of sit-down with the family. It kind of checked the box that, ‘OK, we made the right decision.'”
BEING AN NHL CAPTAIN comes with several responsibilities. They often serve as the conduit between the coaching staff and the dressing room. They usually talk to the on-ice officials during games.
They also must present themselves as the face of the franchise whether their team is about to win the Stanley Cup or endure a season near the basement.
So how does it work for a player who used to wear the C for one team but goes to another team where that job belongs to someone else? And if those former captains are asked to be part of their new team’s leadership group, how do they toe the line between knowing when to help versus overstepping?
“If you’re getting a letter, that means you’re seen by the organization as responsible for more than just yourself,” Nashville Predators center Ryan O’Reilly said. “I think that’s encouraging, and you have to have those tough conversations when things aren’t going well. It brings more responsibility for everyone.”
O’Reilly was an alternate captain when he played for the Buffalo Sabres and for Canada at different tournaments. He captained the St. Louis Blues for two-plus seasons until he was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs last season.
Toronto already had an established captain in John Tavares, but O’Reilly was another experienced player who could be one more voice within their leadership group. O’Reilly signed with the Predators in free agency, going to another team that had an established captain, Roman Josi, and gave him the chance to be part of the team’s leadership group.
O’Reilly, who is an alternate captain with the Predators, said captaining the Blues allowed him to further appreciate the importance of having the sort of strong leadership group that was able to supplement his efforts when he wore the C.
“There’s so many guys that did certain things that helped me along that I wasn’t good at doing,” O’Reilly said. “Whether that was conversations with the GM — there were guys who were better at that who did that. I think there are so many different leadership roles within a team, and guys do so many things differently that there are so many guys who could wear it.”
Vegas Golden Knights captain Mark Stone echoed a similar sentiment. Stone was an alternate captain for two seasons with the Ottawa Senators before he was traded to the Golden Knights where he ultimately became the first captain in franchise history.
For having alternate captains Jack Eichel and Alex Pietrangelo — who each know what it’s like to wear the C Eichel captained the Sabres for three seasons, while Pietrangelo had the same role for the Blues for four seasons.
“Since I have been the captain here I haven’t had to do nearly as much as I thought, and the reason being is Petro’s been a captain, Jack’s been a captain,” Stone said. “[Alec Martinez] is a three-time Stanley Cup champion. [Jonathan] Marchessault, [William] Karlsson and [William] Carrier have been here and started the culture. We’re just continuing that. … I’m not saying it’s easy, but being the captain of the Vegas Golden Knights is easier than a lot of places because of the foundation that’s been built from the top down.”
COULD THE SELECTION process ever change? The majority of players to whom we spoke for this story said it has been up to the coaching staff or management to choose the captains, from the time they played in either college or major junior through the NHL.
Because the captain’s role carries so much weight, is it possible that the NHL and its teams could eventually allow players to have more say? In the NFL, some teams have players vote on captains, which is what the San Francisco 49ers did this season, resulting in second-year quarterback Brock Purdy being named one of their six.
Avs veteran defenseman Jack Johnson said players didn’t really have a say on much when he broke into the league back in 2007. He said that has since changed, and he used sports science as an example as to why. Johnson said coaches have become open to hearing from players about when they need to be pushed versus when they need rest, based on the data they’re receiving from heart rate monitors. That could lead to openness on other decisions.
“I think you need to take some input from the players when it comes to captaincies and leadership,” Johnson said. “At the end of the day, the players are behind closed doors and whenever your boss is around, you’re well behaved and buttoned up. But it’s the guys in the room that really have the true pulse of who the leaders are, what guys’ true colors are like and what guys are like away from the rink.”
But there are certain situations when everyone from management to players knows who should be a team’s captain, which is a point that Panthers alternate captain Aaron Ekblad made when he was asked whether players should vote.
“Whether the players chose it or management chose it, I think 90% of the time — or even 95% of the time — it would still be the same decision,” Ekblad said. “If the players chose it, I still think Barky would be our captain.”
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How Ichiro’s HOF induction helps tell the story of Japanese baseball
Published
8 hours agoon
August 2, 2025By
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Bradford DoolittleJul 29, 2025, 10:35 AM ET
Close- MLB writer and analyst for ESPN.com
- Former NBA writer and analyst for ESPN.com
- Been with ESPN since 2013
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Hall of Famers coming to Cooperstown — the newbies and the veterans alike — are typically subject to a fairly regimented schedule. They have a garden party. Ozzie Smith holds an annual charity event. There’s a golf tournament on Saturday morning. They roll down Main Street on Saturday night during the Parade of Legends. Finally, there is the induction itself.
Ichiro Suzuki, a 2025 inductee, took part in much of this, but even though he is an avid golfer, he did not play in the golf tournament. It turns out that doing so would’ve meant that he wouldn’t be able to maintain his usual workout routine. So he headed out to one of the numerous Little League fields a few miles outside of Cooperstown and got in his work.
At 51 years old, he follows the same routine he always has. He played long toss, did his stretching and running, played catch with Billy Wagner’s son — an aspiring ballplayer himself — and took batting practice against Wagner.
When asked why, Ichiro kept it simple.
“Because I love it,” he said.
That much has been clear, not only through his 19-year MLB career but well before it and since. His induction weekend was not the first time Ichiro made the pilgrimage to Cooperstown — he has been here many times. Each trek he made as a player was to view and study different relics that held special meaning to him.
“You just don’t see players come to the Hall of Fame, while they’re actively playing in the winter time — seven, eight times, because they just want to touch the bat of the guy whose record they broke,” Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch said, “or be here in the freezing cold and snow to see this place.”
Ichiro didn’t limit those travels to the stops in Cooperstown — he famously visited the gravesite of Hall of Famer George Sisler after he broke Sisler’s single-season hit record in 2004 — but the beauty of the Hall of Fame is that it ties all of these interlocking stories together, linking the stars of the past with the stars of the present with the stars of the even more distant past, and in some cases, the stars of the future.
For a person like Ichiro, who is deeply interested in historical artifacts and the stories they represent, there is no better place than Cooperstown, and there is no better ambassador for Cooperstown than Ichiro.
“The history of baseball is very important,” Ichiro said. “We’re able to play the game today because of players of the past. I really want to understand them and know more about them. I think we all need to know the game of the past, things of the past, so we can keep moving it forward.”
Ichiro’s plaque there suggests the closing of a historical, cultural and symbolic loop that brings together two great baseball cultures.
It was the converging of paths, joining the practice of yakyu, the game Ichiro began playing at age 3, and the pastime of baseball, the game he still plays — with ritualistic abandon — at 51.
For all of the cultural significance and the historic nature of Ichiro’s induction, it’s this work ethic and his meticulous nature that is almost certainly going to be his greatest legacy. And it’s one that spins into the future, as he blazes a path to serve as a guide for the Japanese and American stars of the future — and present — to follow.
Before Shohei Ohtani, there was Ichiro. Before Ichiro, there were many, but none who followed the path that perhaps only he could see.
EVEN BEFORE SUNDAY, Ichiro Suzuki had a Hall of Fame plaque on a wall. That one was hung in January at the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame Museum, located within the Tokyo Dome.
The contrast between Cooperstown, a tiny rustic village in upstate New York, and Tokyo, one of the world’s largest and most dense cities, couldn’t be more stark. But the baseball galleries within them look very similar, right up to the shape and size of the plaques themselves.
This is no coincidence. The American version came first; the very concept of a Hall of Fame is a purely American convention. So when one was built in Japan, back in the late 1950s, it was an early sign of the dissolution of differences between the two leading baseball cultures.
The differences, convergences and exchanges between the two is the story told in the Hall of Fame’s stunning new exhibit “Yakyu | Baseball: The Transpacific Exchange of the Game.”
“This isn’t just an exhibition about baseball in Japan,” said RJ Lara, the curator of the exhibit. “This isn’t just an exhibition about baseball in the United States. It’s about how the two countries and how baseball in two countries has come together and exchanged equipment, ideas, concepts, players, teams.”
Baseball’s roots in Japan trace to the 1850s, the game exported there by visiting Americans and seafarers. For decades, even as the popularity of baseball spread, it remained a strictly amateur practice, with the college level seen as the pinnacle of the sport into the middle of the 20th century.
While baseball grew into America’s pastime as a source of joy and play for anyone who could toss a ball or swing a bat, in Japan, at least in the early years, yakyu was viewed as a martial art. In fact, the first thing you see when you walk into the exhibit is a suit of traditional Samurai armor, full of red and gold — a gift from the Yomiuri Giants to Los Angeles Dodgers president Peter O’Malley in 1988.
Yakyu, one of the Japanese words for baseball, describes a game that evolved from the American version and still differs in mainly intangible ways and strategic preferences. The gap between the two has narrowed, as the success of Ichiro, Ohtani and others strongly suggests. But it might never completely disappear.
The “Samurai Way of Baseball” — as author Robert Whiting described it — meant a painstaking focus on practice and repetition, a heavy emphasis on fundamentals and a standardized version of the game in which every discrete act had a precise method behind it, and everything was about the team: the “wa,” as outlined by Whiting in the seminal “You Gotta Have Wa.”
Starting around 1905, teams on both sides of the Pacific began making the voyage to compete against one another. But the biggest influence on the professionalization of baseball in Japan came in 1934, when a team of American barnstormers stuffed with future Hall of Famers — including Babe Ruth — toured the country, drawing huge crowds nearly everywhere they went.
Plans for a professional league were already being hatched, and the success of the 1934 tour helped to cement them. The Yomiuri Giants were founded in 1935, and, as longtime Tokyo resident Whiting put it, grew into a behemoth that became as popular as the Dodgers, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox combined. It set the stage for Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima and the legends who laid the foundation of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) — and the collision of Japanese and American baseball that the exhibit celebrates.
THE YAKYU EXHIBIT has three centerpieces, and appropriately the first one you encounter focuses on Hideo Nomo. (Ichiro is the second and, though you can probably guess who is the third, we will come to that a bit later.)
Nomo was not the first Japanese-born player to make the transition to the major leagues: The seal was broken in the mid-1960s, when Masanori Murakami pitched two seasons for the San Francisco Giants. There was a lot of rancor in Japan over the move, and after two seasons, Murakami went back to Japan. Meanwhile, greats such as Oh and Nagashima stayed put, both spending their careers with Yomiuri, thanks to the reserve clause in place in Japan, as well as a societal pressure to remain true to Japanese baseball.
Oh talked in later years about how he would’ve liked to have played in the majors, but he just couldn’t do it. The taboo against jumping the pond remained in place until the mid-1990s. This was when Nomo “retired” from his team in Japan, a ploy cooked up by agent Don Nomura to exploit a loophole. Nomo ended up with the Dodgers, and Nomo-mania was born.
Nomo was heavily criticized at the time in Japan, and doubt existed in America about whether a Japanese player could truly make the leap. Nomo more than proved his ability to make the transition, and did so with such verve that it swept through Southern California and beyond, and also captivated audiences in Japan. The practice of baseball fans on the other side of the Pacific rising in the early morning to watch MLB began at that time.
The exhibit features some of Nomo’s equipment, as well as videos of hitters flailing at his nasty splitter. There are also some model baseballs with which you can try to simulate the grips Nomo used on his various pitches, including that splitter.
Jack Morris was in the midst of praising the nastiness of Nomo’s splitter when fellow Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith interjected, “You should try to hit it!”
NOMO’S DEBUT SEASON in 1995 preceded the now-celebrated 1996 Japan tour, which saw an MLB all-star team that included Cal Ripken Jr. play an eight-game series against players from the NPB, then called All-Japan. Ripken had gone on a similar tour in 1986, along with Morris and Smith, and a decade later he already noticed a marked difference in the caliber of play from his Japanese opponents.
“Going over there, you kind of look and shake your head and go, ‘These people are crazy about baseball,'” Ripken said. “They were talking about drawing 60,000 fans for a high school championship game.
“I thought the Japanese were always really competitive and very serious. They wanted to do really well. They wanted to beat us.”
One of the opponents of the all-star group in 1996 was Ichiro, and that experience for the Japanese star, in combination with the phenomenon that Nomo created, began to turn his head toward the other side of the Pacific. He wanted to test himself.
“The excitement I felt in that series was definitely a turning point,” Ichiro told author Narumi Komatsu in “Ichiro on Ichiro.” “Instead of something I just admired from afar, the majors became a set goal of mine.”
Ichiro had become a phenomenon in his home country, his face splattered on billboards all over Tokyo and beyond, as he exploded on the scene by becoming the first player in Japanese professional history to record 200 hits in a season, setting the since-broken record of 210 at age 20. He hit .353 during his nine years for Orix, which would far away be the all-time highest average in Japanese history if he qualified for the career leaderboard.
He did it in his own way, forging a path unlike any players before him. He famously refused to change the batting stance he’d used since high school — much to the chagrin of his first manager with Orix.
Ichiro also donned the name “Ichiro” on his jersey, departing from Japanese tradition. Suzuki is a common name in Japan and his club felt that would make him all the more marketable, which it did. To this day, in baseball everywhere, when you hear the name “Ichiro”, you know exactly who’s being referenced.
Bobby Valentine, who initially bucked against tradition when he went to manage in Japan, eschewing conventions such as marathon practice sessions and incessant meetings, saw things evolving, especially when he prepared for his first stint with the Chiba Lotte Marines in 1995, the year Nomo debuted with the Dodgers.
“That was the year after Ichiro was Rookie of the Year for Orix in 1994,” Valentine said. “Every night, all the coaches got together and looked at video and looked at charts, trying to figure out one guy, Ichiro.
“He showed me what he could do. I asked him for an autographed bat and told him that he was one of the best players I ever saw.”
Later, when Valentine was managing the New York Mets, he unsuccessfully lobbied his front office to pursue Ichiro.
“I was told at the end of the day, that they didn’t want a singles hitter in the outfield,” Valentine said mournfully. “And I said, ‘What if you get 200 of them?’ I swear. And he got like 240 of them.”
AT TIMES, IT has been far from certain that the paths that came together through Ichiro on Sunday would indeed merge. That part of the story isn’t overlooked in the yakyu exhibit.
It’s depicted in a couple of very different ways that relate the baseball sliver of the story of the years during and after World War II, including the post-war period when the United States occupied Japan under the supervision of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
One object from the war years is the most melancholy relic in the exhibition, and indeed perhaps in the entire Hall of Fame.
It is a handmade, wooden home plate that once was part of Zenimura Field at the Gila River in Arizona internment camp during the war. The field was built by Kenichi Zenimura, a baseball advocate born in Hiroshima who spent most of his childhood in Hawaii.
The home plate is a a solemn reminder of how the forces that too often keep nations apart can’t be overcome by baseball alone. But if baseball can’t keep nations from conflict, conflict can’t keep people from baseball.
“It was the anchor of the Gila River community, and that’s how we like to describe it,” Lara said. “During these tragic, incredibly hard times at this camp in Arizona, it was the anchor that brought the community together, around a single baseball diamond that they built with their hands.”
After the war, when the occupation of Japan began, much of the country, and especially Tokyo, was in ruin. The battle for the ideological soul of the country was well underway in those early years of the Cold War, and the influence of communist Russia was of chief concern for the Americans.
MacArthur thought that reigniting the dormant cultural elements of Japanese society might help to calm things down and help make some headway in turning heads from the encroaching communist influence. With many of the country’s cultural institutions in rubble or ashes, sports, especially baseball — which can be played outside and a sport the Japanese already loved — was the answer.
Author Robert K. Fitts describes the sequence in “Banzai Babe Ruth.” League play resumed in 1946. Things improved enough that in 1947, Japan celebrated Babe Ruth Day at the same time that the major leagues were honoring the dying slugger. Quality of play began to recover but the overall fervor around yakyu still fell short of the pre-war years.
In 1949, on a suggestion from MacArthur staffer Cappy Harada, the project was turned over to Lefty O’Doul, who had fallen in love with Japan on a 1931 tour with other major leaguers and played a key role in helping convince Ruth to join the 1934 tour.
O’Doul, manager of the San Francisco Seals, brought his Pacific Coast League squad to Japan after the 1949 season to tour the country. The Seals were welcomed with a parade and, over the course of four weeks, helped boost the morale of a struggling nation. One evening before a game, for the first time, the flags of the United States and Japan were raised together, bringing many fans to tears.
Japanese journalist and historian Tadao Kunishi sees the O’Doul tour as one of the turning points in the evolution of Japanese baseball, especially in its gradual move toward becoming more like the American game.
“During that time, Japan was still doing the rebuilding,” Kunishi said. “We did not have much entertainment, and baseball is outside. So many movie theaters were burned down, so they cannot play, but baseball is outside, and anybody can go there. And really [Lefty] O’Doul brought the joy of watching baseball.”
A veritable baseball Forrest Gump, O’Doul always seemed to be in the middle of baseball history. He pitched for John McGraw. He converted to hitting and one year batted .398 in the National League. He managed and mentored life-long friend Joe DiMaggio, whom he brought along on a later, much-celebrated tour of Japan. He saw the potential of Japan as a baseball nation from the start.
“He said it was just a matter of time that Japanese ballplayers are going to be playing in America,” said Tom O’Doul, Lefty’s cousin. “And they’re going to be playing American baseball because they’re good and they respect the game. And that’s what happened.”
Though you don’t need to attribute the eventual boom in Japan — baseball and beyond — entirely to Lefty O’Doul and baseball, those tours proved to be a turning point in the ongoing exchange in the sport between Japan and America, which had seemed hopelessly severed.
THE THIRD CENTERPIECE of the yakyu exhibit, along with Nomo and Ichiro, as you probably have guessed, is the display for Shohei Ohtani, who is in the midst of a Hall of Fame career, and thus years away from joining Ichiro in the Japanese and the American plaque rooms. But he will get there.
Ohtani’s display looms in the back of the room behind Ichiro and indeed, from a certain angle as you stand there and look upon Ichiro’s uniform and bat and shoes and batting glove, a little lower to the left and against the wall behind him, you see an image of Decoy, the most famous dog — and literary muse — in all of baseball.
As for the player himself, Ohtani’s display is a stunning piece of museum technology. Depending on which angle you take to look at his image, you might see him pitching or hitting for the Los Angeles Angels, doing the same for the Dodgers, or celebrating the end of Japan’s victory in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, which he clinched by fanning Mike Trout for the last out.
The rise of Ohtani is also a chief part of the legacies of Oh and Nagashima and Nomo and Ichiro. By now, 74 players have made the transition to the major leagues — not all with resounding success, but many have reached All-Star status. All you have to do is look in the financial ledgers and the contracts that have been dolled out to the likes of Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki to know how Japanese stars are valued today.
For his part, Ichiro does think that the differences between yakyu and MLB have softened, but they still exist — and they should.
“It usually takes a few years for Japanese baseball to pick up the things that happen in major leagues,” Suzuki said. “It’s definitely getting closer.
“I don’t think that Japan should copy what the MLB does. I think Japanese baseball should be Japanese baseball in the way they do things, and MLB should be the way they are. I think they should be different.”
And yet in so many ways, Ichiro himself was the bridge. He was yakyu and he was baseball.
Ichiro, who will generally give frank answers about himself and his thoughts about baseball, almost always deflects when asked about the thoughts or impressions of others. He still does it.
When asked about his role or his sense of how Japanese fans are reacting to his induction to Cooperstown, he says he doesn’t know. When asked about his relationship to the current Japanese stars in the major leagues, he says that he sees them at the ballpark when they come through Seattle.
He doesn’t get any more detailed when asked about the path that he has opened up for other Japanese stars, but he does open up a little when discussing his role in spreading knowledge to the next generation of players on both sides of the Pacific.
“The players need to tell the younger players about the game,” Ichiro said. “That’s a responsibility that those who have played this game have. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to help in that aspect, but it’s something I’d really like to do.”
As much as anything, Ichiro’s legacy is helping to bring the paths of two different baseball cultures together.
“We used to say that yakyu and baseball are different games with the same rules,” Kunishi said. “Now yakyu and baseball is the same game and the same rules.”
As far as legacies go, that’s not bad, even if the process remains ongoing. In the meantime, Ichiro will be there, connected with Cooperstown and Japan alike, making sure that no aspects of all the history he has been a part of will be lost.
Sports
Alcantara: Uncertainty at trade deadline ‘hard’
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8 hours agoon
August 2, 2025By
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Associated Press
Aug 1, 2025, 07:40 PM ET
MIAMI — Sandy Alcantara admitted that Thursday was one of the hardest days of his career.
It has been thought all season that the Miami Marlins could move on from Alcantara amid their rebuilding project, which has included shipping out established players for prospects.
And as Thursday’s 6 p.m. ET trade deadline approached, the Marlins’ ace could not hide his nerves.
He sat in front of his television watching baseball programming with his family for most of the day, repeatedly checking his phone to see if he had been traded.
“It was hard, man,” Alcantara said Friday. “Every time I get on my phone, I see my name. I thought that I was leaving.”
Miami opted not to trade its 2022 NL Cy Young Award winner. In their only trade Thursday, the Marlins sent their longest-tenured position player, outfielder Jesús Sánchez, to the Houston Astros for right-hander Ryan Gusto and two prospects, infielder Chase Jaworsky and outfielder Esmil Valencia.
The rest of the team, which has won five straight series and went 15-10 in July, remains intact. Marlins president of baseball operations Peter Bendix said Friday that the club’s recent success, in part, factored into its approach at the deadline.
And manager Clayton McCullough said if there weren’t trade scenarios that “moved the needle for us in the near and the long term,” the Marlins were happy to continue competing with the group they have.
Amid what was expected to be a season of finding out which of its relatively inexperienced pieces Miami could build around in the future, the Marlins are third in the National League East at 52-55 and entered Friday seven games behind San Diego for the National League’s third wild-card spot.
Bendix declined to say how close Miami was to finalizing a trade for Alcantara but noted that the team “felt really comfortable” with its ultimate decision.
“All of the things that go into building a sustainably successful team were taken into consideration,” he said, “at a deadline where you have all of these decisions in front of you. It’s our job to be disciplined. Disciplined means listening, means having conversations, and then means trying to figure out the best decision to make for every decision point that we have.”
Alcantara has played most of his eight-year career in Miami, going 47-64 with a 3.64 ERA in 159 starts while becoming the first Miami player to win the Cy Young Award after a 2022 season in which he pitched a league-high 228 innings and six complete games.
Alcantara, 29, missed the 2024 season recovering from Tommy John surgery and hasn’t yet returned to form in 2025. He is 6-9 with a 6.36 ERA, and despite being known as one of MLB’s most durable starters, has pitched only seven innings once.
He said it has taken a new level of mental toughness to play through a season not knowing if he would finish the year with the Marlins.
“It was a little hard because everywhere you go, every time you grab your phone, you see your name on the media,” Alcantara said. “But you [can’t] think too much about it. Just stay focused on everything you can do. I just came here, and if something happened, it just happened.”
Alcantara’s most recent two starts have been his best, an indicator to both the player and the Marlins that he might be close to returning to his All-Star caliber play.
He allowed one run and four hits in a season-high seven innings against the San Diego Padres on July 23, then pitched five shutout innings in a win at St. Louis on Tuesday.
“Sandy is continuing to trend,” McCullough said. “And we’re going to continue to be the beneficiaries of having Sandy for the rest of the season, continuing to get back to the pitcher that we all know Sandy is.”
Sports
Rays place 1B Aranda on IL with fractured wrist
Published
8 hours agoon
August 2, 2025By
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Associated Press
Aug 1, 2025, 07:47 PM ET
TAMPA, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Rays placed All-Star first baseman Jonathan Aranda on the 10-day injured list Friday with a fractured left wrist.
Aranda was injured Thursday in a collision with New York Yankees designated hitter Giancarlo Stanton.
Aranda said the injury did not feel “catastrophic” and he’s hopeful he’ll return this season, although the Rays cautioned he won’t be able to use the wrist for approximately three weeks.
Aranda’s wrist has been immobilized in an air cast and he’s scheduled to undergo more imaging at the three-week mark. At that point, the Rays will reassess his return timetable.
“Let’s see how the bone heals,” manager Kevin Cash said before Friday night’s series opener against the Los Angeles Dodgers. “I think he has re-imaging in about three weeks, but we will continue to remain optimistic.”
Stanton hit a soft grounder in the fifth inning to third baseman Junior Caminero, who charged in on wet grass to field the ball. Aranda reached for Caminero’s wide toss that sailed into the runner, and his left wrist appeared to hit Stanton’s left shoulder.
Aranda, a first-time All-Star, is batting .316 with 12 home runs, 54 RBI in 103 games this season. He has a .394 on-base percentage, and an .872 OPS, making him one of the majors’ most dangerous hitters.
Cash shifted Yandy Díaz to first base in Aranda’s absence.
The Rays reinstated Ha-Seong Kim from the IL and recalled Tristan Gray from Triple-A Durham.
Trade deadline acquisitions Griffin Jax and Hunter Feduccia were active for Friday night’s game.
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