“Make sure you sit in the Ichiro section,” he said. “We love Ichiro here.”
He wasn’t kidding. I just happened to be in Seattle as the city hosted the All-Star festivities — I was in the middle of a meandering month-long road trip through the western half of the country, a handful of years before I started working at Sporting News — and I was going to watch the first Mariners game after the All-Star break with a buddy.
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We bought our tickets way down the first-base line, as close as we could reasonably get to the sensation that was Ichiro Suzuki, who was in his first year in the major leagues.