By Karen
These past couple of days, I've seen many people raving about Shohei Ohtani's baseball skills. I chatted with my husband about it and casually asked, "Is Shohei Ohtani really that amazing?" Without even looking back, he said, "Suzuki Ichiro is the one who's truly incredible!!"
Never having paid attention to sports before, I became curious and searched for Suzuki Ichiro's biography. His father, Suzuki Nobuaki, was also a baseball player, but due to injuries, he had to retire from his career and placed his hopes on Suzuki Ichiro.
From childhood, Suzuki Ichiro was strictly trained by his father. During school, his dad would drive him to a nearby batting cage after school for practice until 11 PM, and this continued even during exam periods without interruption. This dedication led young Suzuki Ichiro to write in his sixth-grade composition essay "My Dream" that he aspired to become a professional-level baseball player.
"Someone with such achievement must have done extraordinary things!" my husband said again. As I read further into Suzuki Ichiro's playing career, he started in the Japanese professional league, with a turning point in 1998 when he expressed his desire to play in Major League Baseball. (Extended reading: Suzuki Ichiro's Legend: How He Changed the Baseball World)
In 1999, he participated in the Seattle Mariners' spring training for the first time. In 2000, he signed with the Mariners with a total contract value of $14.08 million over 3 years, including a $5 million signing bonus. In 2001, he participated in the Mariners' spring training as an official player, and that same year he set a Major League Baseball record for most hits by a rookie with 242 hits. With 27 out of 28 votes, he became the 2001 American League Rookie of the Year and also won that year's MVP award. That year, the Seattle Mariners achieved a record-breaking 116 wins in Major League Baseball history.
That year, Suzuki Ichiro was 27 years old, earning $14.08 million over 3 years, equivalent to 390 million TWD today, plus a signing bonus of 130 million TWD, totaling 520 million TWD—or 170 million TWD annually!! This number is truly beyond imagination!!
I suddenly realized that while many people in the workplace pursue million-dollar or ten-million-dollar annual salaries, through genuine expertise, talent, and value to society, what the world is willing to pay can exceed any individual's imagination.
"Professionalism" requires time to refine and master. However, many modern people tend to overlook this, perhaps because our era has evolved too quickly, causing each person in this society to feel an inexplicable anxiety about their own development, worried that they might fall behind others if they don't accelerate, ultimately being left far behind.
That's when I finally understood why so many people are passionate about sports events—because what everyone is truly pursuing is the meticulous effort behind it, the self-imposed high standards, the determination to seize every opportunity and share all this honor with the world. Because most people cannot achieve excellence, they can only admire the spirit of it.
After 20 years of competition, Suzuki Ichiro officially announced his retirement in 2019 at Tokyo's sport stadium, which deeply moved me. As a Japanese national, he chose to retire while playing at home, allowing the world to focus its attention on his birthplace, making the starting point of his baseball career also its ending point.
【Bonus section】Forbes 2020 Highest-Paid Athletes
- Roger Federer: $106.3 million
- Cristiano Ronaldo: $105 million
- Lionel Messi: $104 million
- Neymar: $95.5 million
- LeBron James: $88.2 million
- Stephen Curry: $77.4 million
- Kevin Durant: $63.9 million
- Tiger Woods: $62.3 million
- Kirk Cousins: $60.5 million
- Carson Wentz: $59.1 million
