As if leading the league in RBIs and making his third All-Star team wasn’t enough, Jason Bay is good at blogging too. He wrote about his All-Star experience for WEEI.com, including this amusing moment with Ichiro Suzuki:
Workout day. I run back in from the field to get sunglasses. Locker room completely empty except Ichiro stretching on the floor and his translator sitting on the chair beside him. So we make small talk, and I ask him where he lives in Seattle because I lived in the suburbs.
Well, I had barely got the last word out when Ichiro says something in Japanese. Then his translator turns to me, deadpanned and straight-faced and says, “I’m going to mess with your house.” The way he said it was malicious, and Ichiro is on the floor dying laughing like it was the funniest thing ever. I was just like, “OK, I’ll see you guys out there.” I didn’t know what to say. It was weird.
I’m convinced that Ichiro is the most awkwardly entertaining person in baseball, because just about everyone who meets him seems to have a similar story. If most of his public interactions weren’t conducted through an interpreter, he’d be thought of as either a comedic genius or insane.
Bay also wrote about playing the game while snipers were perched atop the ballpark in St. Louis, meeting the president one week after becoming an American citizen, volunteering to sing “Oh Canada” with fellow Canuck Justin Morneau, and why “there’s no Moneyballing” in an All-Star game.