Ichiro Suzuki has become the first Japanese player to make it to baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is likely to be the next.

The Athletics signed Japanese baseball player Shotaro Morii, just 18 years old, to a $1,510,000 bonus deal in a very different way than the rest of his compatriots. Morii chose the

Ichiro Suzuki is all about baseball, but he is much more than that at home in Japan. Ichiro is a wellspring of national pride — like Shohei Ohtani now — and his fame across the Pacific was therapeutic as the national economy sputtered through the so-called lost decades.