Garlic fries and Ichirolls
Reiko and I made our annual pilgrimage to Safeco Field yesterday. We’ve been doing it since Reiko became a besuboru fan several years ago with the advent of Japanese players in the US leagues. Now, I’ve been going to Mariners games for 27 years and they almost invariably lost. Since Reiko has joined me, we have yet to see them boot one. The Mariners, according to this logic, should give us free season tickets, thereby assuring themselves of at least 81 wins.
We got to see Ichiro beat the Yankees. Well, OK, he had some help. But he didn’t need much. The Zen Master of baseball homered in his first at-bat, went three-for-four, walked once and stole two bases. His batting average is now .362 and he’s 15 hits away from his fourth 200-hit season. I think this is called being “in the zone.” Would that it were contagious. Of course, Ichiro seems to be in a previously undefined zone.
You gotta love how he keeps making sportswriters look like idiots. Not that they need any help. They saw how his batting average declined for his sophomore and junior years and concluded that major league pitchers had figured out how to keep him from getting on base. Myopia is not unusual in sportswriting. Ichiro batted .328 in 2002 and .312 last year. Yeah, .312 is a bad year for him, but he still managed well over 200 hits.
I have to admit that I had moments of doubt about his powers when he started this year off sluggishly. Then came the month of May and something caused Ichiro to kick in the afterburner. He had five hits in a game two times in six days during July and, unless someone puts Rohypnol in his rice balls, seems destined to set new marks for 50-hit months, both in one season and in a career.
All well and good, but baseball fans and sportswriters alike tend to ignore the fact that baseball requires defensive skills. Here, too, Ichiro continues the type of play that has won him three gold gloves in three years and seen right field designated as Area 51 when he’s on patrol. Nobody has tested his arm lately, even though he unleashes one from right field to third on occasion just to keep everybody honest.
It was a most satisfying day at one of baseball’s most beautiful facilities. We did have the garlic fries since no human being I know of can resist that smell. We did not have Ichirolls because it is something concocted for American tastes in sushi. Once your palate has become more educated, you wonder why they get away with calling such junk sushi in the first place.
One of the highlights of the day was when a beer vendor asked for my ID. At first, I thought he was joking, but he made me take my license out and hand it to him. Reiko later spotted someone being busted by the state booze cops. I'd rather not have known.
One of our regional grocery chains, headquartered here in Bellingham, offers package deals where you can take the train from Bellingham and catch a game before riding the rails back in the afternoon. King Street Station in Seattle is only a two-block walk from Safeco field. This is a huge gift to those of us who would rather listen to Dubya explain the theory of evolution than drive to Seattle.
It is a serene and beautiful ride that takes just over two hours. Amtrak and the Washington State Department of Transportation cooperate to provide service along the I-5 corridor from Vancouver, BC, to Portland, OR. They have fancy new train sets from a Spanish company called Talgo. What they don’t have are railroad beds that can take advantage of the new equipment.
In theory, these trains should be able to cruise along at about 140 mph. Instead they are confined to one short stretch where they can actually crank it up to 79 mph. One nasty curve north of Everett requires the train to slow to about 20 mph. The ride is generally pretty rough even in the best stretches. Our engineer pointed out that there is one short stretch where the track actually dates from the 1930s when 90-foot sections of rail were bolted together, thus producing the proverbial clickety-clack sound many of us grew up with.
If you’ve ever ridden Shinkansen in Japan, you realize just how much better rail service could be if this country could just get its transportation priorities straight. I rode on one of those babies at 175 mph and the rail car never twitched. I’ve always been a railroad nut and it saddens me to see what has become of our American system.
Science fiction author R. A. Lafferty wrote a seminal short story back in the late 1960s called “Interurban Queen.” It describes an alternative world in which certain wealthy American investors chose to put their resources into light rail instead of the automobile back at the turn of the previous century. It’s enough to make you cry for what could have been. If you can’t find it under the author’s name, try looking for it in an anthology called Orbit 8, edited by Damon Knight.
3:57:38 PM 
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