A star arrives.(baseball player Ichiro Suzuki)(Brief Article)

In Japan, Ichiro has moved beyond baseball star to ... what? A myth, perhaps.

Is it true that from the time he was in third grade, his father promised to ditch work early every afternoon to come home and throw batting practice? It nearly doesn't matter. "Can all the anecdotes you hear be believed?" asks senior writer Michael Knisley, whose profile of Ichiro begins on page 12. "I don't know. He's like the Pecos Bill of baseball in Japan."

Ted Heid, the Mariners' director of Pacific Rim scouting and the man closest to Ichiro in the States, says, "It's kind of like the parlor game where one person tells a story about the red cat who jumped over the blue roof. By the time it gets 12 people around, it's a green Ferrari going through a bridge." But in the end, the stories are so good it almost doesn't matter whether they're true.

What is true for me is that Ichiro (you don't even need to know his last name) is the best story in baseball as the season nears. Can he play? That's the question we're all asking. Michael says all indications are that he can. "But, of course, he still hasn't stared down a high-and-tight Pedro Martinez fastball," he says.

A lot of the discussion is why, at 27, Ichiro would come to the United States to play when he has everything to lose in terms of stature and not much to gain. After all, he'll never be Mark McGwire.

"I never said it was too easy for me (in Japan)," Ichiro says. "But it wasn't interesting anymore. People have twisted that very often. As the better pitchers left my league, it wasn't as fun.

"I used to have extremely competitive battles with (Hideki) Irabu. When Irabu was in Japan, he may have been the best pitcher in the world. And so there were some great competitions at that time. (Hideo) Nomo was in the same league, and he left. So as those pitchers left, those battles against those really fine pitchers disappeared also."