Remembering Hideki Irabu
Irabu's impact on MLB-NPB relations profound
By ROBERT WHITING
Hideki Irabu, once considered to be one of the best pitchers in the world, is dead, in what has been adjudged to be a suicide in late July.
Formidable force: Hideki Irabu led the Pacific League twice in strikeouts and earned run average during his career with the Chiba Lotte Marines.
He led a troubled life, struggling with a mixed-race heritage, growing up not knowing his father, causing controversy by refusing to bow to the conventions of Japanese and American professional baseball and battling with alcohol addiction and other problems in his later years.
But he also had an historic impact on U.S.-Japan baseball relations, particularly in the area of player rights (which, before him, had barely existed in the Japanese game). For this alone, he is worth remembering.
The road that Hideki Irabu took from Japan to the United States was an especially tortuous one, beset with obstacles erected by high-handed baseball executives who treated players as chattel. A player of lesser willpower might not have stayed the course.
As Jean Afterman, his one-time attorney, put it: "He went through the (expletive) jaws of hell to get where he wanted to go, but not once did he ever think of giving up. Because of him an entire generation of players in Japan has benefited."
Irabu was a 193-cm, 100-kg hurler who could throw the ball at speeds up to 159 kph. This ability combined with a sharp breaking forkball, made him one of the best pitchers in Japan. Playing for the Chiba Lotte Marines he had led the league in ERA and strikeouts twice by the time he was 27.
American Bobby Valentine, who had managed Irabu at his peak in 1995, compared him to Nolan Ryan and urged him to think seriously about playing in North America.
It had long been Irabu's dream to migrate to the major leagues and test himself against the world's best, but he was limited by a strict Nippon Professional Baseball rule that granted free agency to Japanese players only after 10 long years of service (as compared to six years in the U.S.).
He discussed the possibility of a trade to a major league team with Lotte officials, and after some initial resistance they began to think it was not a bad idea. The team had just formalized an agreement with the San Diego Padres which called for annual player exchanges and other forms of cooperation.
Since the Marines lacked batting power, the front office thought that perhaps Irabu could be sent to San Diego in exchange for an American home run hitter.
But then Irabu announced he would only play for the famed New York Yankees, who reciprocated his affections.
He hired noted player agent Don Nomura who had just set the NPB on its ear by helping Hideo Nomo escape to MLB through an obscure "voluntary retirement" loophole that was quickly closed by the embarrassed owners.
Lotte's acting owner Akio Shigemitsu was not happy at this impertinence. Shigemitsu was a Japan-born Korean, whose father Takeo had founded the vast Seoul-based Lotte candy, chewing gum and hotel empire that had operations all across Asia. He was used to total obedience, as were most baseball franchise owners in Japan who ruled the game like Tokugawa Era feudal lords, treating their players like personal property, refusing to deal with player agents and dictating terms to a fearful and compliant players union.
Shigemitsu threatened to keep Irabu out of baseball for the 1997 season. When Irabu and Nomura responded with a threat to challenge Lotte's claim that it held worldwide rights to Irabu's services in a U.S. court, Shigemitsu's lieutenants devised a diabolical tactic on behalf of their boss.
They proposed a secret, bizarre compromise under which Lotte would verbally promise to do its best to deal Irabu to the Yankees, if, in return, Irabu would sign a "personal" letter, handwritten by a Lotte front office executive, agreeing to follow the will of the front office.
It was just a formality, Irabu was told by a Shigemitsu retainer, but one necessary to mollify the Lotte shogun, who did not want a 27-year-old corporate vassal dictating terms to him. Promised that the letter would never see the light of day, Irabu, against his, and Nomura's, judgement, signed it.
Shigemitsu then offered Irabu to the Yankees, requesting that, in return, he be given All-Star first baseman Cecil Fielder, who had hit 39 homers that year, with the further stipulation that the Yankees pay one-half of the slugger's $10 million salary to boot. The Yankees, predictably, called the request preposterous and refused.
Thus, in a meeting in January with Irabu and Nomura, who had been granted a rare seat at the table, Shigemitsu said that he had made his best efforts to grant Irabu's wish, but since the New York Yankees would not cooperate, he had no choice but to trade the "exclusive negotiating rights" to Irabu to the Padres for two second-tier players.
"You're no longer part of this club," he said, and ended the meeting.
Irabu was stunned at the chicanery. He flatly refused to go to San Diego, turning down the Padres' three-year $4.5 million offer, which had come with a $2.5 million signing bonus and reiterated his desire to go to the Yankees.
When San Diego executive Larry Lucchino said that if Irabu did not sign, he would have no choice but to sit out a year, Irabu told reporters, he had just been subjected to a "slave trade."
Shigemitsu then released the personal letter signed by Irabu to the media.
"This document shows that Irabu was willing to join any team in the major leagues," declared the acting owner. "I wish he would stop being so self-centered."
* * *
A special session of the MLB Executive Council was convened in San Diego in February of 1998 to resolve the impasse and the council ruled in favor of the Padres, ignoring a sworn affidavit by Irabu about the origins of the personal letter and the verbal promise by the front office of a Yankees trade, which Lotte had not even bothered to refute.
The council issued a written statement citing a 1967 working agreement between the U.S. and Japan baseball commissioners that did not specifically prohibit trades between the two countries.
The rights of the Japanese players were an issue, the council allowed, but said that was a matter for others to consider. The Padres would retain exclusive negotiating rights.
Had Irabu been a different sort of person, he might have signed with the Padres at that point. San Diego was a nice, clean town. The weather was good and there were lots of golf courses.
But Irabu had a sensitive streak as wide as Tokyo Bay. To his way of thinking, the San Diego organization had disrespected him as much as Lotte had by issuing that "sign or else" ultimatum. And he wasn't about to let that go by the boards.
Moreover, he had begun to feel an obligation to other players to ensure that in the future they would not find themselves in a similar position.
"This player will never sign any contract with San Diego, ever," said Afterman, then working with Don Nomura. "When he does get the club of his choice, there will be a no-trade clause — no trade to San Diego. Not because of the players, but because of the ownership and management treated him like a piece of property, a piece of meat."
For a time Irabu considered rejoining Lotte, which still retained "reservation" rights to him within Japan (as opposed to the "negotiating" rights held by San Diego), under the labyrinthine deal that had been struck.
Free agent eligibility requirements in Japan had just been lowered to nine years, and theoretically Irabu could put in his time and qualify as a bona fide free agent, which, according to the math involved, would be sometime in the middle of the 1997 season.
But Lotte quickly put an end to such fantasies. Marines spokesman Yuji Horimoto announced the conditions under which Lotte would take Irabu back.
First he would have to apologize for his behavior in general and in particular, his grievous calumny depicting the Marines' business practices as "slave trade," a statement, said the spokesman, that had "gravely injured the Marines reputation."
But that was not all, the spokesman said. Demonstrating the grasp of civil rights that had long been the hallmark of Nippon Professional Baseball, he further announced that Irabu would have to submit written statements to the MLB and Japanese baseball commissioners, to all MLB clubs and to Shigemitsu himself, vowing that he had given up trying to play in the MLB and promising that he would never, ever again in his entire life attempt to play baseball for a team in North America.
It was an arrangement, Afterman noted dryly, that would make Irabu the oldest living reserved player in either country. The good news was that he would not be required to commit hara-kiri (ritual suicide).
* * *
Despite largely critical press reviews back in Tokyo by the pro-owner Japanese sports media, which had portrayed Irabu as a selfish ingrate, as well as by the press in San Diego, where the populace had been offended by Irabu's rejection of their city, the Irabu-Nomura team refused to bend. It sought help from the Major League Baseball Players Association, whose leaders thought Irabu had been screwed.
"If Irabu had the name of John Smith, with blond hair and blue eyes," said the eloquent MLBPA attorney Gene Orza, implying that discrimination had somehow affected the MLB executive council decision, "I do sincerely believe that all this would have never happened."
Played hardball: Chiba Lotte Marines acting owner Akio Shigemitsu made Hideki Irabu's attempt to play for the New York Yankees difficult by pressuring the star to accept a trade to the San Diego Padres.
Behind Orza, the union applied pressure, threatening legal action. Thus, in the following spring, the executive council reversed itself and initiated a freeze on future transactions of the San Diego-Lotte type, producing a new rule that prohibited a player's contract or the exclusive rights to it from being sold or traded to or from a U.S. club without that player's express permission.
At the same time, San Diego, thoroughly disgusted with their Lotte experiment, gave in and traded Irabu to New York for three Yankee reserves.
Thus, Irabu got his wish. But, more important, he would go down in history as a champion of players rights for his refusal to accept the Lotte trade to San Diego, which had thereby attracted media attention to the deal.
The ensuing criticism of the Lotte-San Diego transaction on the part of other MLB teams, which had also coveted Irabu at the time (followed by an episode involving Alfonso Soriano, who wanted to leave the Hiroshima Carp to play for the Yankees), led to the creation of the posting system, currently in use by Japanese and MLB teams.
The posting system is a mechanism whereby a player not yet eligible for free agency who wishes to play in America can be "posted" by his team, which then sells the negotiating rights to his services to the highest MLB bidder.
Among those Japanese players who joined the MLB via the posting system are Ichiro Suzuki and Daisuke Matsuzaka, whose rights were sold to the Boston Red Sox on a record $51 million bid, the Sox subsequently signing Matsuzaka to a $50 million contract covering six years.
If posting had been available in Irabu's day, he would have been the subject of fierce bidding. As it was, however, when he went to the Bronx, he signed a four-year deal for much less, $12.8 million.
"Ichiro, Hideki Matsui, Matsuzaka, they all owe a big debt of gratitude to Hideki Irabu," said Nomura. "They were only able to get the deals they did because Irabu had the guts and the will to stick it out.
"(Hideo) Nomo was a piece of cake compared to what Irabu went through. In Nomo's case, we had a clearly written rule on our side which allowed a voluntarily retired player to go to the States — before it was changed.
"With Hideki it was a much tougher matter. There was no rule of precedent. It was a question of right or wrong, a moral principle. And Hideki had a full realization of what was at stake historically and that sustained him.
"I remember Hideki telling me, 'If I give in now, then everybody else will lose the right to reject a trade overseas.' I was very proud of him."
Attitude, lifestyle contributed to Irabu's demise
Hideki Irabu was given a king's welcome in New York.
Smashing debut: Hideki Irabu takes a curtain call after his debut with the New York Yankees on July 10, 1997. Irabu pitched 6? innings and struck out nine in a 10-3 victory over the Detroit Tigers. KYODO PHOTOS
He was flown to the city in Yankees owner George Steinbrenner's private jet and given the key to the city by NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Irabu's debut in America, July 10, 1997, was a memorable event in a Yankees history filled with memorable events.
Before a weeknight audience of more than 50,000 fans, nearly one-third of whom were Japanese, and a morning television audience back in Japan of over 30 million, Irabu took the mound. Mixing a fastball in the high 150s kph, with a sharply diving forkball in the low 150s kph, he struck out nine in a 10-3 victory over the Detroit Tigers.
When he was removed from the game with two outs in the seventh inning, he was given a deafening ovation, one which lasted so loud and so long, that Irabu was pushed back onto the field by Yankees teammates for a curtain call.
It was perhaps the high point of Irabu's career.
However, a string of bad outings followed, and he was shipped to the minor leagues for a time. He would finish the year with a disappointing mark of 5-4 and an embarrassing ERA of 7.09. It was a pattern that would repeat itself.
The next season he started off like Cy Young and by mid-season was 8-4 with an ERA of 2.47. He won the American League MLB Pitcher of the Month award for May and over the first half of the season, he was arguably the best pitcher on the Yankees, a team, which would go on to win the World Series and one which many observers adjudged to be the finest MLB squad of all time.
But then he mysteriously collapsed, finishing with a mark of 13-9 and an ERA of 4.06.
In 1999, he had a mark of 9-3 over the first four months of the year, and was voted Pitcher of the Month for July, but then he collapsed again to finish with a record of 11-7 and an ERA of 4.84.
A season low came perhaps the night of Aug. 9 in Oakland. Given an eight-run lead in the second inning, he was then pounded for six runs and eight hits and was removed from the game with two on in the fifth inning, thus failing to qualify for the official victory in the scorebook.
His failure to hold the A's in check sent Yankees manager Joe Torre in an angry yelling fit that could be heard in the Oakland stands.
The Yankees won their division all three years Irabu was with the team, but by the end of each season, management had lost much confidence in their Japanese import, who was costing them several million dollars a year, that by the end of the year they removed him from the playoff starting rotation.
His performances brought to mind the old nursery school rhyme, "When he was good he was very, very good. But when he was bad, he was horrid."
His yo-yo inconsistency was baffling to the Yankees brain trust. Said Yankees pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, "When he was on he was one of the best pitchers I have ever seen. But when he was off, he was one of the worst."
Added Yankees catcher Jorge Posada, "When he was into it, he was probably the nastiest pitcher in the league. He pitched some great games for us. Unfortunately, he also pitched some bad ones."
Some speculated that Irabu could simply not adapt emotionally to the higher level of competition in the big leagues, especially in a highly competitive organization like the Yankees, whose bombastic owner Steinbrenner demanded perfection.
Being touched by a home run on a 158-kph pitch that had been unhittable in Japan seemed to unnerve him. Afraid of lightning striking twice, he would then resort to breaking ball pitches on the corners, surrender a string of walks, and find himself with the bases loaded and no out and his confidence shaken.
* * *
Irabu was well-liked in the Yankees clubhouse, despite the language barrier, ready with a smile and an off-color remark he had learned in English to make his teammates laugh. He tried to fit in and follow the customs of American baseball.
He had joined in the first on-field brawl he had witnessed as a member of the Yankees, but because he had taken care to wrap his pitching hand in a towel, he inquired as to whether or not his teammates had thought any less of him for having done that. He was assured they had not.
He was also capable of great generosity. He supported many charities and gave expensive gifts to people working in the Yankees front office and his interpreter, George Rose. He paid off Rose's post-graduate loans out of his first World Series check.
Irabu got special permission to have a Yankees World Series pendant reproduced, an expensive and exclusive item normally given only to family members, and presented it to one-time lawyer Jean Afterman, who had gone on to become a Yankees executive and a team lawyer.
"He was sweet," she said. "He came to a barbecue at my house one time bringing a bottle of plum wine that he knew I liked but was hard to find. He had looked all over Little Tokyo to find it.
"He did thoughtful things like that for others that never got reported — only the other stuff made the news."
The "other stuff" related to Irabu's personal behavior which could be as erratic as his pitching. He had always had trouble controlling his temper, as he would freely admit.
Once after giving up a key run while pitching for the Chiba Lotte Marines, he had kicked the dugout in anger and broken a big toe.
In the United States, that temper revealed itself on more than one occasion. During one losing effort, he had spat in the direction of fans who were booing him. After another game in which he had pitched poorly, he smashed his fist into a Yankee Stadium clubhouse door.
Moment in time: New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner welcomes Hideki Irabu to Yankee Stadium in this May 30, 1997, photo. Steinbrenner would later regret signing the Japanese star to a lucrative contract.
During his first full-fledged Yankees camp, he literally destroyed a hotel room in Tampa during a drunken rage in which he had inadvertently hit his new bride, Kyonsu, a girl from Chiba whom he had married during the Lotte-San Diego contretemps.
On another occasion, in Philadelphia, he flew into a rage after a bad game and did considerable damage to the visitor's dressing room.
Irabu also had a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit and liked to drink beer, a lot of beer. By his second spring training, Irabu had ballooned to 113 kg and was in poor physical condition.
A New York writer quipped, "Hideki never met a beer can or a cigarette he didn't like."
After making a serious misplay in an exhibition game in Tampa, Florida — a mental lapse that Irabu later attributed to personal problems off the field -Steinbrenner who had earlier cracked that the only people he could give his Hideki Irabu T-shirts to were visually handicapped fans, famously called him a "fat pussy toad."
Irabu was so upset at this slight that he refused to board the Yankees private plane for an away game. His agent, Don Nomura, had to fly in to help sort things out and help calm his client down.
New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica declared that Irabu was nothing but a "big baby."
Irabu's run-ins with the press were another problem, particularly the Japanese reporters who dogged him wherever he went. He compared them to "locusts" and called them "goldfish (expletive)."
He broke a Japanese photographer's video camera on one occasion and on another, hit a Japanese cameraman with a pitched ball during a bullpen session, smirking in satisfaction as he did, causing headline coverage in the sports dailies back home.
Irabu had blacklisted several writers and publications who had cast him as the villain during his struggle with the Padres, including one reporter who had written that the real reason Irabu refused to sign with the National League team was because his mother was of North Korean descent and the city of San Diego, as home to a major naval base, had figured significantly in military strikes against the Northern Korean Peninsula in the past.
He took issue with the American media as well, including a New York Times reporter who had delved into Irabu's past and uncovered his mixed-race background, Irabu having been born to an Okinawan mother and an American serviceman who had subsequently returned to the States, and then raised by his mother and a stepfather in a rough and tumble, lower class section of Osaka.
As a child, Irabu had, on occasion, been subjected to taunts over his slightly Western looks. During his time at Lotte, he had confided late one alcohol-fueled night to some sportswriters that he wanted one day to go to the U.S. and become so famous a ballplayer that his biological father could not help but notice.
That quote had been widely reprinted in the Japanese press, much to Irabu's chagrin. After that, he had clammed up and refused to answer any more questions about his origins.
He considered such intrusions an invasion of privacy and nobody's business but his own. Thus, when the Times story appeared, he added the reporter to his blacklist.
* * *
To some insiders, Irabu had no more of a temper than Posada or Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, who have kicked their share of lockers, and was certainly far less combative than other players like, say, pitcher Carlos Zambrano. But because he was new and from far-off Japan, and had come off a highly publicized battle with baseball's powers-that-be on both sides of the Pacific, his behavior was more scrutinized in the media, especially the Japanese-language media.
Whatever the explanation, his perceived attitude upset many image-conscious Japanese. Said a Japanese kitchen worker at Obata's, a popular midtown Manhattan restaurant, "It's all very embarrassing. He makes Japanese people look bad."
Back in Japan, commentators decried his lack of dignity, while Nomura's opinionated mother went on nationwide television to declare "Irabu is the shame of Japan."
Irabu's temper tantrums alternated with bouts of depression in which he would hole up in his hotel room on the road, closing himself off from the world, soothing himself with a favorite hobby, drawing pictures of the human anatomy, something he became quite good at.
During games he did not pitch, he could be seen by himself in the bullpen, a morose expression on his face.
Bobby Valentine, his former Chiba Lotte manager, remarked, "He probably was in the wrong place to begin with. What he needed was a more sheltered environment. What he needed was not a 'show me' mode but a 'help me' mode."
By 2000, the Yankees had grown weary of his inconsistency and shipped him off to Montreal, where he underwent elbow and knee surgery. He won but two games in his two seasons there, spending most of his time in the minors, where, among other things, he was suspended for getting drunk the night before a start.
After that it was on to the Texas Rangers, where he had a brief shining spell as a late-inning relief pitcher before developing blood clots that put him in the hospital and ended his major league career in 2002.
* * *
While in America, Irabu was able to fill in the blanks in regard to his biological origins. His real father just showed up one day at Yankees camp, like Ray Liotta in "Field of Dreams," bearing presents for Irabu's wife and his two daughters.
Enigmatic: Hideki Irabu had a tense relationship with the media and did not go out of his way to make himself understood.
He was not exactly the John Wayne figure Hideki had imagined. He stood 173 cm and was of slight build. He was living in Alaska, working in the civil service after completing his military duty.
As Hideki discovered, his father's father had been physically big, had played semi-pro baseball and had exactly the same birthday as Hideki. That information had pleased Hideki greatly.
Hideki's father explained, through an interpreter, how he had come to meet Hideki's mother, Kazue. He had been a GI in Okinawa and was walking down the street outside his base when he spotted her being assaulted by a man, and he had intervened to rescue her.
They began a relationship that lasted about a year and culminated with the conception of Hideki. Scheduled for rotation back to the States, he had offered to take her with him when he went back, but she refused and said she wanted to sever relations and raise the child by herself. So he left and returned to the United States.
But he said he always thought about the woman and the child he had left behind and was wracked with guilt about not having been a proper father. He wanted to make up for it in any way he could. So the two embarked on a relationship of sorts, but one that was difficult to develop because of the language barrier, and one that Hideki did not discuss publicly.
"Hideki's father was a nice guy," said an acquaintance who knew them both. "I met him at the airport in Los Angeles when Hideki was flying back to Japan and he had come to see Hideki off. He was quiet, standing off by himself.
"Hideki told me later that he liked his father because he was the one of the very few people who never asked him for money. A lot of people tried to worm their way into Hideki's life. They pretended to be his friend — some even pretended to be his father. But they just wanted his money. His real father was not like that at all."
Irabu spent final days lost, without purpose
For the late pitcher Hideki Irabu, the surname Irabu had come from Hideki's mother. It was her surname, and Hideki's stepfather, Ichiro Irabu, had been a common-law husband.
Form rediscovered: After his career in the major leagues ended, Hideki Irabu returned to Japan and enjoyed some success with the Hanshin Tigers before retiring. KYODO PHOTOS
Still, he treated Hideki as his own, raised him and encouraged his love for baseball. He had set up a routine of rigorous exercise to strengthen his body and his pitching arm, including a drill where he tied a rubber tube to a pole and tugged on it using his throwing motion to strengthen his arm and back muscles.
Throughout his days at Jinsei Gakuen High School in Kagawa, Hideki would awake every morning at 5:30 without fail to exercise and run.
"I was just stunned by his ability to keep up with a lot of hard work," his stepfather said to a New York Times reporter, "Hideki would tenaciously hang onto things that a normal kid would have long given up. And that made me think that he might grow up to be an extraordinary man."
Irabu grew up "haafu," like his agent Don Nomura, and was subjected to the predictable childhood taunts that in turn caused many a schoolyard fight. He would turn on anyone who made a rude remark about being an "ainoko," or half breed, hurling some insult like "bakayaro," (idiot) and the fight would be on.
However, what bothered him more than being singled out for being mixed heritage was growing up in poverty and never having enough to eat. He said that one of the good things about being recruited to play baseball at a big-name baseball high school was being able to live in the team dormitory and feast to his heart's content in the team cafeteria three times a day.
Meeting his biological father for the first time, in 1998, at Yankees training camp in Florida, had been another good thing. Hideki spent a week with him and that had been a positive experience, although he was frustrated at his inability to communicate with the man whose DNA he shared, without the constant presence of an interpreter, and as a result the relationship did not develop as much as he had wanted it to. But Hideki respected the man.
"He did not want anything from me except to know me and my kids," Irabu said. "He never asked for anything."
Upon leaving the big leagues, Irabu returned to Japan to play with the Hanshin Tigers where he experienced some success. He won 13 games in 2003 and helped the club win a Central League pennant.
He played another, less successful year, then retired to Southern California with his wife and two kids to run a moderately successful restaurant chain with an L.A.-based Japanese-American businessman. He talked of getting into Hollywood movies, as an action actor, but nothing ever materialized in that area.
"There were a lot of guys around Hideki," said a friend. "Not all of them had his best interests at heart. But his business partner did and Hideki was pretty careful with his money."
In 2009, he tried a comeback in the independent Golden Baseball League, signing a contract with the Long Beach Armada and posting a mark of 5-3 with a 3.58 ERA.
In August of that year, he had been introduced as a member of the Kochi Fighting Dogs, a team in one of Japan's new independent leagues, but injuries kept him on the sidelines. And trouble dogged him.
* * *
Irabu liked to drink. He liked to go out to nightclubs and cavort with bar hostesses. He had Japanese bar hostess drinking friends in L.A., Hawaii, Tokyo and Osaka. And whenever he was in town he would be on the phone to them setting up an evening of wine, women and song.
But he tended to overdo it. There had been an incident at a girls bar in Osaka in 2009 where he had consumed 20 mugs of beer and grew obstreperous when the proprietor refused to accept his credit card.
"Do you know who I am?" he reportedly said. "I can buy up a place like this with ease. Tell me that you know the world famous Irabu!"
Police arrested him for assault.
In March 2011, he was arrested for drunk driving in Los Angeles, and was sentenced to court counseling. He quit drinking for a time and coached in a youth league, but, according to one acquaintance, it bothered him to see young players with little or no ability working so hard in practice.
"It's pointless," he was quoted as saying, "Either you have natural-born talent like I do or you don't. And no amount of practice will give it to you."
During his final year, Hideki reportedly fell into a depression. He complained of being lonely, of having fewer friends than before. He told one visitor, "I have no idea what to do with myself when I get up in the morning."
Nikkan Sports reported that he called his former Hanshin manager, Senichi Hoshino, in the middle of the night Japan time from Los Angeles, and broke down in tears.
"I want to come back to Japan," he said and begged Hoshino for help in finding a job as a coach. But a job was not forthcoming.
In 2011, he gave an interview to a Japanese magazine in which he said, "I want to go back to Japan. I can't speak English. I don't belong here."
His wife, however, wanted to stay in L.A. She wanted their two children to grow up "international."
Irabu was the only one in his family who could not speak English well.
* * *
Irabu and his wife, Kyonsu, had wed in 1997 in what could be described as an arranged marriage. Kyonsu had come from Chiba, home of the Chiba Lotte Marines. She was an ethnic North Korean with a Japanese passport.
Her father was a wealthy pachinko operator in Chiba who enjoyed a strong relationship with the local bank, Chiba Bank, where Kyonsu had been employed as a teller. The bank also had a strong relationship with Lotte.
According to sources, the marriage between Irabu and Kyonsu had been "arranged" by Lotte and Chiba Bank, while Hideki was still awaiting a decision on his struggle with Lotte and the San Diego Padres.
Kyonsu was described as "serious" and a "good wife," who always took care to see that her husband ate the right foods, like "genmai" (brown rice). But after the children came, she devoted more and more of her attention to being a good mother, and spent more time with a group of Koreans and Korean-Japanese living in the L.A. area.
Said a family friend, "She really took good care of him. She let him do anything he wanted. If he wanted to go out with his friends, she would just say, 'Fine, and what time are you coming back?'
Happier times: Hideki Irabu married wife Kyonsu on Jan. 14, 1997. She and their two children left him in the final months of his life, leaving the former star despondent.
"After he retired from baseball, she didn't bother him about getting a job like some wives would. And she came from a very wealthy family. She didn't need Hideki's money. You didn't see her all dressed up and out there trying to impress the other wives. She wouldn't leave him without a good reason . . ."
However, she reportedly had grown weary of dealing with her husband's erratic behavior and his inability to control his addiction to alcohol. And so in the spring of 2011, she packed and left, taking the two children with her.
Some people called it a mid-life crisis. Others said it was more than that — the death of hope. No more family. No more baseball. Fewer and fewer friends.
Still others saw the root of Irabu's troubles was a lack of identity and psychological grounding. (Said one close friend, "He never was able to figure out who he was.") Some suspected a chemical imbalance or bipolar disorder. Still, mental illness was a touchy subject for a professional athlete, especially one from Japan where psychiatry was not as developed as in other countries. Thus no one thought to recommend psychiatric treatment for Irabu.
Irabu's final interview with a journalist took place in mid-July and was published a couple of weeks later in the popular magazine Shukan Shincho. The interviewer said that Irabu told him he had lost 20 kg, a result, some thought, of having quit drinking, but he was quoted as telling the interviewer he was sick.
But he did not elaborate on the nature of his illness, whether it was physical or mental.
He also said that divorce was imminent and that he was very lonely. A week later, he hanged himself in his garage.
* * *
Irabu was a complex man. He could be fun to be with. He liked karaoke. He could laugh at his own short temper and his other eccentricities.
(For instance, for him, a trip to the dentist was sheer terror. He had to be put under anesthesia. Once a dentist had accidentally dropped a tiny implant that had slipped down Irabu's throat and became lodged in his lung. He spent six hours in the hospital.)
And he could be quite thoughtful and unfailingly generous.
Said a longtime acquaintance, "He treated his employees and friends to dinner often and he made sure they had a good time. 'Have you had enough to eat?' he would ask. 'How about trying this?' He would sit there and wait until everyone was satisfied.
"When Hideo Nomo took his friends out by contrast, Nomo would finish eating ahead of everyone else and then it was time to go, whether anyone else was ready to leave or not. Hideki was a really, really nice guy that way."
He had a tattoo of a dragon on his back and shoulder which he believed gave him power. He had his own god, a dragon god he called "Ryujin" whom he prayed to and whom he paid tribute to with an assortment of dragon statues, statuettes and figurines that he kept in his home.
If someone he disliked met with some misfortune, Irabu would tell friends that the misfortune had been the doing of "Ryujin."
But, sadly, he had demons that neither he nor his dragon god could conquer. On the morning of July 27, 2011, an acquaintance stopped by to check in on Hideki and found a gruesome scene: Hideki hanging from a rope in his garage. He had been dead for three days. The odor was overwhelming.
His agent and friend, Don Nomura, could not believe Irabu was gone.
"I had talked to him a month earlier and we made plans to meet that weekend for dinner," Nomura said. "We talked about the good old days and how he changed baseball. He seemed upbeat to me. And frankly, I couldn't see any reason for him doing what he did.
"He said he and his wife had agreed to get back together and give it another go after the end of summer vacation. He seemed to be enjoying life. He had no money problems. He had a nice house. He had reapplied for his green card. He was teaching young kids. I was going to hook him up with an independent league as a coach. I was going to arrange some speaking engagements for him.
He said, 'Do you think people will really be interested in what I have to say?' Hell yes, I said. He had those Yankee experiences to talk about . . .
"He was upbeat," Nomura said. "So everything just puzzled me. I believe what he did was a spur-of-the-moment thing. An accident maybe. I believe he was drinking alone and one thing led to another and that was it. I don't believe he knew what he was doing. It didn't make any sense, otherwise.
"Hideki was a very precise, orderly person, who planned his moves. If he was really going to kill himself, he would have cleaned his house and then left a note. But he didn't."
* * *
At his best Hideki Irabu was arguably as good as any pitcher who ever lived. No matter how bad he looked at times, he could always lay claim to the fact that for a two- or three-month stretch in 1998, he was the best pitcher on what many baseball historians consider the best team there ever was. That was saying something.
Moreover, in New York, he was also the first MLB player ever to use magnets. Before each game, he had 50 tiny round magnets attached to his back, shoulders and head.
Later he added a magnetic wrist bracelet, which today has become a trend among MLB players. The intended purpose was the creation of negative ions to improve blood flow, calm nerves, decrease aches and pains.
But what history will remember Irabu best for was his having championed player rights by refusing to accept the Lotte trade to San Diego and attracting so much media attention to the deal. Because of his willingness to fight the trade to the Padres, no player will ever again have to go through what he did.
Last hurrah: Hideki Irabu's farewell to baseball came with the independent Long Beach Armada in California in 2009.
Trades like the Lotte-San Diego deal just don't happen anymore. Or as Nomura put it, "he was buoyed by the idea that history was different because of him."
"Life was easiest for Hideki when he was throwing a baseball," said his one-time attorney Jean Afterman. ". . . On the mound, he was in control. The hard thing for him was the rest. Being mixed race, growing up not knowing his father, working under autocratic NPB rules, battling Lotte and San Diego, fighting the urge to drink and smoke. Not being able to play baseball anymore and finally, being alone. He was a fighter but that was too much for him to take on."
"I was honored to work with him," said Nomura. "It was sad to see him go. I still can't believe he is gone. He did more than what people think he did. He was a target of the press and I know that hurt him a lot.
"I just hope that people come to appreciate what a contribution he made. The media has got to give him some credit. They made money by writing about him while he was playing. Criticizing him usually.
"I think they should contribute something to his legacy in return. I think they should change the name of the posting system to the Irabu System, in his honor."
