OAKLAND – The Coliseum has never been a great fit for Ichiro Suzuki, who has been booed by A’s partisans from the moment he first set foot in the place 16 years ago.
At the same time, the Coliseum is perhaps the place where Ichiro first broke into national baseball consciousness. Back on April 11, 2001, he threw out the A’s Terrence Long on the Oakland outfielder’s attempt to go from first to third on a Ramon Hernandez single.
To that point, Ichiro was an unknown, a great hitter in Japan, a country that had never produced a Major League baseball player.