August in Kansas City is hotter than two rats f**king in a sock.

I heard that in the United States the level of baseball was the highest in the world. So it was only natural that I would want to go there, as a baseball player.

The Japanese have a strong tendency to suppress their own feelings. That's the Japanese character. They kill their own emotions.

In baseball, even the best hitters fail seven of ten times, and of those seven failures there are different reasons why. Some are personal failures, others are losses to the pitcher. You just get beat. In those personal failures, I felt I could have done better.

When you mail Ichiro something from the States, you only have to use that name on the address and he gets it (in Japan). He's that big.

Personally, I don't like the term 'success.' It's too arbitrary and too relative a thing. It's usually someone else's definition, not yours.

I played on the 2001 team, the team that won the most games in the history of Major League Baseball and also I played on one of the worst teams of Major League Baseball.