Who knew Ichiro was so potty-mouthed? Intern Bill investigates.

When you think about Seattle OF Ichiro Suzuki, a few things come to mind—the monastic practice of his craft, the seeming lack of command of the English language, the rhetorical flourishes of a warrior poet like “I would face [then Boston Red Sox' rookie Daisuke Matsuzaka] with the zeal of a challenger.€ Well after this story of Ichiro’s now-annual pre-All-Star game speech by Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan, it looks like we might need to take everything we thought we knew about Ichrio, and throw it right out the freakin’ window:

[Ichiro] happens to be baseball’s amalgam of Anthony Robbins and George Carlin. Every year, after the AL manager addresses his team, Ichiro bursts from his locker, a bundle of kinetic energy, and proceeds, in English, to disparage the National League with an H-bomb of F-bombs, stunning first-timers who had no idea Ichiro speaks the queen’s language fluently and making returnees happy that they had played well enough to see the pep talk again.

You mean the quiet Asian guy in the corner is really a balls-out competitor who probably likes to get crazy and scream more than anyone else? It’s like the baseball version of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. The funniest thing about this was that it started in 2001. Did someone forget to tell Ichiro that it was an exhibition and that no one really cares about the All-Star game? Why was this scrawny newbie screaming expletives out of nowhere at the team in broken a broken while Cal Ripken Jr. and Juan Gonzales stared on in perplexed awe?

Maybe it’s a good thing that he was voted in after all. The AL might not have won without him!

Ichiro’s speech to All-Stars revealed [Yahoo!]