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TOKYO (AP) — Ichiro drew all the cheers. Most everyone else on the Seattle Mariners did all the hitting.A crowd that came to salute Ichiro Suzuki in his homeland saw Domingo Santana deliver the biggest hit at the Tokyo Dome Matt Adams Jersey , a grand slam that sent Seattle over the Oakland Athletics 9-7 Wednesday in the Major League Baseball opener.Batting ninth and knowing he’d get two plate appearances, Ichiro popped up and worked a walk. The 45-year-old star took his spot in right field to begin the bottom of the fourth inning, then was pulled to another huge ovation. He was met with hugs from the Mariners on the diamond.“The fans in Japan probably aren’t used to the reception I got from my teammates, but it’s not that unusual in the majors,” Ichiro said.Mariners manager Scott Servais said Ichiro will play in Thursday’s final game of the series, but there is no guarantee he’ll start.“We certainly want to give him an opportunity to go out and play, but we also want to get some other guys in the game,” Servais said. “I understand everybody wants to see him go all nine innings. We’re trying to do the best thing for the team and Ichiro understands.”This marked the earliest opening day ever — the summer sport actually started on the last day of winter. No doubt, most fans in North America were sound asleep when Oakland’s Mike Fiers threw the first pitch at 5:36 a.m. EDT (6:36 p.m. local).A year after the Cubs’ Ian Happ homered on the very pitch of the season, the ball again was flying.Tim Beckham also homered as several Seattle newcomers excelled. Khris Davis, who led the majors with 48 home runs last year, Stephen Piscotty and Matt Chapman connected for the A’s.“It was great. It’s a fun crowd to play in front of. Even the pregame stuff was exciting. I think everybody had a good time,” Oakland manager Bob Melvin said.A packed crowd of 45,787 was buzzing for its favorite star, sending cheers, chants and camera flashes for Ichiro bounding all around the park. Signs and Ichiro jerseys were plenty, too.Ichiro became the second-oldest position player to start an opener, only a few months younger than Julio Franco was for Atlanta in 2004. Several of the players in this game weren’t born when Ichiro began his pro career.Ichiro is getting very near the end of a sensational pro career that began in Japan in 1992 when he was at 18. He stopped playing last May to become a Mariners special assistant — after totaling 4,367 hits on both sides of the ocean — and struggled in spring training this year.Santana, one of many Mariners new to the lineup Kevin Long Jersey , had no trouble at the plate. His opposite-field grand slam capped a five-run burst in the third for a 5-2 lead and Beckham’s drive in the fifth made it 9-4.Beckham got three hits and scored three times. Also making a nice debut for Seattle were Jay Bruce, who singled for MLB’s first hit of the season, and Edwin Encarnacion, who scored twice.The Mariners won for the 12th time in 15 openers. They also beat the A’s in 2012 when MLB last started in Japan.Seattle starter Marco Gonzales hung in for six innings, allowing three earned runs and seven hits, and got the win. Felix Hernandez had started the last 10 openers for the Mariners.Hunter Strickland pitched a scoreless ninth for a save in his first game for Seattle. Edwin Diaz, who led the majors with 57 last year, was traded with Robinson Cano to the Mets in the offseason.Fiers, making his first opening day start at 33, was hit hard for three innings and took the loss.NOT THIS TIMEAfter a lot of offseason talk about improved pace of play, the opener took 3 hours, 24 minutes. … The Mariners had held opponents to no more than three runs in their past 12 openers, an MLB record.TRAINER’S ROOMMariners: C Omar Narvaez got stung in the bare thumb on a fastball right down the middle after an early cross-up with Gonzales. Narvaez was checked by a trainer and stayed in. … 1B Daniel Vogelbach was hit in the elbow by a pitch and kept playing.Athletics: OF Nick Martini (sprained knee), who hit well after making his big league debut last season, is on the injured list for at least another week.UP NEXTMariners: LHP Yusei Kikuchi makes his major league debut in his home country. The 27-year-old lefty starred for Seibu last season, then joined Seattle with a contract that could be worth $109 million over seven years. Kikuchi mixes a hard fastball with a tough, looping curve.Athletics: RHP Marco Estrada makes his debut after signing with the A’s. The 35-year-old was 7-14 with a career-worst 5.64 ERA last season for Toronto and was hampered by hip and back problems. WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The complete game is nearly completely gone from baseball. Shutouts are vanishing, too.The numbers are striking.Go back to 1978, and there were more than 1 http://www.nationalsfanproshop.com/authentic-matt-adams-jersey ,000 complete games in the majors. Move to 2003, and the total was about 200. In 2018, though, there were only 42 — the lowest total in the sport’s history, according to Baseball-Reference .com — and just 19 of those were shutouts, the fewest since the 1870s.Or to put it a different way: Roughly every other game featured a starter who went the distance 40 years ago, whereas about one in every 55 games did last season. Stars of the 1960s and ’70s such as Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton or Jim Palmer would top 20 complete games in a year. In the ’90s, Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson would get to 10 or 12 or so.Last year, no one threw more than two complete games. No one delivered more than one shutout.“The special, elite guys are still able to achieve it and want to achieve it,” Washington Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo said. “I don’t think we’ll ever see it disappear completely, but it’s definitely becoming a rarity.”So what happened? Various factors contributed to the decline of dominant, nine-inning performances on the mound, from injury fears to an increased emphasis on accumulating bullpen arms, from the newfangled “opener” strategy of using a reliever to get things underway to protecting young pitchers in such a way that they never build up an ability to stay in until the end of games.Still, the basic sense around the sport is that it’s not that pitchers are no longer born with shoulders or elbows capable of producing complete games, but that their teams simply won’t let them even try and generally don’t properly prepare them to do so.“Everyone,” Atlanta Braves right-hander Kevin Gausman summed up Ryan Zimmerman Jersey , “is obsessed with pitch count now.”It’s a trend that seemed to gain steam in the 2000s, not coincidentally as more and more pitchers were getting elbow injuries that required Tommy John surgery.Don’t let most guys throw too hard for too long, the thinking goes.“There’s a general pullback in the industry, because they couldn’t comprehend why so many people were getting hurt. The biggest mass effect you can have is workload,” Houston Astros righty Gerrit Cole said. “Just overall, clubs are kind of doing a risk analysis. … They are trying to be smarter about it and disburse the load a little bit to some other guys.”Merely six starters averaged at least 100 pitches per outing last season, down from 43 in 2011, per TeamRankings.com.Cole was a member of that group in 2018, which also included his teammate Justin Verlander, NL Cy Young Award winner Jacob deGrom of the New York Mets, and three-time Cy Young recipient Max Scherzer of the Nationals.“They’re really holding starters down to 100 pitches and not letting you go past that. If you do, maybe you get 110. But you rarely see guys get to 120 anymore,” Scherzer said. “If an inning takes 15 pitches, you get to 105 after seven and that’s about all you get. The data shows that once you get past 105, 110, that’s when you do start losing your effectiveness, no matter how good of a starter you are.”In this age of hard-throwing relievers and lefty specialists, a team would rather have someone fresh pitch than a player laboring for hours.“Everybody’s coming in throwing gas. Are you really that much better than those guys down there at that point in time?” Scherzer said. “That’s where you have to be honest with yourself and your manager and say, ‘I’ve given everything I’ve got over these 105, 110 pitches.’ The decision becomes pretty easy for the manager to say http://www.nationalsfanproshop.com/authentic-matt-adams-jersey , ‘I’m going to go to one of my wipeout bullpen guys.'”Scherzer has been known to lobby to remain in at key late-game moments. He’s as competitive as they come. Yet he says he grasped early in his career that all that truly matters is that his team wins — not how it happens.His initial complete game arrived in his 179th big league start; he has 10 over the past five seasons.“There were opportunities where I could have pitched one sooner. But it didn’t matter. I could have gone back out there, but we’re winning by 10 or 11 runs, so why go pitch the ninth? So I can say that I did it? No, then I’m hurting the team. It would be a selfish accomplishment,” Scherzer said. “There’s times where if you can get a rest, take it. You’re actually helping the team more by not doing it.”He also pointed to another element: the score.“The sweet spot to throw a complete game now is being up three or four runs,” Scherzer said. “That’s the only time where it makes sense to think, ‘We still need our best guy in there, and it’s not a save situation.'”As with everything in professional sports these days, it’s all about what the numbers dictate. And there are calculations connected to saving up strength for the postseason, too; if NBA players sit out entire regular-season games for “load management,” why shouldn’t a pitcher head to the clubhouse a little early?Bullpens are built to get the last six or nine outs, and it’s OK for a starter to become conditioned to go six or seven innings.That starts happening in the minors, when pitchers are pulled as soon as they show signs of fatigue.By the time they get to the majors, they’re not used to working through that.“We have a way of trying to evolve as an industry that’s taken out a little bit of the ‘machismo’ that goes with the complete game,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said. “I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but it’s part of the evolution of analytics being applied at a higher rate across the board.”