Yankee Pitcher Suicide: Hideki Irabu

Former New York Yankees right-handed pitcher Hideki Irabu was found dead of an apparent suicide in the wealthy Los Angeles suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes, authorities said. The body of Irabu, 42, was found at 4:25 p.m. PDT Wednesday, July 27, 2011, county sheriff's Sgt. Michael Arriaga said. "He was found dead by an apparent suicide," Arriaga said.

TMZ reported that he died by suicide by hanging himself. Irabu lived in LA with his wife and two children, where he had investments in various Japanese restaurants.

Baseball player suicides are not as rare as one assumes, and my study of them in the mid-1980s predicted a wave of self-deaths in 1989. Half of the suicide victims were pitchers, and all of those during the 20th century were right-handed.

Hideki Irabu (Japanese: 伊良部 秀輝) (May 15, 1969 – July 27, 2011) was a professional baseball player of Okinawan and American mixed ancestry. He played professionally in both Japan and the United States. Irabu's biological father is American, according to the father who raised Hideki, Ichiro Irabu. Ichiro also indicated that his wife, Kazue, is Hideki Irabu's biological mother. Hideki Irabu grew up in Amagasaki, Hyōgo Prefecture.

Irabu lived in Rancho Palos Verdes but it was not immediately clear whether it was his home, the sergeant said. Other details were not immediately released.

Messages left at the county coroner's office were not immediately returned.

Irabu pitched for the Lotte Orions, who later became the Chiba Lotte Marines, of the Pacific League from 1988 to 1996. He was known as a high-speed pitcher and in 1993, he threw a 158 km/h (98 mph) fastball against Kazuhiro Kiyohara of the Seibu Lions. This was the fastest clocked pitch in all of Japanese Professional Baseball (NPB) until 2005, when the record was broken by Marc Kroon of the Yokohama BayStars. It remains the Pacific League record.

Irabu led the Pacific League in wins in 1994 (27 games, 207 1⁄3 innings, 15 wins, 10 losses, 239 strikeouts, ERA 3.04), and in ERA in 1995 and 1996 (1995 - 28, 203, 11-11-0, 239, 2.53; 1996 - 18, 157 1/3, 12-6-0, 167, 2.40). In these successive years, Irabu monopolized the title of greatest strikeout pitcher in his league.

In 1997, the San Diego Padres purchased his contract from the Chiba Lotte Marines. This signing is especially notable because it led to the creation of the posting system currently used by Japanese and MLB teams. Irabu, however, refused to sign with the Padres, saying he would only play with the Yankees. For the negotiating rights to Irabu, the Yankees offered the Padres a choice of one from a list of players including Brian Boehringer, David Weathers, Chris Cumberland, Andy Fox, and Matt Luke. The Padres would eventually include him as a player-to-be-named-later in a trade that involved Homer Bush and Irabu traveling to the New York Yankees in exchange for Rafael Medina, Ruben Rivera, and $3 million in cash. The Yankees signed him to a $12.8 million, four-year contract, and after only eight minor league games, the Yankees put him in their rotation. He played with the Yankees from 1997 through 1999, winning two World Series rings (1998, 1999) despite only pitching in one postseason game and having no postseason decisions (coincidentally, the 1998 win was against the Padres). 

George Steinbrenner publicly expressed disgust at his weight, at one point calling him a "fat pussy toad" after he failed to cover first base on a ground ball during a spring training game. Steinbrenner refused to let Irabu accompany the team to Los Angeles, but two days later, Steinbrenner apologized and allowed Irabu to join the team. Steinbrenner's own dissatisfaction with Irabu was parodied in the final episode of Seinfeld; with the fictionalised Steinbrenner on the witness stand, George Costanza's father stands up in the court gallery, and tries to impeach Steinbrenner's credibility by asking him "How could you spend $12 million on Hideki Irabu?"

1998 was Irabu's best season in MLB, featuring career bests in games started (28), complete games (2), innings pitched (173), wins (13), and ERA (4.06).

After the 1999 season, he was traded to the Montreal Expos for Ted Lilly, Christian Parker, and Jake Westbrook. He started only 14 games for the Expos in 2000 and 2001, pitching 71⅓ innings with a 6.69 ERA and only 2 wins against 7 losses. 

In 2002, Irabu signed as a free agent to pitch for the Texas Rangers as a closer. At the end of the year, Irabu moved back to Japan to pitch in the Hanshin Tigers' starting rotation for the 2003 season, helping the team win the Central League pennant for the first time since 1985. When Major League Baseball opened its 2004 season in Tokyo, he pitched against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays

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Over the course of six MLB seasons, Irabu's career totals are 126 games, 514 innings, 34 wins, 35 losses, 16 saves, 405 strikeouts, and a 5.15 ERA. His Japanese totals for eleven seasons are 273 games, 1,286 1/3 innings, 72 wins, 69 losses, 11 saves, 1,282 strikeouts, and a 3.55 ERA.

In 2009, Irabu had come out of retirement and made a contract with Long Beach Armada of the independent Golden Baseball League. He posted a 5-3 record in 10 starts, with an ERA of 3.58. In 65 innings Irabu struck out 66 batters while walking just 19. In August, he announced his intention to return to the Japanese professional leagues.

On August 20, 2008, Irabu was arrested on the suspicion of assaulting the manager of a bar in Umeda, Osaka. He was upset that his credit card was not accepted in the bar. At the time of the suspected assault, Irabu had consumed at least 20 glasses of beer. Irabu admitted to the assault, the bartender sustained no injuries, and Irabu paid the bill with another credit card.

On May 17, 2010, Irabu was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena (although it was also reported to have been Redondo Beach). Police said he was stopped after his car drifted outside of traffic lanes and he nearly collided with a parked car. He posted $5,000 bail but it was not immediately clear whether he was criminally charged. The press release of his arrest states he resided at the time in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Final MLB statistics

Win–loss record:    34–35

Earned run average:    5.15

Strikeouts:    405

Dark Deaths Engulf Wales

The Welsh countryside is being visited by dampness, darkness, and death. The spirit and happiness of youthful hope is being snuffed out.

When I wrote my book Suicide Clusters for Faber and Faber (Boston and London) in 1987, few people accepted the reality that suicides clustered. By the time The Copycat Effect came out in 2004, it was taken for granted that suicide clusters existed and do happen.

This week the media began to report on a highly active cluster happening in Wales, in and around Bridgend, a former coal mining community of 40,000, and today the site of a well-known prison.

The death toll went to seven with the latest suicide occurring this Wednesday, when Natasha Randall died by hanging.

In addition to Randall, six men between the ages of 17 and 27 have also been found dead in the area. Authorities have ruled three of the cases to be suicides; the others are under investigation, but suicide is suspected. [See the update at the end, regarding a possible new count of 13 deaths by suicide.]

Let me be clear. From reading about how they all have died, I would say that all seven are suicidal deaths.

Read for yourself, how these associates and friends killed themselves:

Dale Crole, 18, hanged himself at the Coney Beach funfair at Porthcawl, near Bridgend, January 2007;

David Dilling, 19, a former classmate of Dale from Pyle, near Bridgend, hanged himself, February 2007;

Thomas Davies, 20, who had been at school with both Dale and David, found hanged from a tree in David’s home village two days before his funeral, February 2007;

Zachery Barnes, 17, of Wildmill, Bridgend, a friend of Thomas’s family, hanged with washing line, August 2007;

Liam Clarke, 20, a friend of Dale, found hanged in a park in Bridgend, December 2007;

Gareth Morgan, 27, who knew Liam, found hanged in his bedroom, January 2008; and

Natasha Randall, 17, of Blaengarw, Bridgend, a close friend of Liam, hanged herself in her bedroom, January 2008.

The common method hanging unites these deaths in the cluster.

Near Bridgend, from my research, clustering has happened before. In 2003, the Bridgend Samaritans group wanted to put signs at a south Wales beauty spot to persuade suicidal people to call them. Southerndown Cliffs near Ogmore in the Vale of Glamorgan had become a notorious suicide spot, with nine deaths since December 2000. That translates into a cluster of nine jumping deaths between December of 2000 and May 2003 ~ nine deaths in 18 months.

In 2006, the media quoted Philip Walters, the coroner, as saying he was "desperately concerned" about the number of young men dying by suicide in his area (Bridgend, Rhondda Cynon Taf and Merthyr Tydfil). Over an 11-month period in 2006, he said he dealt with nearly one case of suicide per week for men under 30. (If he actually said that, the new 2007-2008 cluster in Bridgend should be no surprise to him.)

In the midst of the 2006 events, a widely reported story was of a Swansea Institute computer student Geraint Banks-Wilkinson, 20, from Nantymoel, who died by hanging on January 13, 2006. His death seemed directly related to his worries about an overdraft at his bank, the Bridgend branch of HSBC. Mr. Banks-Wilkinson's father, Geoff, a prison officer, said of the bank: "The way they treated him was appalling."

Bridgend appears to be one of those communities that has a historical predisposition to clustering and contagion, where suicide is seen as an option for "coping" among vulnerable and hopeless youth.

Now the deaths in Bridgend are front-page news stories worldwide and people are looking to blame someone or something.
"People are saying it might be some sort of cult, but we don't know," said Luke Wills, 25. "There is something amiss, but we don't know what."

Even speculation about a "pact" has been floated about.

"It's nothing like that. What people are saying is not true," said Alicia Johns, a friend of 17-year-old Natasha Randall, who was found dead last week.

"People get down and they do it," she added, saying the young people acted on their own and were not influenced by others. "It's all from the same group, I knew these people."

But this suicide cluster is probably merely being pushed along by the copycat effect, in which the model for suicide among impulsive, action-driven, forlorn youth has now been placed in front of them in an area that has turned grim in a downward economy reinforced in the nearly perpetual damp mists that shroud Bridgend in the long winter months. The darkness of despair can run deep. One need not blame cults, pacts, video games, the internet, or even the media. The gloom is like the fog surrounding one at night in Bridgend, and for many, the modeling of past suicides shout out from those Welsh nights.

Remember, if you live in Wales, don't forget to keep talking to each other and help each other through these dark times.

~ UK Samaritans: 08457 90 90 90 and www.samaritans.org ~

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Update: Senior detectives investigating a spate of young suicides in south Wales over the past year are to re-examine the files of 13 deaths in the area - including four cases that are officially closed. South Wales police issued a statement saying: "We will be reviewing a number of cases of sudden deaths in the Bridgend area as part of the investigation process. At this stage, we can't confirm the number or further detail."

According to other sources, among the cases are five involving people aged between 21 and 27, three 20-year-olds, two 19-year-olds, an 18-year-old and two 17-year-olds. All are apparently unexplained and were within the space of a few miles.




Bridgend, Wales, in calmer days.