(
)
His marriage in tatters, troubled ex-Yankees pitcher Hideki Irabu retreated into his empty suburban LA home — and was found three days later after hanging himself, officials said yesterday.
The 42-year-old hurler — whose dream of major league stardom eluded him — was found by a friend Wednesday, said Lt. David Smith, a spokesman for the LA County Department of Coroner.
“He was last known alive on July 24,” Smith said, adding it was not yet clear when Irabu actually killed himself.
Smith said Irabu was declared dead at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Neighbors had said Irabu’s wife, Kyonsu, and the couple’s two daughters had moved out weeks earlier.
“Every time that I would see him out and about in the driveway, he would wander about like someone who was down and who wasn’t very happy,” neighbor Mary Feuerlicht told the local newspaper, The Daily Breeze, in Palos Verdes.
“He would look like he was in a daze.”
She said a sheriff’s deputy and a friend of Irabu told her the hurler’s wife left with his two daughters a month ago.
It was yet another aspect of his family life that had been shattered.
When he first arrived in the United States in 1997, Irabu confided he wanted desperately to meet the American dad who ditched him and his Japanese mother.
He told Japanese reporters he wanted to pitch for the Bombers precisely because he wanted to find his birth father, The Daily Sports newspaper of Japan reported at the time.
“Even if he can’t meet his father, he believes his father will see him if he does well in the United States,” the publication said, quoting officials with Irabu’s Japanese team, the Chiba Lotte Marines.
From then on, rumors regularly circulated about Irabu’s dad, a Vietnam veteran, showing up at various Yankee games. Irabu never gave the stories credence.
“I’m not talking about it,” the irritated hurler would snarl through his interpreter.
But when another father figure turned his back on Irabu, it was a rejection he had a harder time shaking off.
Yankees owner George Steinbrenner groused that the 240-pounder looked like a “fat toad” when Irabu flubbed a play during a 1998 spring-training game.
Irabu apparently never reconnected with his real dad, but his stepfather, Ichiro Irabu, stood by him proudly.
Soon after his son’s arrival in New York, Ichiro, the manager of a restaurant in Amagasaki, Japan, revealed he had become the star’s stepfather soon after Hideki’s birth in 1969.
Hideki’s friend and Yankee translator, George Rose, said expectations were unrealistically high for the hurler.
“He did have incredible talent. He was a better pitcher than his statistics reflect,” Rose said.
More important, he had a good heart, Rose said.
“He paid off most of my graduate-school loans with part of his World Series bonus,” Rose said. “He was kind and generous and I’d like people to know that about him, too.”