How do you take the way Ichiro plays baseball and translate it into words and pictures? It’s not easy, but Jim Rosenthal attempts to do it “Ichiro’s Art of Playing Baseball.”

Written with Ichiro’s cooperation, the book tries to condense the immense knowledge he has about the game into something both kids and adults can learn from. I have to think that there’s no way to totally do this, but the book does make a fairly good attempt at sharing Ichiro’s approach to hitting, fielding, and baserunning.

What left me uneasy about the book is that I kept thinking that there’s no way to really distill what Ichiro knows about playing baseball into a book, and by doing so, you make what he does appear so simple, when in reality it’s anything but.

However, if you are looking for a new book of instruction and advice, it’s worth picking. Just don’t expect to get a real technical breakdown of how to play baseball – the book relies on surface level instruction and fairly simple drills that most young ballplayers may already be doing.