Maybe the Seattle Mariners and Oakland A's thought that if they kept playing, Ichiro Suzuki couldn't leave baseball.
The game had to end at some point, however, and it was the Mariners who provided the final blow.
Seattle scored the tiebreaking run in the 12th when the A's couldn't turn a double play on a grounder by Domingo Santana and then held on for a 5-4 win on Thursday night at Tokyo Dome in a game overshadowed by the reports Ichiro Suzuki would retire when it was over.