JUPITER, Fla. — Maybe the line drives don’t jump off the bat quite like they used to, but the swing is the same. Ichiro Suzuki, taking batting practice before the Marlins’ Grapefruit League matchup with the Mets on Wednesday, lifts his front leg as he coils his body, then plants his foot and unfurls, slashing the pitch into center field.

Crouching some 15 feet behind the batting cage, Nobuyuki Kobayashi scribbles something on a notepad. He is monitoring Ichiro’s every action, the same way he has nearly every day of every season since the future Hall of Famer arrived on the Major League landscape in 2001.

“People ask me, ‘Is it getting boring?'” Kobayashi told USA TODAY Sports. “I always answer, ‘No, not at all. Ichiro is very interesting.’ He has a great sense of humor, and his thought is very deep, always. We always have to think about him, and what he thinks.”

After batting practice, Ichiro strolls down the left field line toward the Marlins’ clubhouse. A young boy in the front row at Roger Dean Stadium, clutching a giant baseball, wails out, “I-chee-ro!” The player looks, raises his sunglasses, smiles, and walks over to sign an autograph. Kobayashi follows behind, snapping a photo with a small digital camera.

Kobayashi works for Daily Sports, a Japanese newspaper. He will cover the Ichiro beat again this season, and he is one of only two reporters — with Keizo Konishi of the Kyodo News — that have been following the outfielder stateside since his spectacular first season in Seattle.

At that time, Kobayashi estimates, the number of media covering Ichiro approached 100. This year, including the photographers on hand to capture Suzuki on Wednesday, the count is closer to 10.

“To me, it’s not so different,” Kobayashi says. “Still, I’m very nervous to talk to him after the game or before the game. I’m comfortable, but still I’m nervous. Because he’s a professional baseball player, but also he thinks of us as professionals. So it’s like walking the tightrope — very cautious to ask some questions.”

Kobayashi was born in Osaka and began his career writing about the film industry. He moved to the United States in the late 1990s to study and work as a freelance writer for a Japanese-American newspaper in Chicago before he got offered a job on the Ichiro beat. He now makes his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife and three sons, and where Ichiro spent the first 11 1/2 seasons of his career. But he followed Ichiro to New York when the Mariners traded him to the Yankees in 2013, and he’ll stay in Miami this season after Ichiro signed a free-agent deal with the Marlins in January.

He returns to Japan for a couple of weeks around the New Year, and spends his offseason writing about transactions involving Japanese players entering or leaving the Majors.

But during the season, his coverage focuses on a single player, a task that has grown more difficult as Ichiro has seen his playing time dwindle. Now 41, Suzuki looks ticketed for a part-time position in 2015, filling in behind a talented young Marlins outfield.

“It’s one of the toughest parts for us, every day focusing on one player,” Kobayashi says. “If he didn’t hit well, we have to write about that, and ask him. We never ask, ‘Why didn’t you hit well?’ Never. But ‘What happened on the field? What did you think about that play, or that pitch?'”

If Ichiro doesn’t play at all — a relative rarity even last season, when he appeared in 143 of the Yankees’ 162 games — then “it’s a very short article,” Kobayashi explains.

“I think it’s kind of cool,” says Marlins teammate Jose Fernandez of Ichiro’s constant coverage. “Everybody wants to know what he’s doing. All the people in Japan want to know how he’s doing. Everyone in the U.S. wants to know what he’s doing.

“In Cuba, he’s like a god. Everyone loves him over there, like crazy. They admire the way he plays the game, and it’s amazing just to be part of the same team with him. He’s probably more famous than anybody in the big leagues in Cuba. Even more famous than a lot of Cubans that play here, in my opinion.”

Even as younger Japanese imports like Masahiro Tanaka and Yu Darvish draw headlines in the United States and overseas, Ichiro’s stature in Japan remains massive. Earlier this spring, cameras caught him wearing a discontinued T-shirt once sold by his old Japanese team. After the photo circulated in Japan, fans bombarded the club with phone calls requesting the shirt, so many that they are now again on sale.

“Ichiro has such an effect on people,” Kobayashi says. “How can I describe it? Everybody knows Ichiro. Everybody. He is a huge superstar.”

But for all Ichiro’s fame, Father Time remains undefeated in baseball. And though the outfielder has stayed effective enough to provide some value for his teams after most of his contemporaries in baseball have retired, Suzuki is now a 41-year-old part-time player on a one-year contract with no guarantee he’ll get another. So at some point in the not too distant future, Kobayashi and the rest of the reporters following Ichiro may need to scramble for different work.

“I’ve never thought about after Ichiro retires,” he says. “I cannot imagine it, even now. He’s 41 years old, and I cannot imagine him retiring.”

Suzuki played center field and went 1-for-3 with an RBI before leaving for a defensive replacement in the top of the seventh inning of the Marlins’ 7-4 exhibition win on Wednesday. Afterward, as always, he discussed it with his press corps.