At age 23, Seattle's King Felix is establishing himself as a true ace

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Mariners hurler Felix Hernandez boasts a 2.62 ERA to go along with an 8-3 record and 114 strikeouts. Brad Mangin/SI Ted Keith's Mailbag Ted Keith will answer select questions from SI.com users in his Baseball Mailbag. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND Follow Ted Keith on Twitter

Ichiro Suzuki was lying on his back in the corner of the visitor's clubhouse at Yankee Stadium last week doing his usual pregame stretching when a large, muscular man suddenly jumped on top of him and began ... tickling him? Yes, Ken Griffey Jr. was tickling his fellow outfielder, both players acting like schoolchildren and wearing smiles as broad as the room they were playing in.

As Ichiro squealed and giggled with delight, Griffey kept asking, "Who's the man? Who's the man?" A breathless Ichiro managed to squeak out in accented English, "I'm the man," and only then did the 39-year-old Griffey relent.

With all due respect to the pair of future Hall of Famers, the real man in the Seattle clubhouse these days is the one whose locker they were rolling around in front of: ace right-handed pitcher Felix Hernandez, who watched the scene, which has become something of a common occurrence before Mariners games this season, with a bemused grin, before quickly going back to his side conversation.

With Ichiro and Griffey about, Hernandez will never be the biggest star in Seattle's firmament, but he may be the best player in their present and he is surely the biggest hope for their future. Having just been selected for his first career All-Star appearance on Sunday, Hernandez is finally living up to the prohibitive amount of hype that greeted his arrival in the bigs as a skinny teenager from Venezuela four years ago. His success is further proof stars in baseball are not born, they are made. Who would have guessed it would take until his fifth season for Hernandez to reach his first All-Star Game? And yet when Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon is trying to decide on a starting pitcher for the game this week, he could do a lot worse than to pick Hernandez, who is now 8-3 with a 2.62 ERA and 114 strikeouts in 116.2 innings pitched, numbers that have him very much in the running for not only the starting nod but also for the Cy Young award.

Whether or not he's first to the mound in St. Louis next week, this has been a breakout season for the 23-year-old Hernandez. In addition to entrenching himself as one of the best starters in the game, Hernandez has served notice that if he keeps this pace up, he may establish the next threshold for a free-agent contract by a pitcher. He will be a free agent after the 2011 season, when he will still be just 25 years old, in contrast to Johan Santana and CC Sabathia, free-agent gems of the past two offseasons, who were both 28 when they signed their contracts.

A large contract, no matter where he signs it, would be the king's ransom Hernandez has been projected to receive since he started his professional career. He was dubbed "King Felix" for his exploits as a teenage minor leaguer, then arrived in Seattle as a 19-year-old with an almost unreasonable amount of hype. Over the first four seasons of his career, he showed glimpses of superstardom -- such as when he tossed a one-hit shutout in Fenway Park in his second start of the 2007 season -- but has mostly been a puzzle to managers, coaches and fans who expected that by now Hernandez would be well into his reign as the best pitcher in the American League.

This has been a tough spring for kings. King James got bounced in the conference finals, the King of Pop died and members of the King of Norway's royal family were being spied on by his own government. King Felix endured his own difficulties. On May 19, he lost to the Angels 6-5, dropping his record to 4-3 and raising his ERA to 4.13. Afterward, manager Don Wakamatsu chastised Hernandez for his casual approach on the mound that helped lead to four stolen bases by the Angels. "I never questioned his competitiveness, I questioned if he was being intelligent about it," said Wakamatsu. "We need him to live up to the anointment he got early on in his career."

Beginning with his very next start, Hernandez did just that. He shut down the Giants on just one earned run over eight innings to begin a stretch of eight consecutive quality starts that is still ongoing, and has dropped his ERA a full run and a half. The catalyst may have been some words of encouragement Hernandez got from Randy Johnson before his start against the Giants. Johnson had done likewise for Hernandez once before; during Hernandez's rookie season in 2005, Johnson told the then 19-year-old he was impressed with his stuff.