An Ode to Ichiro

For those of you who are not aware, on September 23rd, Ichiro Suzuki became the first player in Major League Baseball history to have ten consecutive seasons in which he accumulated at least 200 hits. At the same time, he tied Ty Cobb for the most 200 hit seasons over the course of a career. All in all, not bad for a guy who has played only ten years in the United States.

In that spirit, as well as in the spirit of Rob Neyer’s post in his SweetSpot Blog on espn.com (http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot, check his entry on September 10th), I’m going to take a little stroll down “what if?” lane. The simple question that Neyer asks is what would have happened if Ichiro had been born in the United States and not in Japan and so that’s the question that I’m going to attempt to answer in a very conservative manner.

First of all, in his post, Neyer suggests that Ichiro reaches the majors at the age of 22 but for this analysis, I’m making the bold assumption that he would have reached the big leagues at the age of 20. In reality, he began playing for the Orix BlueWave when he was just 19 and in his first full season of professional baseball, he hit .385 with 210 hits and a .958 OPS. Yes, I understand that Japanese baseball is not American baseball. Nowhere in this excursion into fantasy will you hear me suggest that Ichiro would have hit .385 against American pitching at the age of 20. However, I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that as a 20 year old with his speed, his durability and his skill set, he could have gotten 200 hits and hit better than .300.

So, what I’m going to do is simply put in his career numbers for six seasons before 2001 when he made his Major League debut with the Seattle Mariners. Instead of using his averages for a 162 game season, I prorated everything for the average number of games that he has played over the past ten years, which even with several games left to go in the 2010 regular season, comes out to 157.7. Over those ten years, he’s averaged 223 hits, 9 home runs, and just 68 strikeouts per season.

Where would he be today with six additional seasons of .331/.376/.430 level production? First of all, his slash line would stay the same and that batting average is currently the highest among active players (just a tiny bit ahead of Albert Pujols, .3311-.3309) and would be good enough for the 30th best batting average of all time of batters with at least 3,000 plate appearances. Of the 29 that are currently ahead of him, only three played a single game after 1940: Al Simmons (.334) whose last appearance was for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1944, Paul Waner (.333) who played one game for the 1945 New York Yankees, and Tony Gwynn (.338) who last played in 2001. Another note on Gwynn; he only hit under .300 in one season during his Hall of Fame career and it was in his 190 at-bat rookie year when he hit “only” .289.

More importantly though is where Ichiro would fall on the countables lists. Under our previous assumptions, he would have 3,565 hits in 10,766 at-bats by (nearly) the end of the 2010 regular season. He would also have scored 1,669 runs, hit 408 doubles, 114 triples, and 144 home runs. He would have stolen 611 bases while only being caught 141 times and while he would have only walked 728 times, he would have only struck out 1,088 times.

The obvious question is what does all that mean? Well, first of all, Ichiro would be tied with Paul Konerko for the 192nd most strikeouts in Major League history and while that may not seem noteworthy, you must also consider that only 13 players have ever had more at-bats than Ichiro’s projected total. His total of 611 stolen bases would also rank 18th in league history. All of this might be fascinating to you Ichiro and Mariners fans out there but none of this is what we’re really here to talk about.

At 3,565 hits, Ichiro would rank an astounding 5th all time while completing this season at the age of 36. Given that he really doesn’t look like he’s going to slow down anytime soon (he hit .352 last year at age 35) it’s very realistic to project that within two and a half to three seasons, he would become the third ever member of the 4,000 hit club and maybe a season or two after that (with good fortune before he turned 42) he would become the all-time hits leader.

In short, Ichiro is the prototypical player to break every hits record and put them far out of reach for generations to come, much the way Ty Cobb was once upon a time. If he had started his career here instead of in Japan, he would be a first ballot Hall of Famer with several years left in his career. As it is, I’m not at all convinced that he’s NOT a Hall of Famer. Consider this; many players don’t make it into the Hall of Fame for one of two reasons. First, that they simply weren’t good enough, they weren’t great players, merely good players. Second of all, they weren’t great for long enough. If you put a few more good years on the tail end of Ichiro’s career, it’s hard to say that he doesn’t meet both of those criteria since, in my opinion, he’s been one of the best leadoff hitters in baseball for the past decade.

Is he a Hall of Famer? I think after a few more years to boost his counting stats, he’ll be on the cusp and his batting average, baserunning, and stellar defense will push him over the top and into Cooperstown.