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I meant to read The Meaning of Ichiro before writing this post. To that end, and given that there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do anymore, I ordered a copy of it from Amazon. Now, about a year and a half ago I bought a house. In my old neighborhood packages got stolen off of the porch more often than they didn’t, so I always had packages delivered to work. My new neighborhood is safer, but I didn’t have any particular reason to change my delivery address. Long story short: my copy of The Meaning of Ichiro is waiting for me at work, where I will be able to pick it up at some indeterminate time in the distant future. So I don't know if there’s anything original in this post. Probably not. So forgive me if I’m rehashing stuff you’ve heard before.

There’s no reason to summarize Ichiro Suzuki’s career. Of everyone I’ve written about in this thread, he is almost certainly the person who is best-known to American audiences. (Maybe to Japanese audiences too?) What I’m going to talk about, instead, is why Ichiro matters.

Japanese players in MLB are sometimes referred to as ‘imports’, but that’s not really quite right. A “re-import” is something that is produced in one country, sold in another, and then imported back into the first. Japanese players in MLB are really re-imports. Baseball evolved out of rounders sometime in the late 18th to early 19th century. It was probably a gradual thing. Anyways, certainly by the civil war something recognizable as baseball was popular throughout New England and spreading west and southward. The war suddenly took it everywhere in the country.

In the 1870s baseball was introduced into Japan by Horace Wilson, an American professor at what is now Tokyo University. By the end of the decade there were established teams no longer playing on a merely ad hoc basis. By 1891 the game was popular enough that it was being featured on postcards. Nevertheless, it was decades behind the American game. In Japan in the 1890s baseball was being played by university students and school children; in the US in the 1890s baseball had been a professional sport for going-on 30 years.

The Japanese won the first meeting between an American team and a Japanese team, but they did less well thereafter. In 1905 Waseda toured the US, playing against college teams, and went 7-19. Three years later a team composed largely of PCL players toured Japan, compiling a 17-0 record. There were a number of tours of professional American players through Japan in the first few decades of the 20th century. The American professionals went 87-1 in total. During the famous 1934 tour Eiji Sawamura famously struck out Gehringer, Ruth, Gehrig, and Foxx in a row. Less well-remembered is that he lost the game.

In recent years many Japanese players have come to the States, and many American players went the other way. Pitchers have done better than position players, but the track record of Japanese players in MLB is not good. Ichiro and Hideki Matsui are the only position players who were legitimate stars. (On the pitching side, Tanaka, Darvish, and to a lesser extent Nomo were good starters. Sasaki, Saito, and Uehara were good relief pitchers. Ohtani could be good on both sides of the ball.) Americans going to Japan have had trouble adjusting to the culture, but were much more successful on the diamond. MLB non-entities like Wladimir Balentien, Bobby Rose, and Oreste Destrade were stars in Japan.

Comparisons between American baseball and Japanese baseball are probably inevitable. And they have mostly not been flattering for Japan. That this matters to Japanese baseball as a cultural or institutional force is probably most clearly exhibited by the degree to which Sawamura is celebrated. The award for the best pitcher is named in his honor, due to a game that he lost.

All of this leads to the accomplishments of Japanese players being viewed with a jaundiced eye. Certainly on this side of the Pacific; I suspect on the other as well. And it, perhaps, engenders a certain degree of defensiveness. Kawakami was appalled at Yonamine’s American style of play, and traded him away as soon as he was in a position to do so.

The reason that Ichiro is important is that he can put some of this to rest. He is living proof that the best Japanese players are as good as the best American players. Whatever the various indignities of the past, no matter that the average level of play is lower in the Central League than in the National League, Japan can get to the very top. And the proof is that it did. Ichiro will almost certainly be the first player elected to both the American and the Japanese halls of fame. (That means that I’ll need to get two more of his cards.) Many people argue that his case for Cooperstown should include his Japanese performance, but it doesn’t really need it. Suzuki accumulated 59.7 WAR. That puts him right around Zach Wheat and Vlad Guerrero. He collected 3089 hits. That’s 24th all-time, right between Dave Winfield and Craig Biggio. (And of course he also owns the single-season record.) Ichiro would be a hall of famer even if you ignored what he did in Japan. He matters because he’s proof that, at least at the top of the game, Japan can play with anyone.

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That’s what I wanted to say. As I warned above, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not especially original. If not, my apologies to those who came first.

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I also want to play with some numbers. Ichiro is a Meikyukai member because of what he did in the US. But we can also ask what he would likely have done had he spent his career in Japan. Or what he would likely have done if he played in the US directly out of high school. Now, we can’t know this with any certainty, but what we can do is estimate it on the basis of the numbers that he actually put up. Preferably, I’d use Davenport Translations for estimating an MLB-only Ichiro, but Clay’s website seems to be having trouble at the moment. (I keep getting 404 errors when I load Japanese stats.) So I’m going to have to do some very rough back-of-the-napkin calculations here.

What I did was take his last three seasons in Japan and calculate his hit rate, and his first three seasons in MLB and do the same. He lost only about 4% of his hits coming across the Pacific. Next I multiplied his Japanese hit totals by 96%, and then adjusted the resulting number by the differences in season length. That gives an estimated hit total of 4561. Take that Pete Rose. However, it’s unlikely that an 18 year old Ichiro would be playing in the big leagues. He actually wasn’t good until 1994, so his first two (partial) seasons would probably have been spent in Tacoma or wherever. By 1994 he was good, but was still just 20 and had struggled the past two seasons. Let’s imagine that the Mariners keep him down for the first 1/3 of the season until he really forces the issue. Two seasons in the minors cost him 41 hits, the first third of 1994 costs him an additional 80. So my hypothetical Ichiro records 4440 hits in MLB. Hypothetical Ichiro breaks Rose’s record in 2015, his first season with the Marlins. There’s quite a lot of uncertainty around a little exercise like this, so I think that the best we can say is that if Ichiro had spent his whole career in MLB, there’s a fair chance he would have surpassed Rose.

What about Japan-only Ichiro? The same (admittedly over simplified) methodology yields an estimate of 3956 hits. That would be, far-and-away, Japan’s all-time record. In fact, it’s so far beyond the record it’s hard to believe. So I also did this: I also gave him the average of his full-time numbers with Orix for as long as his peak actually lasted in MLB, and then adjusted his hit totals down proportionally as he aged. Even this method gave him >3700 hits. These are rough estimates, but I think it’s clear that if Ichiro had stayed in Japan, he would have obliterated the all-time hits record. Probably around 2010-2012.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: soon enough

The card is from the 1999 SP Calbee set. You had to send in five “winner” cards from potato chip bags to get it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is my most valuable Japanese card, although I didn’t pay much for it, as I got a good deal on the entire set.

I like it that he’s known just as ‘Ichiro’.