On Sunday, the halls of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, NY, embraced Ichiro Suzuki into their fraternity of immortality. The legendary right-fielder became the first Japanese-born player to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, and he did so in his first year of eligibility.
To the lament of almost everyone within the inner circles of the MLB and sports in general, he was robbed of being just the second player ever and the first since Mariano Rivera to be a unanimous selection. His name was left off one ballot, thereby earning 99.7% of the vote.
Despite the ignorance of that one sportswriter, Suzuki is widely regarded as one of the game’s best outfielders ever. In his first ten seasons with the Seattle Mariners, all he did was win ten Gold Glove awards for defensive excellence. His cannon of an arm ranks amongst the game’s all-time best.
However, what he did with the bat is what set him apart from the other icons of the game. Ichiro’s career at the plate was arguably the most superlative of anyone who ever donned a major-league uniform in any part of the world.
As a spry 18-year-old in 1992, Ichiro began his professional baseball career in Japan with the Orix Blue Wave. While he only appeared in a total of 83 games in his first two years, his fabled career took flight for good in his third season with Orix.
In 1994, Suzuki clanged out an incredible 210 hits in just 130 games, and he finished the year hitting .385 and claimed the first of seven consecutive Nippon League batting titles. That mark also set the record for the greatest one-year batting average. During his reign, he averaged 177 hits each season in just over 124 games per campaign.
With that resume in his briefcase, Ichiro was ready to test the waters in major league baseball to see if his game matched up with the greats on this side of the Pacific Ocean.
Needless to say, his debut season of 2001 left no doubt that his skill set transcended continents, and he began a decade of dominance the game has rarely seen.
Ever since Ichiro started playing for Orix in 1992, the Mariners had their eye on him, hoping to one day land the prize of their desires and bring him to the States.
Ted Heid, who was a key figure of the Mariners’ scouting in Japan from 1997-2015 and courted Ichiro for years, feels a sense of pride now that Suzuki earned his Cooperstown call.
“It’s really emotional because he’s more like one of my children than he is a ballplayer,” said Heid.
The feeling was mutual about getting Ichiro to play in the big leagues. Jim Colborn, a pitching coach in the early 1990s for Suzuki’s Orix team in Japan before becoming a Mariners scout, said the young teenager pestered him constantly about making the trip to North America.
“He would constantly ask me about going to the States,” said Colborn, who played in the majors from 1969-78. “He’d corral me, and say, ‘You think I can play in the Major Leagues? What do I have to do?’ I’d say, ‘Just be yourself, and you’ll be all right,’ and he said, ‘No, maybe I need more home runs?’”
That dream came true in 2001, marking the beginning of Ichiro’s string of dominant years with the Mariners. In 2001, Suzuki led the American League with 242 hits and a .350 batting average, which earned him the rare coupling of the Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards.
He ranked either first or second in hits in a season from 2001-2010, and his 262 hits in 2004 surpassed George Sisler’s 1920 season total of 257, a mark that stood for 84 years.
Ichiro’s defensive awards and offensive prowess in the decade of the 2000s were not seen before nor since, so much so that Suzuki’s contemporaries lavished effusive praise upon him as his “Call to the Hall” was realized.
Anaheim Angels outfielder Tim Salmon, who played against Ichiro from 2001-2006, said: “He had a cannon in the outfield and just the gracefulness that he went about things, whether he was charging the ball and his footwork and being able to get off that perfect throw every time or running the bases. He just glided, and he just did everything with a gracefulness. That was really rare to see.”
Opposing managers never found a consistent way to get him out during his heyday.
“I really believe that he could look at the field and decide where he wanted to hit the ball and then he would hit it in a manner that would fall in front of outfielders,” said Joe Maddon, who skippered the Rays and the Cubs during Ichiro’s career. “Although he had pop in his bat, he knew how to just hit it over infielders — almost like his bat was a fungo — and as if the pitcher was just tossing it up in the air and he would hit it somewhere; it was just really maddening to defend it.”
To put the decade into perspective, his 2001 through 2010 with the Mariners produced a .331/.376/.430 line with 90 homers, 258 doubles, 71 triples, 383 stolen bases, and 2,244 of his eventual 3,000-plus MLB hits.
During his 28 years ruling two major leagues, Ichiro Suzuki amassed numbers that may never be seen again. He collected a combined 4,367 hits during his stints in Japan and America, which surpassed the standard of 4,256 career knocks set by the late Pete Rose.
What makes Ichiro so unique is that he did not arrive from Japan out of nothingness. Yes, Ichiro’s first 1,278 hits occurred in the less-talented Nippon Professional League, but his nine years of dominance there earned him a first-ballot enshrinement into their Hall of Fame, too.
He was a fully-formed star in Japan, the first position player who was making the trek to America. Once he got here, he piled on another Hall of Fame career, one that saw him stroke 3,089 more hits against the greatest pitchers in the world. That seamless transition, which was stocked with cultural and athletic challenges, makes him arguably the greatest hitter this game has ever seen.
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