Ichiro hits 3000
Ichiro Suzuki tugs on his sleeve. It’s the same every time. It’s been the same every time for 15 years now. He brandishes the bat at the pitcher, pointed straight up toward the sky. Every time for over 10,000 plate appearances. He brings it in, holding it behind his head, parallel to the ground. It flutters lazily. Every time for 3,000 hits.
They call him simply ‘Ichiro.’ As it is with kings and conquerors and messiahs, we need only his given name to identify him. As it is with legends, lore about him abounds. It’s small wonder that, faced with a fist-sized projectile hurtling toward them at upwards of 90 miles per hour, most players struggle even to make contact. Yet whispers on either side of the globe insist that Ichiro can aim his hits, can tell you where he wants the ball to be and slap it so it lands there. A little more realistically, his peers have long told tales of the absurd power hidden in his wiry frame, which he reveals only in batting practice for silent stadia and invisible fans. At the cost of a little of his batting average, we are told, Ichiro could have the ability to slam pitch after pitch into the upper deck. He just chooses not to.
But there has been so much more wonder on the path he has walked instead.
He is the platonic form of a baseball player. A bolt of lightning around the base paths, a laser cannon from right field, there is no part of this motley of seemingly randomly selected physical skills that insists on calling itself a sport at which Ichiro does not excel. Famously terse, the stoic master of the most stoic game to this day gives interviews through an interpreter (he can speak English conversationally, a number of his teammates have revealed over the years; he just chooses not to). He is also very, very good at using a club to hit a ball such that it lands within the roughly conical area formed by two intersecting lines, without having it land in an opposing player’s glove. 15 years after coming to the Major Leagues from Japan, Ichiro sits on a .314 batting average.
This is where some nerd chimes in in an attempt to ruin everything, as nerds are wont to do. Batting average is a much maligned statistic in the 21st century. Hits divided by at-bats (that is, plate appearances minus walks) is actually a relatively poor indicator of a player’s contribution to the team’s ability to produce runs, our hypothetical champion of math and hating fun reminds us.
A more useful figure is on-base percentage (OBP), plate appearances minus outs divided by plate appearances, because walks are functionally almost identical to singles for the purposes of a team’s offence. More useful still is on-base plus slugging (OPS), a similar figure that also accounts for power (measured by extra-base hits) whose equation is too long to comprehensibly write in words for me to be willing to record here. Ichiro is a dinosaur, our friend the nerd insists. His pathological insistence on smacking singles instead of swinging for the fences or working pitch counts for walks could actually be harmful for any club that would write him into a line-up.
So much of modern baseball is math, and that’s part of what makes it so fascinating. Baseball is math, but it’s also art, and it’s also history and philosophy and business and physics. It’s a comprehensive liberal arts education in the 60% of a second it takes for a curveball to gently carom just inside the strike zone. We cheer teams that win because winning is entertaining and spectator sports are an entertainment industry, but more than that we cheer athletes who are great because greatness is beautiful and beauty is what’s best in us. Ichiro’s preternatural ability to hit has been valuable for the baseball teams he has played for, but it has been much more valuable for those who have been fortunate enough to observe it.
30 players in the more than century-long history of Major League Baseball have amassed 3000 hits. The musical crack of Ichiro’s bat that we have felt split the hazy summer air for 15 years rings through history now, this altogether useless sliver of history called baseball (all art is quite useless, Wilde told us). He is one of the best to ever play the game, perhaps the best ever at the specific art of firing baseballs just out of reach of defenders. Nobody hits like Ichiro. Perhaps nobody will ever hit like Ichiro again.
The bat swings out in front of him as he kicks his right foot into the ground and he is already running. He knows, as he has known 2999 times before. He leaves the plate almost before the ball does, his certainty bordering on nonchalance. Nobody catches the ball. He arrives safely on base. Ichiro has done it again. It’s the same every time.
