Is Ichiro Suzuki the Real Mr. 3000?

With the Yankees—a "Dead Cat Bounce"?

Hitting just .261 during the 2012 season, Suzuki himself asked the Mariners to be traded; the team, looking to rebuild, obliged. Suzuki's first choice was the New York Yankees, who agreed to send pitchers Danny Farquar and D.J. Mitchell to Seattle in exchange for Ichiro, and in one of those seemingly-scripted moments, his first game as a Yankee, on July 23, was in Seattle's SafecoPark against the Mariners. (He went one-for-four, singling in his first at-bat and then stealing second, as the Yankees won 4–1.)

In the Bronx, Suzuki, whom the Yankees had initially moved into left field (although he would return to right field later in the season) and the bottom of the batting order, seemed revived as in 60 starts and 240 plate appearances he generated a .322/.340/.454 slash line from 73 hits including 13 doubles and five home runs for a 113 OPS+ while stealing 14 bases and scoring 28 runs. The Yankees won the AL East and advanced into the postseason, the first time Suzuki had appeared in the playoffs since his rookie year, and although Suzuki batted only .217 in the five-game AL Division Series against the Baltimore Orioles, he did hit two doubles and knock in three runs as the Yankees prevailed. The Detroit Tigers proved to be the stronger team in the AL Championship Series as they swept the Bronx Bombers although Ichiro did hit a homer, his first in the postseason, and notch a pair of RBI.


Ichiro made a splash when he joined the New York Yankees--but should he have retired after his stint in the Bronx came to an end?

But was Ichiro's brief resurgence in the Bronx simply a "dead cat bounce"? In 2013, the Yankees made Suzuki their everyday right fielder as he essayed 128 starts and compiled 555 plate appearances, but although he had a decent first half (though still nowhere near the Ichiro in his prime), posting a .283/.320/.393 line from 90 hits, 11 doubles, three triples, and six big flies, he nosedived in the second half to a paltry .228/.259/.262, and his .262 batting average for the season was the lowest of his MLB career.

Because of Ichiro Suzuki's unique style of play, batting average, usually discounted in the sabermetric age, really does become the barometer of his effectiveness. OPS and OPS+, both of which are keyed to on-base- and slugging percentages, are not kind to Suzuki unless he is hitting at a lusty clip—and those hits are overwhelmingly singles. (wOBA, or weighted on-base average, and wRC+, or adjusted runs created based on wOBA, are not his friends, either—Suzuki's career wOBA is .330 while his wRC+ is 105. League averages for wOBA and wRC+ are, respectively, .320 and 100.) Of his 2935 career MLB hits, only 545 are extra-base hits—341 doubles, 91 triples, and 113 home runs. And in 10,101 plate appearances, he has walked only 596 times, a frequency of once every 16.9 plate appearances.

Going back to his NPB days in Japan, Suzuki has made it his life's work to reach base on the perfectly-placed hit, aiming to place the ball in a specific spot and then executing the swing with the precision of a billiards player to drop it there. It is truly idiosyncratic, particularly in an era in which power-hitting is celebrated, and Ichiro seems to relish being a "banjo" hitter, albeit an artistic one who claims that "chicks who dig the long ball" don't appeal to him although he'll "flirt" with them once in a while by occasionally hitting one out.

Superficially showing that the cat may still have some life in him, Suzuki's batting average rose to .284 in 2014, but the Yankees used him as a part-time player as he made only 95 starts, mostly in right field, and his 102 hits in 385 plate appearances were the fewest of his MLB career. At the end of the 2014 season, Ichiro became a free agent and signed a one-year deal with the Miami Marlins.

Trudging toward 3000

The Marlins, marking Ichiro's first foray into the National League (other than interleague play), had planned to use Suzuki as a fourth outfielder in 2015, but a season-ending injury to Giancarlo Stanton put Ichiro into right field more than had been expected. Ichiro made 89 starts altogether, amassing 438 plate appearances, but even his mediocre first half, posting a .253/.307/.290 line in 204 plate appearances, was better than his woeful second half with its slash line, .208/.260/.269, on life support although the "dead cat bounce" came with all five of his doubles and four of his six triples hit during the second half.

With a two-out RBI double off the Washington Nationals' Doug Fister on July 29, 2015, Suzuki collected his 2900th MLB hit, and with 35 more hits by the end of the season, he has come within 65 hits of the storied 3000-hit plateau; having signed another one-year contract with the Marlins, Ichiro technically has the opportunity to reach that plateau.

But at what cost? In 2015, Suzuki's OPS+ was 56—just a little better than half as good as a league-average hitter; his .250 wOBA and 53 wRC+ were just as conspicuously sub-standard. Granted, with a 71–91 win-loss record in 2015, good for the third place in the NL East, the Marlins were the tenth-best team in the NL and thus hardly a threat, but for how much longer can the Marlins sustain the novelty of having Ichiro Suzuki, so close to 3000 hits, occupy a spot in the batting order? For the first time in his career, Suzuki produced a negative WAR value, –1.2 by Baseball Reference's calculations although FanGraphs is a bit more charitable with –0.8.

Is it worth it to the Miami Marlins to have Ichiro become "Mr. 3000" on their watch? Is it worth it to Suzuki to trudge away to reach that goal? Is his Hall of Fame legacy dependent upon reaching 3000 hits? Interestingly, the Marcels projection system, used by Baseball Reference, has Suzuki getting 102 hits in 2016, enough to cross the threshold, but Steamers Projections, featured on FanGraphs, forecasts 63 hits for him—two shy of 3000. And are 3000 hits even necessary for Suzuki to go into the Hall of Fame?

Is Ichiro Suzuki a Hall of Famer?

Every player eligible for the Hall of Fame who has at least 2800 hits has been inducted into the Hall except for Harold Baines (2866 hits), 60 percent of whose career was spent as a designated hitter; Barry Bonds (2935 hits, coincidentally tied with Suzuki) and Rafael Palmeiro (3020), both of whose careers are marred by associations with performance-enhancing drugs; and Pete Rose, the all-time MLB hit king with 4256 safeties whose violation of baseball's gambling prohibitions has been a contentious issue for much longer than the PEDs issue.

In other words, the only eligible hitters with at least 2800 hits who are not in the Hall of Fame are one whose primary position has been all but dismissed by Hall voters, one whose permanent ban from baseball in 1989 had been implemented before he was even eligible for the Hall, and two whose drug taint has made them personae non grata among Hall voters. (In December 2015, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred declared Pete Rose still ineligible to participate in "baseball operations"—but, teasingly, he passed the buck about his Hall of Fame eligibility to the Hall and/or other entities; however, the Hall had voted in 1991 to reaffirm that players banned by baseball were ineligible to be placed on any Hall ballots.)

Ichiro Suzuki does not fall into any of those categories. Another category he does not fall into is the need to have 3000 hits in order to be considered a Hall of Famer—neither he nor any other comparable hitter need be "Mr. 3000" on the dot to go to Cooperstown. Moreover, trying to land on that dot could be hurting his cause rather than helping it.

The following table lists Ichiro Suzuki's selected career qualitative statistics calculated cumulatively from 2010 to 2015, with aggregate (range) totals for those statistics between 2011 and 2015; those statistics are explained below the table.

Ichiro Suzuki Qualitative Career Statistics, Cumulative from 2010 to 2015
Ending Year	Slash Line	OPS+	bWAR	bWAR(O)	bWAR(D)	fWAR
2010	.331/.376/.430	117	54.6	44.9	4.9	53.1
2011	.326/.370/.421	115	55.2	45.9	3.8	53.1
2012	.322/.365/.419	113	57.0	47.2	3.7	55.7
2013	.319/.361/.414	111	58.6	47.7	4.2	57.0
2014	.317/.360/.411	110	59.6	48.5	4.0	57.5
2015	.314/.356/.406	108	58.4	46.7	4.1	56.7
Range	Slash Line	OPS+	bWAR	bWAR(O)	bWAR(D)	fWAR
2011–2015	.268/.304/.342	82	3.8	1.7	–0.8	3.6

Slash Line: Grouping of the player's career batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage.
OPS+: Career on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, league- and park-adjusted, as calculated by Baseball Reference. Positively indexed to 100, with a 100 OPS+ indicating a league-average player, and values above 100 indicating the degrees better a player is than a league-average player.
bWAR: Career Wins Above Replacement as calculated by Baseball Reference.
bWAR(O): Career Wins Above Replacement for offensive performance, as calculated by Baseball Reference.
bWAR(D): Career Wins Above Replacement for defensive performance, as calculated by Baseball Reference.
fWAR: Career Wins Above Replacement as calculated by FanGraphs.

Ichiro's age-36 season in 2010 marked the last time he batted .300 (.315), collected at least 200 hits (a league-leading 214), and generated an OPS+ of greater than 100—in short, it was his last elite season as it was also the last time he won a Gold Glove, was named to an All-Star team, and garnered even token support for the Most Valuable Player Award.

It was also his tenth season, the minimum number of seasons needed to qualify for the writers' Hall of Fame ballot, and had he retired at the end of the season, Suzuki would have been only one of four hitters whose careers occurred primarily in the Integration Era (from 1947 on) with a batting average of .330 or higher—joining first-ballot Hall of Famers Ted Williams (.344), Tony Gwynn (.338), and Stan Musial, whose .331 was what Suzuki would have retired with had he done so.

Hindsight is a luxury, though, and while analysts could (and did) prognosticate on what Suzuki could expect to accomplish—or not—in the following seasons, he would have to actually enact the performances to prove them right or wrong. He did, and it is no surprise that all his qualitative measures in the table above fell in concert with his decline phase as a baseball player in his late-30s, no matter the physical condition in which he kept himself, began to pale noticeably against the high talent compression he faced. For the first ten years of his career, Ichiro Suzuki was worth, on average, about five and a half wins per season to the Seattle Mariners; for the last five, he was worth just over a win a year to the Mariners and about the same to the Yankees, while for the Marlins so far he has cost them just over a win.

But in 2010 not many were expecting Ichiro to pull a Stan Ross and abruptly retire, confident that his playing record would get him into the Hall of Fame. Indeed, unlike the fictitious Ross, Suzuki was far from the 3000-hit plateau, and his playing record put him on a bubble upon which his legacy could go either way: On the one hand, he'd had a tremendous ten-year peak, and a most unusual one as a place-hitter in an age of power; on the other hand, his counting numbers, most crucially those hits, were light. Curiously, had Ichiro retired after 2010, his hits total would have been 2244, just three shy of fellow Mariner Edgar Martinez, whose travails on the Hall of Fame ballot have been examined at length on this site and elsewhere. Of course, Suzuki had a deeper tool kit as a top-notch defender and effective baserunner. Still, padding the counting numbers has been a time-honored tradition in baseball.

The following table lists Ichiro Suzuki's selected career quantitative statistics calculated cumulatively from 2010 to 2015, with cumulative (range) totals for those statistics between 2011 and 2015. Those statistics are plate appearances, hits, home runs, runs scored, runs batted in, and stolen bases.

Ichiro Suzuki Quantitative Career Statistics, Cumulative from 2010 to 2015
Ending Year	Plate Apps.	Hits	HR	Runs	RBI	SB
2010	7339	2244	90	1047	558	383
2011	8060	2428	95	1127	605	423
2012	8723	2606	104	1204	660	452
2013	9278	2742	111	1261	695	472
2014	9663	2844	112	1303	717	487
2015	10,101	2935	113	1348	738	498
Range	Plate Apps.	Hits	HR	Runs	RBI	SB
2011–2015	2762	691	23	301	180	115

Using the table above as a baseline, had Suzuki retired following the 2012 season, he would have crossed thresholds of 2600 hits, 100 home runs, 1200 runs scored, and 450 stolen bases—all those neat plateaus we prefer—while his .322 batting average would have kept him in the top fifty all-time. From the storyline standpoint, Ichiro would have retired after his second-half resurgence with the Yankees, with whom he entered the postseason for only the second time in his career, and if his only postseason home run was not a Joe Carter moment, it would have still been a capper.

Even if he had retired after the 2014 season, he would have pushed past 2800 hits and 1300 runs scored while still having provided marginal value to the Yankees, with his final-season .284/.324/.340 slash line somewhat respectable for a 40-year-old ballplayer still in the majors in 2014. Couple that emeritus performance with the stellar, historic ten-year peak with which he began his career, and Ichiro Suzuki, while still a borderline Hall of Fame player, is still a legitimate Hall of Fame player.

However, Suzuki seems determined to press on this season. In addition to trying for 3000 hits, he is very likely to steal the two bases he needs to reach the 500-steals plateau; he could even pass a couple of Hall of Famers (Paul Molitor and Luis Aparicio) if he is near the number of bags he swiped last season. And if he and the Marlins both have good seasons, Suzuki could score 52 or more runs, which would push him over the 1400-run threshold.

All that, though, depends on Ichiro being given the opportunity to perform and then actually performing well enough to attain those goals. Baseball history has shown that it is never easy.