Anybody here think he has a chance at 3,000 MLB hits?

played 160+ will get a lot for ya.

How many hits did Pete Rose have in the minors?

I think it's pretty easy to make a distinction between a guy playing at the highest professional level he can, and a guy playing in the minor leagues.

Their team could call them up. No one could call Ichiro up.

, is there any consensus as to where the NPB would fit in relation to the US minor league system in terms of talent? Double A? Triple A? Quadruple A? Somewhere in between.

He was just a young player who needed time to develop Major League skills.

I'd wager that the average talent level is probably somewhere between AA and AAA, with maybe 5-10% that could hold their own in the majors.

IOW how representative of the top Japanese talent are the handful of players that they've allowed to come over here? How many average Major Leaguers would there be for every Ichiro or Hideki Matsui? How many Kei Igawas for every Dice-K? And how would you even know until they got here how they'd perform in a foreign culture? The cultural adaptability factor has got to be much bigger for some players than for others.

And I think Ichiro *could* have come over sooner. I don't know the exact timeline on NPB/MLB relations, but Nomo came over in 1995. Ichiro could have.

Double A? Triple A? Quadruple A? Somewhere in between.

Nomo came over in 1995 by retiring from NPB, and then unretiring with MLB. This loophole was closed off almost immediately after he did it, so further players couldn't follow. Soriano was the last player to take advantage of the same loophole in 1997. After that point, there were only three ways for a Japanese player to sign with an American team:

Okay, now why couldn't Ichiro have done this?

He wouldn't have been up at age 18 or 19, but looking at his record he probably would have made the majors at 20 or 21.

the perception until Ichiro was that NPB position players couldn't hit in MLB

He'd have to hit .400 to advance in the minors I suspect.

Is there a corner OF that came up in MLB without some power?

Well, to be fair. OPS+ of 117 from a RF isn't particularly good. It's above average, but not as good as, say, Raul Ibanez.

the perception until Ichiro was that NPB position players couldn't hit in MLB

Well, to be fair. OPS+ of 117 from a RF isn't particularly good. It's above average, but not as good as, say, Raul Ibanez.

Tony Gwynn immediately comes to mind. He played some CF, but was mostly a corner. He was a pretty unique post-WWII player as a RF with minimal power.

I think it's pretty easy to make a distinction between a guy playing at the highest professional level he can, and a guy playing in the minor leagues.

Hmmm. We could just use some common sense.

He would likely have been used as a CF in MLB, as he was in Japan from the 1995 season onwards. At that position, a lesser amount of power would have been acceptable.

Wasn't Ichiro a CF in Japan? The M's stuck him in RF because they had a world-beating defensive CF in Cameron, but if we're doing an imaginary projection of Ichiro the America, you have to assume he'd be a CF.

Position starts:
LF : 24
CF : 225
RF : 608

2000: (104 starts)
------------------------
RF : 104

You see, there's this myth going around that Ichiro played centerfield for a large proportion of his time in Japan, which is almost always propogated by people writing articles about Ichiro's move to CF this year on the Mariners. And quite frankly, that myth is wrong. I've always thought that Ichiro was primarily a rightfielder, but I never had data to back it up. Well, now I do.

A few weeks/months ago, I found this amazing page of every starting lineup in Japan from 1981 onward. While it's true that the starting orders don't necessarily indicate how many innings a player played at each position, it does indicate where they batted in the order, and generally what position they were playing, doesn't it? (I'm sure there's a databank somewhere that DOES have the exact innings that he played at each position, but I haven't found it, so this is what I do have. I don't think there's a Japanese version of Retrosheet, unfortunately.)

I wote a Perl script to parse out the starting lineup information for both Ichiro and Johjima. You can view the long outputs with breakdowns per year here:

Now, one can make a pretty clear distinction between MLB and NPB as well, and obviously this accomplishment isn't the same as getting 3000 hits in MLB alone. But I think it's more comparable to that than getting 3000 hits combined between minors and majors.

What exactly is at stake here? Why, iow, does Chris or DMN care about this, since clearly MLB is not going to count his hits toward his career MLB totals, and still, everyone recognizes this guy's a great hitter. I don't quite get this.

But you could equally say, why do people care so much about trying to make Japanese hits equivalent to MLB hits?

No. His primary position in NPB was in RF. Deanna, an NPB and Mariners fan, who blogs on her Marinerds site, wrote a perl script that parsed box scores to prove that that the Ichiro was a CF in NPB meme, isn't actually correct:

What a ridiculously stupid statement.

Doesn't matter. If Japanese performance is relevant, it's relevant for anyone who participates in Japan - Petagine and Ichiro played under the same conditions. The Japanese baseball leagues are a specific level, not a variable level that changes based on how individual players did in the major leagues.

Who's done that? In fact, up until your 1st post, nobody said they were equal.

That's interesting as far as it goes, but it actually helps prove the point people were trying to make that Ichiro would've come in the USA as a CF, because he did in Japan. Of the 225 games he played in CF, 198 (88%) came in his first three years in the league. His first two years, in fact, he played more in CF than elsewhere.

So it's apparent that the Blue Wave brought him up as a CF, and decided that either he couldn't cut it in CF or that he would be better deployed in RF. So this notion that Ichiro would've had to battle through the minors as a corner OF with no power doesn't really track with his established history.

At Orix he'd drop runners on the way to third like sacks of meat with sniper fire from deep right.

By this logic or lack thereof, Hank Aaron should have at least 786 home runs because since he kept on hitting just as well in the majors, the Eau Claire and Jacksonville numbers "count" in hindsight.

I just have a problem of saying minor league performance is of the same equivalence of major league performance.

So, to sum up: Ichiro, had he originated in the US leagues, would be essentially a shooin for 3000 hits but probably wouldn't quite be there yet.

It would be hard to track down anyway, since Rose no doubt has sold it.

It would be hard to track down anyway, since Rose no doubt has sold it.
Nah, he lost it in a bet.

I don't know why people like Chris need to come into a thread like this and be an insufferable ass. I get it, Ichiro wasn't here. I'm not giving him the Hit King belt to wear. But its an interesting "what if" to think about.

Gwynn is probably the best comp we have to what Ichiro's earlier career could have looked like in MLB.

No. He might still be languishing in the minors b/c of his lack of power

and b/c he's basically Raul Ibanez.

Offensively, over their careers, they are more similar in production value than not.

And FWIW, OPS+ as Sean does it does count extra for OBP, so let's not start that one.