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Congratulations Ichiro.
Well, technically, if we're counting professional hits, I think Aaron's 324 hits for Eau Claire and Jacksonville make him younger at 3000 professional hits.
Well, he's been in the majors for 8 years, and he'll be closing in on 1800 by the end of the season. He's only 34 and, by all accounts, he's in excellent shape, so it's reasonable to expect him to age well. He's also signed through the 2012 season, so he's pretty much locked in as a starter until at least then (if not more, given who currently owns the team), and it's not unrealistic to expect him to run up around 800 hits over those 4 years. That puts him at about 2600 at age 38, and his fame will likely allow him to play for at least a year or two after that, which would mean at least 150 hits per season, bringing him to 2900 at age 40. If he's that close, and can play even a little, some team will give him the chance to go for 3000, especially since it could mean they also get the benefit of him playing for them when his combined hit total exceeds Rose's career total.
Of course, the above is total speculation, but (including all the assumptions) I think he's got a decent shot at 3000 hits in MLB.
I should have mentioned that as well - the guy never misses games and doesn't walk much, so he runs up a huge total of opportunities. In his seven full seasons, he's averaged just over 680 ABs and just under 160 games. If he gets 6 more seasons in with those opportunities, he'll need to hit 0.290 to get to 3000 hits at his age 40 year. Given he's currently a .330 career hitter, that leaves a lot of room for decline.
I think he'll have to play till he is about 41 or 42 to get to 3000 hits.
He has a 21.1% chance of reaching 3000.
Total career hits and his chances of reaching 3000 sound about right.
I missed it when Vada Pinson got his 3,000th.
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.
Edgar Martinez for instance. Players in the minor leagues are playing at the highest level they were allowed to by rule - same as Ichiro.
In addition, Ichiro wouldn't have started in MLB signing at age 18. He'd have played in the minors for four years.
NPB is a minor league. That's just the fact of the matter. I firmly believe counting minor league stats as part of major league stats (which is what is going on here, if not by you) is nonsense.
In 1960 he hit .277 in the Class D New York - Pennsylvania League.
In 1961 he hit .331 in the Class D Florida State League.
And in 1962 he hit .330 in the Class A Sally League.
He hit .273 in his rookie year with the Reds in 1963. I think it's kind of questionable how many hits, or even how many plate appearances, he would have gotten if he'd been brought up earlier. He certainly wasn't being "held back" in the manner of an Ichiro or a Lefty Grove. He was just a young player who needed time to develop Major League skills.
EDIT: I should add that in 1960 and 1961, Class D was the lowest classification of minor league. Their stats are at the very back of the Baseball Guide.
I agree with this. If he stays healthy and wants to keep playing, he can do it. I'm all for counting NPB stats if it bumps off Rose. Maybe they should just start including NPB as a "major league". I mean, who gets to make that distinction, anyway.
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.
Whether or not the percentages are correct, this would seem like a pretty good gauge of a league's quality. But how can you measure the Japanese leagues on this scale when you have such a small percentage of players who are even allowed to compete in the US Major Leagues?
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.
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:
1. Sign directly out of highschool, which was not a viable option at the time as no MLB team had ever shown interest in signing a Japanese position player
2. Play for 10 years until hitting free agency
3. Arrange to be posted before completing 10 years.
At the time, there was no realistic method by which Ichiro could have signed in the major leagues. Keep in mind as well that, even when he was signed by Seattle, there was still considerable speculation among MLB teams that he was going to be an enormous bust, after he had churned out a career .353 average in Japan. Even with the success of some Japanese pitchers, there was still a huge amount of skepticism around Japanese position players.
Now, I agree it is incredibly unlikely that Ichiro would have been a major leaguer at the age of 17. However, given his skills, it isn't unlikely that he would have been of major league caliber by the 1994 season.
Between AAA and the majors, but it's a disproportionate drop in power. For example, a guy hitting .330 with 30 homers in AAA might hit .280 with 22 in the majors. A guy putting up the same numbers in Japan might hit .315 with 15 homers in MLB.
Ichiro has hit for pretty close to the same BA as he did in Japan, but while he had 15-20 homer power there, now he's just got batting practice power. The way the translations work, plus shorter schedule, leads one to believe his hit total would at least be the same had he started his career with the Mariners. 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.
Well, we also look at the players that went there -like Tuffy Rhodes and Roberto Petagine. Seriously, Tuffy Rhodes?
Good point. Is there any study on the performance of ex-Major Leaguers in Japan over the years? Are marginal Major Leaguers less likely to excel over there now than they were ten or twenty years ago? And what percentage of Major League stiffs actually do make it big over there?
Of course the cultural adaptation factor works even more going from West to East. American food and American lifestyles are far more common in Japan than their Japanese counterparts are over here, but OTOH the Japanese bias against gaijins can be considerable.
You know, you could have gone to the next line: "no MLB team had ever shown interest in signing a Japanese position player". It is likely that he would have retired, and all the MLB teams would have shown no interest. Hell, there were a lot of teams who couldn't be bothered to show token interest even when he did finally get posted in 2000 - the perception until Ichiro was that NPB position players couldn't hit in MLB (too small, no power, illusion of small parks, they'll wear down over the longer season, and so on).
Is there a corner OF that came up in MLB without some power?
Every A's OF prospect the last couple of years?
Isn't there a good chance he would have been a CFer in the States? I have to think most organizations would have made him play CF in the minors with the kind of skill he has.
He hit .385 in his age 20 season in Japan. That's about .400 in the minors.
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.
(He also appears to have played third base for one game in Japan. I guess he's got the arm for it, if nothing else.)
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.
But to be fair to Ryan, I'm pretty sure he was also considering other important skills as well. There is more to Ichiro than his 117 OPS+.
That also doesn't consider the OBP/SLG weighting of Ichiro's skillset, as well as his significantly above average performance on the basepaths, and the perception of his above average defense. Ichiro is hugely underrated by considering only his OPS+. Besides, as you note, that OPS+ of 117 is still above average for a RF.
EDIT: Essentially, what Andy just said.
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.
Ibanez is a great comparison, because, as we all know, their entire skill set is basically identical.
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.
Also, Vince Coleman in LF, and assorted other crappy speedsters who struggled to keep their OBPs above .300.
Gwynn is probably the best comp we have to what Ichiro's earlier career could have looked like in MLB.
Carl Crawford? His highest SLG was .456 in the minors, his highest OPS was .791, yet he was brought up to the majors as a LF at age 20. And he has been a worse hitter than Ichiro since then. Granted, there was probably some expectation that his power would develop.
You forgot Indianapolis.
The problem with the "highest level of play" argument is that it really doesn't provide any limiting factor. What about a Korean baseball player? Or Cuban one? What about a 17-year old American who hasn't finished high school? Do we start counting all their stats? Why not? The distinction between them and Ichiro is just that Japanese baseball is better -- but MLB is better than Japanese baseball.
And then there's the Edgar Martinez problem, as Chris points out. He was at the highest level of play he was allowed to play at. It's no more his "fault" that he wasn't in the majors than it was Ichiro's.
Excellent. I had a great senior year.
Hmmm. We could just use some common sense.
And reduce my posts by about 75%. If we eliminate snark as well, I'm strictly a lurker. Gentlemen, I'm willing to make this sacrifice for the common good.
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:
For example,
The link has year by year OF position totals, and also his year by year batting order position totals.
Edit: and also, The truth about Ichiro:
George Whiteman for pope, #######!!
But you could equally say, why do people care so much about trying to make Japanese hits equivalent to MLB hits?
As hinted at above, you run into the Roberto Petagine problem. I like Petagine as much as anyone, but if you accept Japanese performance as equivalent to MLB performance, then you have to accept Petagine as the 3rd or 4th-best hitter in baseball history.
I'm not sure the guys in the basement are willing to mark him down that far.
Who's done that? In fact, up until your 1st post, nobody said they were equal.
I can understand having a discussion the sole purpose of which is to try and determine whether the hits are equal or count in some way, but that's not what was happening. Virtually all the posts acknowledged a difference but still acknowledged the obvious: the guy's a great hitter who would have even better MLB stats had he played here his entire career. Then, some people apparently find that offensive and mount stupid arguments in defensive of some point not being discussed. Wee! Minors is minors! Where will we stop - do T-ball stats count, huh? Good stuff.
Petagine did not. Neither did Tuffy, nor Randy Bass.
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.
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.
Also, your first point about this didn't make any sense. Bass didn't have a chance to maintain his Japanese-level performance. He last played in MLB in '82 and then headed over to Japan, never to play in American baseball again. Same--for the moment--for Rhodes. And unless you count Petagine's short MLB/MiLB run in '05 and '06 as a meaningful, the whole group doesn't provide any evidence one way or the other.
Yes, I agree, the idea that the relevance of Japanese numbers jumps up and down arbitrarily based on the individual career path of a player after he plays in that league is, in fact, a ridiculously stupid statement.
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 don't disagree that if Ichiro had somehow come to the US at 18, he would likely be a CF. Nor that he might have been a very good CF, who was put in RF for his arm; or maybe because he was playing alongside someone else, Tsuyoshi Shinjo for example, who was better than him at CF D, and who hit worse than him.
An anecdotal quote from the link
might indicate that he was put in right for his arm.
Just wanting to try to help squash the "Ichiro was a CF in NPB" meme.
I don't have a problem with saying that. I just have a problem of saying minor league performance is of the same equivalence of major league performance.
794 if you include the WS and ASG, dude. 792 if you ignore the ASG. I would also point out that the NPB is still not fully integrated due to their restrictions on foreign devils.
Which, of course, no one has said. It amazes me that MLB has a more capacious attitude towards this than you guys. OTOH, they follow common sense and recognize that this is his 3000th professional hit and that Japanese professional baseball merits respect, and OTOH, they distinguish the # of hits he's had in each league.
794 if you include the WS and ASG, dude. 792 if you ignore the ASG. I would also point out that the NPB is still not fully integrated due to their restrictions on foreign devils.
Hey, I said at least!
No. He might still be languishing in the minors b/c of his lack of power and b/c he's basically Raul Ibanez.
Which, of course, no one has said. It amazes me that MLB has a more capacious attitude towards this than you guys. OTOH, they follow common sense and recognize that this is his 3000th professional hit and that Japanese professional baseball merits respect, and OTOH, they distinguish the # of hits he's had in each league.
Ichiro's an excellent player and it's a shame that he didn't get to play in the major leagues sooner.
The rest of minor league baseball merits respect, too, but I don't remember MLB honoring Ripken's 3500th professional hit or Edgar Martinez's 350th professional home run.
Career line (2001-present): 390/440/509. He would have hit 400 three times: 415 in 2001, 426 in 2004 and 411 in 2007. He would have had 328 hits in 2004 and exceeded the previous MLB record for hits in a season in each of his seasons thus far. He would have, to date, 2334 MLB hits.
Clearly, present day Colorado isn't 2000 Colorado, but I also think it might underestimate Ichiro due to style. A spray hitter with all that open space in the OF... Not to mention that a good arm and speed from your OF defense would play well there.
Quickly, had he come up to MLB in, say 1995 (age 22) and posted 90% of his current career average over those seasons (figuring he may have been up earlier and his "peak" would have been around about 2000-01, I'll just guess and give him 90% of his averages for the 1995-00 seasons).
career hits to date: 3927
Anyway, fun with numbers.
Thank you.
It would be hard to track down anyway, since Rose no doubt has sold it.
Perhaps that's because they understand the distinction between a set of leagues that's clearly demarcated as inferior to other leagues within the same organizational framework (i.e. the leagues that Cal Ripken started in), and a pair of leagues that are the best that a country with a century plus baseball tradition has to offer (the ones that Ichiro came from). This doesn't imply anything beyond that, nor is MLB trying to pretend that the Major Leagues of our two countries are equivalent in any serious way. It's merely paying a token of respect to a great and unique player.
I have a mental image of him sitting in an airport next to a Texan businessman betting on arrivals.
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.
Abreu is kind of a weird comp, because he had so much power than Ichiro, I'd probably say that his peak was better (offensively, anyway) than Ichiro. And Gwynn isn't really a great comp either, even at the end his could still hit, it was just that his body failed him (or he failed his body, I'd accept either). And he didn't really crawl to 3000 hits, the year he got #3000 he put up a .338/.381/.477 line. There's a lot of players who would kill to "crawl" like that.
I'm pretty sure you have a legit point here, Chris, but I'm not sure any player comparison can really help you make it. Ichiro is such a unique talent, one basically has to argue theory rather than by example.
Really? (I'm genuinely curious. I'm not just being an insufferable ass. This time.)
In a similar vein to 91, I've got an honest question. Just to be sure, exactly how much extra should OBP be weighted? It's 1.8 x OBP, right? (I say 1.8 because that's what THT multiplies OBP by)
Really? (I'm genuinely curious. I'm not just being an insufferable ass. This time.)
I'd say Gwynn at his peak was a better defender, but Ichiro looks to be aging a wee bit better than Tony.
Ichiro 7
Gwynn 4
Seasons with 150+ games:
Ichiro 7
Gwynn 5
Seasons with 141+ games:
Ichiro 7
Gwynn 7
Huh. I haven't seen either enough to draw a meaningful conclusion, but I've seen Ichiro make highlight reel plays (mainly featuring his arm) that I never saw from Gwynn. Maybe I'm exposing myself as a flash-over-substance guy, but the notion of Gwynn as a better defender really surprises me.
Ichiro FRAR 239
Ichiro FRAA 91
Gwynn FRAR 230
Gwynn FRAA -26
Me, too. Gwynn, at his best, was good out there, but nothing like Ichiro. We'll never get a consensus on this, of course.
* I generally distrust all defensive stats. If there isn't a HUGE difference, I essentially dismiss them. No offense, Chris.
OPS+ = 100 * (OBP/lgOBP* + SLG/lgSLG* - 1)
i.e. OPS+ counts OBP and SLG equally.
Now maybe that's out of date and some change has been made somewhere. Let's check.
Using this formula we get Ichiro having an OPS+ of 117. BB-ref indeed lists his OPS+ as 117.
Conclusion: OPS+ counts OBP and SLG equally, and so undervalues OBP compared to SLG.
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