Mr. 4,000: Ichiro's Career Translates to Hall of Fame in Any League

Ichiro Suzuki stroked his 3,000th career major league hit Sunday, a triple against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field. It's a little simplistic but that makes him a Hall of Famer, right? A total of 30 major leaguers have reached the 3,000-hit mark, and all but five of them are in the Hall of Fame. The exceptions:

• Pete Rose, who is permanently ineligible because of gambling
• Rafael Palmeiro, who fell off the ballot in 2014 because of, presumably, a link to PED use (remember the pointing at Congress?)
• Derek Jeter, who won't be eligible until 2019 but presumably will be elected
• Alex Rodriguez, whose career is continuing (at least until Friday) and won't be eligible until 2021 at the earliest (but there's the PED thing with him, too)
• Ichiro, who is batting .317 with a .390 on-base percentage and says, possibly seriously, that he wants to play until he's 50 (he turns 43 in October)

One statistic alone shouldn't define a player's Cooperstown worthiness, but base hits are used as a common benchmark, like 3,000 strikeouts are with pitchers. Of the 16 pitchers with 3,000 strikeouts, the only ones not inducted into Cooperstown are Roger Clemens (PED association, like Palmeiro) and Curt Schilling—who says he's not in because of his personal politics.

Where does Ichiro stand after looking at a few more details? He's in pretty good shape. Add in his 507 stolen bases, his reputation on defense, and ten All-Star games, and he looks more like a Hall of Famer. He is ranked 16th on the JAWS system; Larry Walker, Joe Jackson, and Dwight Evans the only right fielders who are better but not in Cooperstown.

The elephant in the room regarding Ichiro is that he began his career in Japan. He didn't come to the majors until he was 27 years old, in 2001. Although others already had come from Japan and found success, Ichiro was the first position player to attempt a full transition. The way Ichiro hit the ground running in '01 with the Seattle Mariners, winning the AL Rookie of the Year and MVP for a team that won 116 regular-season games, it was obvious he belonged in the big leagues, but also that the Japanese game was much stronger than most analysts here gave it credit for.

In fact, based on how his Japanese stats translate, it's probable that Ichiro would have been chasing 4,000 hits, not a mere 3,000, had he spent his entire career in Major League Baseball. Back in June, Dan Szymborski of ESPN took a look at how well his stats carry over to MLB:

More for Szymborski:

"As we noted earlier, the talent level of the NPB is somewhere between Triple-A and MLB in terms of overall quality. But not all hits are created equal. When translating between Japan and MLB, power numbers, including for home runs, are downgraded more severely than the same numbers from Triple-A.

"But batting average in the NPB has historically suffered only a minor downgrade when translated to the U.S."

Using the ZIPS projection system, Szymborski calculated that Ichiro would have 4,037 hits as of mid-June—pretty close to the 4,278 hits he has accumulated in reality playing here and in Japan.

That many hits indicates a Hall of Famer by any standard, at least on the field.