Suzuki, Ichiro

Ichiro Suzuki, (born October 22, 1973, Kasugai, Japan), Japanese baseball player who amassed the most total hits across all professional baseball leagues in the history of the sport. He was notably also the first non-pitcher to shift from Japanese professional baseball to the American major leagues.

Suzuki played baseball from an early age. Upon finishing high school, he was drafted by the Orix Blue Wave of the Japanese Pacific League (see also Japanese baseball leagues). He saw limited action during his first two seasons, because his manager disliked the young player’s unorthodox batting style—a sort of pendulum motion created by kicking the front foot back and then striding forward with the swing. In 1994 a new manager gave Suzuki a starting spot on the team and let him swing the way he liked. He responded in amazing fashion, lifting his batting average to .400 during the season and finishing at .385—the second best batting mark in the history of Japanese baseball. He collected 210 hits, a record for one season. Through 2000 he won seven consecutive Pacific League batting titles, posted a career average of .353, and led his team to two pennants. He was not a power hitter, but his speed and bat control were unmatched. He was also considered among the top outfielders, with the strongest, most accurate throwing arm in the league. Suzuki threw right-handed but batted left-handed.

By 2000 Suzuki had established himself as the best baseball player in Japan and had begun his quest for stardom in the United States. He spent two weeks in the Seattle Mariners’ 1999 spring training camp as part of a U.S.-Japan player exchange. A Japanese player in an American lineup was no longer quite the rarity it once had been; several Japanese pitchers, most notably Hideo Nomo and Hideki Irabu, had crossed the Pacific to play in the major leagues. Suzuki became the first non-pitcher to make the transition when he signed a three-year contract with the Mariners in November 2000. Because pitchers in the United States threw harder than their Japanese counterparts, some observers believed that Japanese hitters would struggle at the plate.

Suzuki made his major-league debut with the Mariners on April 2, 2001. He answered his critics with a stellar season, capturing the American League (AL) Rookie of the Year award and a Gold Glove. His batting average in the 2001 regular season was .350, and it was .421 in the postseason games. In 2004 Suzuki broke George Sisler’s 84-year-old record for most hits in a single season, ending the year with 262 hits and a .372 batting average. Five years later, in 2009, he became the all-time leader in hits by a Japanese player, with 3,086 for his career in both Japan and the United States, and later in the year he recorded his 2,000th major-league hit, reaching that plateau faster than any other player in history except Al Simmons. He collected more than 200 hits—and was named to the AL All-Star team—in each of his first 10 seasons with the Mariners. Not only did his 10 200-hit seasons tie Pete Rose’s all-time record, they also set the mark for most consecutive years in which a player reached the 200-hit plateau.

Suzuki’s level of play fell off in 2011. That season he failed to hit .300 or amass 200 hits for the first time in his tenure in the major leagues. He was batting a career-worst .261 during the 2012 campaign when the Mariners suddenly traded the fan favourite Suzuki to the New York Yankees in July of that year. In 2013 he became the third person in top-flight professional baseball history—after Pete Rose and Ty Cobb—to record 4,000 total career hits (counting both his Japanese and American production). In his two and a half seasons with the Yankees, he batted .281, and his total of 136 hits in 2013 was his best single-year hit total with New York.

Suzuki signed with the Miami Marlins in January 2015. On June 15, 2016, he notched his 2,979th hit in Major League Baseball (MLB), which, combined with his 1,278 hits in Japan, gave him one more total career professional hit than MLB record holder Rose. Two months later he became the 30th player in MLB history to record 3,000 career hits. Suzuki served primarily as a substitute outfielder and pinch-hitter in 2017, amassing a career-low 196 at bats that season. In March 2018 he rejoined the Mariners on a one-year contract. Suzuki appeared in just 15 games with the Mariners before abruptly transitioning to a position with the team’s front office on May 8, ending his 2018 season.

In January 2019 he signed a minor-league deal with the Mariners, which contained a provision that he appear on Seattle’s major-league roster during the team’s season-opening games in Japan. He retired immediately after the two-game Japanese series. He finished his major-league career with 3,089 hits, bringing his combined professional hit total to 4,367. Suzuki also amassed 509 career major-league stolen bases (becoming one of only seven major-leaguers with at least 3,000 hits and 500 steals) and retired with a .311 lifetime batting average.