Ichiro Is Hitting Almost Literally Everything

If you’d kind of forgotten about Ichiro Suzuki, I totally get it. I mean, he’s undeniably been an icon, but as far as his remaining a major-leaguer goes, he’s in his 40s, and he’s spent time on the bench for a team that doesn’t get a lot of attention. The league is awash with young, premium talent, and in the Marlins’ own outfield, Ichiro’s behind three young players of considerable ability. And, you know, there was this:

The wizardry had become less and less apparent. I assume that, once you’re a wizard, you’re always a wizard, but Ichiro had perhaps grown weary of using his magic. Or maybe it just takes him longer to recover his mana. He’s been chasing 3,000 big-league hits, and that’s a hell of a milestone, but when the Marlins elected to bring Ichiro back, many figured it was just a publicity stunt, a way to squeeze some profit out of a deteriorating player’s pursuit of history. That tells you something about how people see the Marlins, but that also tells you something about how people saw Ichiro.

I’m now going to embed the same plot as above, only with one extra line segment. Ichiro! is re-earning his exclamation point.

42 years old. The gap between Ichiro and Christian Yelich is old enough to vote.

We spend a lot of time here talking about player adjustments. We examine changing numbers, and the adjustments driving those changes. Ichiro, these days, isn’t changing very much. If anything, he’s built his entire professional career on a strict routine that doesn’t allow him to get too high or too low. If you watch an Ichiro at-bat today, it’ll compare well to an Ichiro at-bat from his rookie year, because the style and approach have hardly budged. Ichiro is Ichiro, and he’s always been Ichiro, and he’ll probably always be Ichiro. All that being said, while Ichiro the player plays the same, the results aren’t static. Clearly, the results aren’t static. And the big improvement this season is that Ichiro just keeps on hitting the baseball. Now, he’s never been an easy strikeout, which is where the whole wizard thing came from, but he’s more difficult to strike out now than ever.

Ichiro is now well into his 40s, and he’s running the lowest strikeout rate of his life, and the lowest strikeout rate in the major leagues. There was a weird lift there, coinciding with Ichiro’s time with the Yankees, and maybe he couldn’t help himself but try for that right-field porch. But the strikeouts have come back to normal, and then some. When the Marlins need a ball in play, they know who they can turn to.

Ichiro has struck out five times. He’s struck out swinging three times. He’s struck out against righties two times. He has twice as many walks as whiffs, but even more interestingly, Ichiro’s sitting on zero homers. Think about the profile, then: Ichiro doesn’t hit for power, and he doesn’t miss the baseball. When calculating a player’s BABIP, the denominator is AB – HR – K + SF. Ichiro doesn’t homer, and Ichiro doesn’t strike out. He also, incidentally, doesn’t have a single sac fly. So Ichiro’s ball-in-play rate this year is 95%. That’s the highest in the league, a point ahead of Andrelton Simmons in second, and six points ahead of Jarrod Dyson in third. Ichiro is extremely reliant on his BABIP, more than he’s ever been.

For fun, I calculated the highest ball-in-play rates since 2000. Acknowledging that the 2016 season still has a long way to go, here’s the top of the list:

The 42-year-old Ichiro is in second. The version of Gwynn in first place was 40. That season, he batted .323. Gwynn was always a natural comparison for Ichiro’s style, so this feels appropriate. Even the older, diminished Gwynn couldn’t help himself but single.

Ichiro does walk from time to time, but it’s not common. He’s homered twice since 2014. It’s all about contact at this point. He ranks in the top seven percent in swinging-strike rate against fastballs, and he has baseball’s lowest swinging-strike rate against non-fastballs. So the contact is balanced. As Ichiro’s BABIP goes, Ichiro’s offense goes, and this is worth thinking about. What would be a reasonable BABIP to expect? Ichiro still motors down the line. But he doesn’t have power. But he sprays the ball. But he doesn’t have power.

The numbers say that Ichiro’s hard-hit rate is up, but the numbers also say that Ichiro has one of baseball’s lower average exit velocities. You’d think defenses could take advantage of that, but it’s not like he’s ever been all that strong. This is a guy with a career BABIP of .340. But that stretches all the way back into his 20s. As a quick check, I looked at the 10 players with the lowest average exit velocities since the start of last year. Those players have averaged a .303 BABIP. Ichiro himself over the last three calendar years has run a .299 BABIP. This seems like it works. From Ichiro, we can expect a BABIP around .300, which means we can expect a batting average pretty close to .300. There won’t be much else there, but there will be hits, each one bringing Ichiro a step closer to history. As the milestone gets closer, Ichiro has seemingly flipped the calendar back.

At 42, Ichiro is running a wRC+ that’s higher than his own career average. There’s no one who thinks Ichiro is actually as good now as he’s ever been, but he is still the same type of player. And, for whatever reason, Ichiro is presently making the most contact he’s made. He still runs, and he still sprays. He still looks like a wizard. A wizard reluctant to ever stop wizarding.