Ichiro’s Career and the Hall of Fame

Ichiro Suzuki is having a down season and is nearing the end of his career. Many people would consider him an automatic hall-of-famer with the work he’s put together since joining the Mariners as a 27-year-old in 2001. But how good is he, really? Well, for comparison’s sake, I took the production of all hitters from 27 years of age and older and put them against Ichiro’s career numbers. The results are interesting and will only add to the debate.

Since starting in Seattle a decade ago, Ichiro has accumulated 53 WAR. Among all players from their 27th birthday and beyond, he has accumulated the 72nd-highest total — putting him above hall-of-famers Duke Snider (77th), Joe DiMaggio (78th), Reggie Jackson (86th) and Robin Yount (89th). Some notable players within 1 WAR of him are Sammy Sosa, Jim Edmonds, Barry Larkin, Jim Thome, Dave Winfield and Eddie Murray. Some people would consider all these players to be hall-of-fame material. Of course, some are in the hall. Still, his production level — using WAR — doesn’t compare to what you might consider to be a sure-fire HoFer.

Certainly, Ichiro isn’t done playing and he should accumulate a few more WAR before he retires. The number is anyone’s guess, but my informal poll of other FanGraphs’ writers produced a guesstimated value anywhere from 3 to 8 more WAR over the rest of Ichiro’s career. Here are the other players near these values.

56 WAR – Dwight Evans, Todd Helton, Paul Molitor and Tony Perez.

61 WAR – Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Norm Cash and Eddie Mathews.

Neither of these lists is full of the game’s greatest. Todd Helton — who is two months younger than Ichiro — has already generated 3 more WAR since Ichiro has been in the league. He will probably get little HoF consideration because he’s played his entire career in Denver. The 61 WAR category has two of the “Killer B’s” from Houston — Biggio and Bagwell. Bagwell didn’t make it on his first Hall-of-Fame vote and Biggio might have the same problem.

Biggio’s main issue is that quite a bit of his value comes from walks, doubles and playing good defense at a difficult position. Most people don’t keep track of league leaders in doubles and walks. Even though Ichiro has played great defense over the years, he ranks high in two other categories that people can connect with (hits and stolen bases), which logically would help his cause.

For players who continued past their year-27 and beyond, Ichiro ranks 14th overall with 2,397 hits. If he were to add 423 more hits in his career — getting him to 2,820 — he’d move up to third, behind Pete Rose (3,250) and Sam Rice (2,925). When it comes to hits for players in this age range, he ranks among the all-time elite. With stolen bases, he doesn’t make it to the same echelon, but he’s still highly ranked. Currently, he’s 24th with 416 stolen bases, which ties him with Tim Raines. If he swipes 60 more bags, he’d move to 15th overall overall behind Ty Cobb’s 494. If he gets into the 500-stolen-base range, he’d move into the top 10.

Ichiro will get into the Hall of Fame base on his production in the United States and Japan — not to mention the bridge he helped create between the two baseball communities. If a person looks at his production since he was signed by Seattle at age 27 — and compare it to others after that age — his Hall-of-Fame candidacy is pretty borderline. Still, he’s among the career leaders in some pretty special categories, and that certainly counts for something.





Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.

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James Gentile
12 years ago

Ichiro will likely walk into the HoF on the merits of his streak of 200 hit seasons alone.

The MLB obviously missed out on his prime, if that matters or not is up for debate. But if results are the only thing that mattered, Ichiro wasn’t any better than Bobby Abreu.

http://www.fangraphs.com/graphs/1101_945___sgraph_%20_8_31_2011.png

JimNYC
12 years ago
Reply to  James Gentile

I’ve always considered the single season hits record to be the single most important record in baseball — more important than the single season home run record — because the job of a “hitter,” by definition, is to get “hits.” It’s a large part of the reason why, until recently, I’ve always considered George Sisler to be one of the 30 or so greatest players of all time.

The fact that Ichiro now holds that record makes him an indisputible Hall of Famer in my view. Kind of like Wilt Chamberlain average 50 ppg for a season, or Oscar Robertson averaging a triple double — regardless of anything else, having that record at least puts you strongly in the conversation, and everything else he’s done puts him far over the line.

Aside from which, he almost single-handedly saved baseball in Seattle after Griffey, Johnson, and Rodriguez left in consecutive seasons. The ability to put butts in the seats matters in Hall of Fame discussions (it’s not the “Hall of Good,” or even the “Hall of Great,” it’s the “Hall of FAME.”)

jacob
12 years ago
Reply to  JimNYC

the job of a hitter is to not get out 😉 or at least do something so the team doesnt get outs (like take 20 pitches in an AB)

James Gentile
12 years ago
Reply to  JimNYC

The pitcher who throws the most pitches also obviously belongs in the Hall of Fame, too!

Welp
12 years ago
Reply to  JimNYC

“The job of a “hitter,” by definition, is to get “hits.”

What’s the definition of the job of a “batter”?

JimNYC
12 years ago
Reply to  JimNYC

The job of a hitter is to hit. The job of a slugger is to slug. The job of an offensive player is to combine all of the facets of offense — but a player doesn’t have to be good at everything to be “famous.”

Ichiro is a hitter, and one of the best who ever lived. No, he didn’t slug. No, he didn’t draw walks. But what he did, he did better than pretty much everybody this side of Ty Cobb.

philosofoolmember
12 years ago
Reply to  JimNYC

I suspect careful trolling. “the job of a hitter is to hit.” Nope, it’s to play defense and help score runs. Nobody who is a serious fangraphs reader falls for B.S. “he’s called a hitter therefore hitting is his job.” That’s bad reasoning, and we all know it.

JimNYC
12 years ago
Reply to  JimNYC

Philosofool, the problem with your argument there is that there’s a difference between somebody who is a “serious Fangraphs reader” and somebody who agrees with the prevailing Fangraphs analytical methodologies. I happen to read Fangraphs at least three or four times a week, but I also happen to be the type of old-school baseball fan who largely eschews statistical analysis.

I’m firmly in the camp of “baseball is a children’s game that people watch for fun and entertainment; mathematics is something that is the opposite of fun and entertaining; and therefore using too much math in analyzing baseball defeats the very purpose of watching baseball in the first place.” So why do I read Fangraphs, you ask? Because whenever the topic of the latest statistical analytical trends comes up with my fellow baseball fans, I like to be able to argue against their utility. It’s intellectual pointless to make arguments against things you don’t understand or refuse to learn about in the first place, so I need to know exactly what it is I’m opposing.

Blue
12 years ago
Reply to  James Gentile

“But if results are the only thing that mattered, Ichiro wasn’t any better than Bobby Abreu.”

Which is why he should not be in the HOF.