Ichiro/Sisler Watch!

He's slumping!!

No Power, No Patience, but the Hits Keep Coming

By ALAN SCHWARZ

For someone hitting .251, Bret Boone gives Ichiro Suzuki an awfully hard time. Whenever Suzuki, the Mariners' lightning-quick leadoff man, scoots safely to first on a four-hopper to short, a flare to center or a 30-foot bunt for yet another three-hit game, Boone accosts him in the Seattle dugout.

"Are you gonna count those as hits?" Boone says. "Nobody else in the world can get hits like that!"

To which Suzuki calmly and confidently says, "On purpose."

As it turns out, Suzuki, who entered this weekend's series with the White Sox leading the major leagues with a .374 batting average, has left more than his contemporaries scratching their heads. He has left fans of statistics at a loss as well - specifically for ways to quantify how good a player he truly is.

On a pace to smash the record for hits in a season (George Sisler's 257 for the 1920 St. Louis Browns) and hitting a spectacular .400 since April, Suzuki lacks the two skills that beguile the numbers folks: power and patience. Meanwhile, his off-the-chart attributes are reflexively dismissed: hitting for average (which is generally overrated), speed (which is hard to measure) and defense (which is even harder).

Like the Yankees' Derek Jeter, whose all-around game is about as popular among stat types as a calculator with a low battery, Suzuki is a round peg in baseball's increasingly square world. As Athletics General Manager Billy Beane says, "He's a very difficult player to get a handle on."

Dodgers General Manager Paul DePodesta put it this way: "Ichiro creates anxiety when he's in the box and on the bases. He forces you to play differently on defense. And when a guy behind Ichiro hits a home run, who's to say that bad pitch wasn't caused because he was on base? You can't measure everything. Part of the beauty of this game is that it's not completely scientific."

Sure enough, many of Suzuki's numbers are often served with salt. He is on a pace to get 264 hits, but because he walks so infrequently, he is also on a pace for 706 at-bats, another record. With so few walks and a vast majority of his hits being singles, his O.P.S. (on-base plus slugging percentage) is .884, placing him 41st in the majors and 7th among baseball's generally more power-oriented right fielders. His 32 stolen bases are nice, but his being caught 10 times tends to even out their benefit. And although he's among the top defensive right fielders, making 2.33 plays a game and reaching 86.6 percent of balls hit into his area, you will not win many arguments with such esoteric fielding data.

(At least there's no Roger Maris-like controversy over how Suzuki's season is 162 games long rather than Sisler's 154. Hits per game, anyone?)

When the numbers settle like flakes in a snow globe, Suzuki's appeal becomes more aesthetic than scientific. And thankfully, although baseball offense is moving more and more toward power and walks, the game does retain its soft spot for all-around players that the numbers often hide.

Henry Chadwick, the 19th century writer who espoused the use of statistics to evaluate players, invented categories like sacrifice hits and stolen bases to discourage home runs, which he considered narcissistic displays of brute force. (He also argued that running 360 feet was too tiring.)

New York Giants Manager John McGraw also railed against the Babe Ruth-catalyzed power boom of the 1920's, calling Ruth a bum who would hit into "a hundred double plays before the season is over."

And Ty Cobb, a prime focus of the slapper-versus-slugger debate, complained about the death of fundamental baseball in a 1952 personal letter. "The hit-and-run, stolen base, bunt and sacrifice bunt are deteriorating from unuse," Cobb wrote, "and they only hit for their amusement and pleasure for the home run."

Suzuki, a native of Japan, speaks of achieving balance in his game, of not neglecting the defense and base-running aspects of baseball that statistics have yet to appreciate. He says only one number concerns him: "Getting as many hits as you can during a year."

Not slugging or on-base percentage, the statistics that measure power (of which Suzuki has little) and patience (of which he has even less). By all accounts, it was the suggestion of Seattle's hitting coach, Paul Molitor, that he take more pitches and drive balls farther - essentially adapt himself to the modern game - that led Suzuki to struggle in April, when he batted .255. Only by shaking free of that approach did his amazing season start.

Suzuki immediately began rapping out hits, his skills once again asserting themselves as some of baseball's most well rounded, if not most appreciated.

"They idolize technique and skill in Japan more than Americans do," said the Dodgers' pitching coach, Jim Colborn, who coached and scouted there for eight years in the 1990's. "How you do something is paramount in Japan. Here, it's more about achieving the numbers. Power is the American way."

With the last two World Series champions relying on speedy singles-hitting leadoff men (Anaheim's David Eckstein and Florida's Juan Pierre), the science of baseball statistics must grudgingly accept that the game has other dimensions to conquer. And every time Suzuki gets one of his beloved hits - whether it travels 400 feet or 90, bounces one time or seven - he offers that pesky reminder.

Like a cat eating 264 canaries, Suzuki is forcing baseball to consider what the numbers, even the newest ones, do not say.

On purpose.

At what point does Ichiro's pursuit of .400 eclipse the Sisler mark? If he gets above .390?

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I did the math on Ichiro nad indeed, it takes .520 to get him to .400. A 2-for-5 at this stage doesn't always raise his BA a point.

It isn't bad for a leadoff hitter on a terrible team.

that was the kicker

:-O

"Ichi's 3.13 GB/FB ratio is second in the majors.  Anyone bent on driving the ball into the ground knows that he won't be getting many doubles, and will get no triples or HRs that way...."

ie, It's an amazing skill... the question is if he'd help the team more than if he sacrificed the few-walks, 84% singles approach for a potentially higher OBP *and* SLG.

That's a problem with Seattle's offense this season -- their best hitter is a singles hitter, so he needs a lot of help to drive in or score runs. Ichiro's SLG isn't so bad ~.480, but that's a bit misleading since most of hit hits are singles. His isolated power is ~.110, which is actually quite awful.

So yeah, a team with a below average offense like Seattle would probably be better off if he were hitting .330/.420/.520 with ~50-60 XBH than the .370/.420/.480 or whatever he's hitting now.

doc, why would you think ichiro would be capable of batting even .275 if he started sitting back and trying to drive the ball? his entire strategy is to rely on his speed and ability to make contact, slap the ball to deep second or deep short and either beat the throw or hope it squeezes through. it might be an interesting experiment if it hadn't already been done - that schwarz article said molitor tried to get him to do just that at the beginning of the season, and it was a disaster.

David Eckstein and Juan Pierre, 2 players that are fairly similar offensively to Ichiro, have much worse ISOPWR: .054 and .087

I'm speculating on the consequences of Ichiro trying to drive the ball *some* of the time, as opposed to slapping it almost *all* the time. His ceiling in MLB seems to be 50 XBH a year.

i would be curious to see how well ichiro would adjust if he were moved down in the order to the second or third spot. in those cases, with other, slower players on base, the deep grounder that ichiro can beat out becomes a liability, not an asset. judging by ichiro's phenomenal bat control, i would be willing to bet that he would become much more of a line drive hitter...

Ichiro I think is pretty similar to Tony Gwynn or perhaps even Rod Carew, who also was good at getting infield hits (especially by bunting).

23 games * 4.4 ABs/game = 102 ABs

26/102 = .254 to tie the record, .265 to break it.

he's 0/8 for the weekend so far (you can't ignore his career numbers which long suggested that he was overdue for a fall back to reality). his 3 year splits show that September is by far his worst hitting month (.283, one of only 2 months that he averages less than .300). this really could go down to the wire. could you imagine if he got intentionally walked if it got close?

Here is SI's Ichiro countdown page, which is pretty cool.

"Their bats are probably not much different than the one George Sisler swung back in 1920, when he banged out a major-league-record 257 hits."

Except for, like, their center of gravity and the thickness of their handles and their weight, sure.

He's batting .200 in the past 7 days.

With a projected 84 at bats remaining in the season, he needs 25 hits to tie the record (.300), 26 to break it (.310).

maybe i should be posting this in the barry vs. ichiro thread...

https://theathletic.com/5080876/2023/11/24/ichiro-suzuki-baseball-pitching/

He could still do it

.@JRODshow44 had the ultimate throwing partner on day one: Ichiro pic.twitter.com/00SC2r7b1T

— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) February 15, 2024