How Overrated Is Ichiro Suzuki?

The 2001 baseball season seems like ages ago. It was the year that the Diamondbacks’ veteran left fielder, Luis Gonzalez hit a looping,heart-thumping bloop that finally drew Yankee blood—and even more impressive—drew it from the stone of Mariano Rivera.

It was also the first major sports championship post 9/11, when everything, pop cultural or otherwise, was in a state of chaotic, almost mindless glass-eyed flux.

That year, Ichiro Suzuki, late of the Japanese Pacific League’s Orix Blue Wave, won the Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player Awards. It marked the true beginning of an exodus of talent from the East, and Ichiro, a star in his native Japan, proved his mettle and then some in the crucible of America’s game.

I have no doubt that Ichiro deserved the Rookie of the Year award—but did he deserve the MVP? Without wading into the messy swamp of meaning tied to the MVP, how good was/is Ichiro? Is he overrated?

I would like to preface this with the fact that I believe Ichiro will definitely be a first ballot, no doubt Hall of Famer. But his hyper-elite status is not particularly well founded. A sports columnist in San Francisco wrote last season, and I’m paraphrasing, that Ichiro would be a better fit for San Francisco than Alex Rodriguez. That is, in two words: beyond ludicrous. It is like saying that you would rather have Dick Groat than Willie Mays. At any rate, it defies logic.

My impressionistic feeling is that Ichiro represents an attractive redoubt for modern writers, pundits,statisticians, etc., who abhor the crass influence of power and long for the old game. Baseball is ideologically conservative and is therefore backward looking and nostalgic. In short, Ichiro satisfies a kind of atavistic hunger that grips baseball fans who long to have been able to watch players like Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner. He is a modern day substitute fort he dead-ball era, representing the mythologized core of the old game.

Cobb and Wagner though were both more effective batsmen than Ichiro. Being a student of history, his style appeals to me too, but his production does not match many of his less heralded peers.

In 2001, Ichiro took the American baseball world by storm—he rapped out 242 hits at a .350 clip, stole 56 bases, all of which led the American League, and won the gold glove as a right fielder. He also scored 127 runs, which trailed only Texas shortstop, Alex Rodriguez (133). That is however, where the list of positives ends, though it is a fine list to be sure.

I rank baseball players on five offensive criteria. OutAverage (outs/plate appearances), RunsCreated (I use the equation from Baseball-Reference: (hits + walks) x (total bases)/ (at bats + walks), OPS (OBP + Slugging Average), Run Production Average (A stat I developed to measure outcomes over potential ((runs + runs batted in)/plate appearances)/team OPS), and RunScoring Average which is the same, asRPA minus the runs batted in. I factor this in to give added weight to run scorers because I believe scoring runs is more difficult than driving them in. I rank each player in those five realms, and then average the ranking, thus giving equal weight to each statistic.

There are some flaws, one is that I don’t take into account park effects, which is why Boston players always have high rankings, and second, I would like to have a better awareness of batting order. Funny things happen with the rankings also, so I will readily admit that 1-3 or so may be debatable, but after that it begins to solidify.

In 2001, Ichiro was ranked eighteenth—lower than Cleveland second baseman, Roberto Alomar (7), Kansas City first baseman, Mike Sweeney (9), and Boston right fielder, Trot Nixon(14). In dissecting why exactly Ichiro ranks so low—relative to the praise heaped on him that year—it is important to look at his stunning lack of power.

Power is a prickly subject among serious baseball fans. It is certainly valued, perhaps overvalued by the tangential fan, but even by serious fans it is a cherished attribute. There is though, a certain American egalitarianism that prevents many of us from requiring it from our most treasured players, given the fact that it is more of a gift than a skill one could develop—chemistry though is increasingly changing that assertion.

The fact of the matter is however, that without some semblance of power, and by that I mean, averaging one home run at least every 45 at bats or having an Extra Base Hit Average up around .100, the value of a hitter is severely eroded. Ichiro, for his part, is a resolute singles hitter. He is an elegant technician, but his body of work is built on a foundation of singles.

Though Ichiro has been an ultra-consistent, if not mechanical hitter throughout his career, the year that stands out, aside from his rookie season, is 2004, the year he shattered George Sisler’s record for hits in a season. Ichiro slapped a mind-boggling 262 hits that year. Unfortunately, a whopping 86 percent of them were singles. And while he carried a .414 On Base Percentage—second only to Baltimore third baseman Melvin Mora (.419)—his lack of power—a singles-loaded .455 Slugging Average—drove his OPS down to .869, which put him 22^nd in the American League. His overall ranking was 21, one spot behind Tampa Bay third baseman Aubrey Huff.

Another reason that Ichiro made such a poor showing in the 2004 rankings was his failure to score runs. As a rookie, he nearly led the league in scoring runs, in 2004 with 762 plate appearances, he managed only 101 runs, which is fine on its face, but when looked at through the prism of Run Scoring Average—ranked 37^th—it’s actually disastrously low for a guy who broke the record for hits in a year.

The year George Sisler racked up 257 hits he scored 137 runs in 692 plate appearances—a .255 RSA—good enough for third in the AL behind Babe Ruth (.332), and Tris Speaker (.258).

There was certainly a talent differential between 2001 and 2004—in 2001 Ichiro was the third best producer on his team behind Bret Boone and Edgar Martinez—in 2004 he was Seattle’s best. Ichiro is a singles machine, and a singles machine simply cannot carry a team.

In the end, I think Ichiro is satisfying to watch, but writers tend to ascribe to him more merit than I think he realistically deserves. As a producer—which is the point of baseball offense, not hitting, but producing—he is regularly ranked around 20 in the AL. He is, I suppose, overrated like Pete Rose was overrated. Make of that what you will.