Fourth outfielder? Slap hitter? Ichiro got to Cooperstown by silencing early skeptics

On April 2, 2001, Bret Boone jogged to second base for a chilly Opening Day in Seattle. The roof at Safeco Field was open, the upstart Oakland Athletics were in town, and ESPN2 had the national broadcast. Boone was preparing for the first pitch of his 10th season when second base umpire Kerwin Danley called his name.

“How about your boy Ichiro,” Danley asked, “and what he just dropped on me?”

How about Ichiro? All of Major League Baseball was wondering the same thing.

Ichiro Suzuki on Tuesday came one vote shy of being the first position player unanimously elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rarely has there been such universal agreement about a hitter’s status among the all-time greats.

But when he made his debut, Ichiro was more a curiosity than a shoo-in for Cooperstown. He’d won seven straight batting titles in Japan, but he was small with unusual mechanics, and his tendency to hit the ball on the ground did not fit with the Major League sluggers of the time. Observers were fascinated, though some doubted that Ichiro’s skillset would translate.

“Skepticism is a good word,” said Larry Stone, the retired national baseball writer for the Seattle Times who covered Ichiro’s entire tenure with the Mariners.

Skeptics thought Major League velocity would overpower Ichiro. Teammates had never seen technique like his, and Ichiro’s own manager questioned his ability to pull the ball with authority. Even the umpires were curious, and so, as the Mariners took the field that night, Danley greeted their new right fielder and welcomed him to America. Boone recalled this week Ichiro’s nonchalant response, which left Danley with more questions than answers.

“What’s happening, home slice?”

Baseball’s greatest mystery had trained since childhood for that moment. He alone understood just how prepared he was to meet it. But even Ichiro didn’t know his road from Japan to Seattle would eventually end in Cooperstown.

“I don’t think anybody in this whole world,” Ichiro said, “thought that I would be a Hall of Famer.”

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Two years earlier, a group of major league players had flown to Tokyo for a series of exhibitions against Japanese all-stars. It was known then that Ichiro had aspirations of coming to the big leagues, and he hit .380 with seven stolen bases in the seven-game series. Some U.S. players heaped praise on the Japanese batting champ, but the American manager, Mike Hargrove, dismissed Ichiro as “a fourth outfielder on a major league team,” and one major leaguer mocked him as “a little slap hitter.”

As a boy, Ichiro owned Transformers toys and watched Ultraman cartoons. He’d ridden his bike to school and once been hit by a car. He’d learned to do math on an abacus.

Mostly, though, Ichiro had trained to be a baseball player. The story of his adolescence might be inspiring if it weren’t so heartbreaking. Even as a child, he took hundreds of swings a day. The word “concentration” was written on his glove. He rarely saw his friends. Ichiro told the author Robert Whiting that training sessions with his father, Nobuyuki, were so intense they “bordered on child abuse.”

From that crucible emerged a unique talent, adept at the pastoral origins of the game. Running, throwing and making contact were his strengths. Ichiro was a savant who won his first Japanese batting title at 20 years old and in nine NPB seasons hit .353, but he was 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds. His lunging swing carried him out of the batter’s box like a softball player.

“My first impression was, I’m laughing,” Boone said. “We’re all trying to figure this guy out.”

The year before Ichiro arrived, MLB players hit 5,693 home runs, at the time the most ever in a single season. Mark McGwire had broken Roger Maris’s single-season home run record in 1998, and Nike had begun airing its “chicks dig the long ball” commercial in 1999. In the spring of Ichiro’s arrival, Sports Illustrated published a cover photo of Boston Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, jacked and shirtless. That was the image of a modern baseball icon.

Into this game of biceps and big flies came a skinny singles hitter who smacked the ball on the ground and dared infielders to throw him out.

“I thought they would jam him a lot, throw at his head, just intimidate him,” Whiting said from his home in Tokyo.

Whiting recalled first seeing Ichiro in Japan and thinking a Little Leaguer had talked his way into an Orix Blue Wave uniform. In a land of Major League giants, Ichiro would be a gnat. He looked frail.

“I didn’t realize,” Whiting said, “how tough he was.”

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Bill Mueller knew. In the spring of 2001, Mueller was entering his sixth big league season, but in the winter of 1993, he’d been a first-year pro in the short-lived Hawaii Winter League. One of his teammates on the Hilo Stars was 19-year-old Ichiro. He had bat-to-ball skills, fast-twitch athleticism, and a strong outfield arm. A week into his stint in the Islands, Mueller grabbed a pay phone outside his hotel to call his father on the mainland.

“Dad,” Mueller said, “remember this name, because this guy is going to play in the big leagues.”

When Ichiro was posted by the Orix Blue Wave in November of 2000, the Mariners — who were owned by the Japanese chairman of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi — were aggressive in their pursuit. But only three other teams emerged as serious bidders. The New York Yankees, according to one report, did not bid “because they did not see the talent others saw.”

Ichiro arrived in Mariners camp in February of 2001, and the Tacoma News Tribune reported that 97 media members had been credentialed to cover the team’s first full-squad workout; 80 of those credentialed were from Japan. Expectations in America might have been tempered, but the attention in Japan was immense.

In the beginning, the skeptics were winning. Early in Spring Training, Ichiro hit almost everything to the left side of the infield. By March 9, he was batting just .200 and even his double off Kerry Wood had been a groundball down the third-base line. Mariners third baseman David Bell would later tell the New York Times that Ichiro “looked overmatched at times.” Upon retirement, Ichiro himself acknowledged hearing many chants of “go back to Japan.”

“Accustomed to the breaking balls that dominate the pitching patterns in his native Japan,” wrote one columnist, “Suzuki has appeared overmatched by high-velocity fastballs in Cactus League games.”

But Ichiro’s teammates liked him. Like Mueller in Hawaii, they were seeing Ichiro up close, day after day. And seeing was believing. Having lost Ken Griffey Jr. and then Alex Rodriguez in consecutive offseasons, the Mariners had rebuilt their lineup around veteran hitters like Boone, John Olerud and Edgar Martinez. Ichiro fit in with that group. He was charming and funny, he didn’t mind being the butt of a joke, and he was meticulous in his preparation.

The most infamous Ichiro story of that spring happened in late March when his batting average had climbed into the .300s, but he was still hitting almost everything on the ground to the opposite field. Exasperated, manager Lou Piniella finally asked Ichiro if he ever pulled the ball. Ichiro gave a nonchalant answer — “Sometimes” — and that afternoon launched a home run to right field. When he got back to the dugout, Ichiro asked Piniella, “Is that what you were looking for?” Piniella told Ichiro to do whatever he wanted for the rest of spring training.

“He wasn’t this young player grinding, trying to impress anybody,” Boone said. “He was very sure about what he was doing.”

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Before Ichiro came to America, Whiting assumed he was finished writing about batting averages and stolen bases. An American author based in Tokyo, Whiting had written three books about Japanese baseball — and he would later write a book about Ichiro — but his most recent work in 2001 was Tokyo Underground, a story of gangsters and criminals.

Whiting was working on a sequel when a Japanese magazine asked him to write an article predicting Ichiro’s move to the Major Leagues. Whiting used the pitcher Hideo Nomo’s transition as a guide and came up with something like a .285 average with 11 home runs and 25 stolen bases.

“Some stupid formula I dreamed up,” Whiting said. “It was a total disaster.”

Back in America, Tom Tippett had a similar assignment. As creator of the Diamond Mind Baseball simulator, Tippett used his proprietary algorithm to write annual season previews for ESPN. In April of 2001, that meant predicting Ichiro’s rookie season. Conventional wisdom said that Japanese baseball was comparable to Triple A, so Tippett took Ichiro’s past three seasons, deflated the numbers as he would for a minor leaguer, and wrote that Ichiro would hit .290 in a pitcher-friendly park like Safeco.

“Truth is,” Tippett wrote, “we don’t know whether the Japanese leagues are in fact comparable to AAA ball, and we don’t know much about their ballparks, though we suspect they are a little smaller than ours.”

In a few years, Tippett would have an extensive NPB database and a job in the Red Sox front office, but in 2001, he was searching the internet for Japanese statistics and entering them by hand. He didn’t even know how far away Japanese ballparks kept their fences. The lack of hard data added to the intrigue. The lack of precedent fueled the uncertainty.

Ichiro finished that spring with a .325 average. He stole three bases, but hit for little power and rarely bunted. As the Mariners were about to break camp, one newspaper columnist wrote that Ichiro “found out this spring exactly what an inside fastball is.” Another asked: “Is Ichiro Suzuki as good as his Japanese resume suggests, or will he be overmatched by power pitchers who can knock him back off the plate?”

The Mariners had been clear about their expectations. “He can do everything but hit for power,” general manager Pat Gillick said. San Francisco Giants manager Dusty Baker and Oakland A’s manager Art Howe also spoke highly of Ichiro’s potential, and New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza raved about his home-to-first quickness. Los Angeles Dodgers pitching coach Jim Colburn — who had previously coached in Japan and scouted Ichiro for the Mariners — was among the most outspoken believers. But even Colburn had his limits.

“No one is expecting him to hit .350,” Colburn told the Los Angeles Times.

Seven months later, the Mariners had won 116 games, and Ichiro was the American League Rookie of the Year and MVP. His batting average: .350.

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When Ichiro won his first NPB batting title in 1994, he was profiled by both the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Nomo had not yet arrived in America, and each outlet pondered the possibility of Ichiro becoming the first Japanese star to come stateside.

“As long as the ball is thrown by a human being, I have the confidence to hit any pitch,” 20-year-old Ichiro told the L.A. Times. “But I’ve never even thought of playing in the major leagues. If I did, I’d probably only hit .250.”

He was either being modest, or he was off by 100 points.

In Japan, Ichiro hit with elaborate mechanics often compared to a pendulum. As the pitcher began his delivery, Ichiro would balance entirely on his left leg, rocking his right leg up, back and over the plate. He would pause before sending his entire body toward the ball.

In America, the pendulum became more of an exaggerated toe tap. The approach was less extreme, but Ichiro still hit such that he was sprinting out of the left-handed batters’ box from the moment he made contact. He almost certainly was not the fastest player in the majors — Boone suspects he wouldn’t have beaten Mariners center fielder Mike Cameron in a foot race — but Ichiro went from home to first like no one else in the big leagues. Veteran infielders couldn’t play with their usual sense of rhythm.

“You know how many times I saw Miguel Tejada field a ball and throw it?” Athletics starter Mark Mulder once told The Ringer. “Well, he fielded it differently when Ichiro hit it.”

In his major league debut, Ichiro went hitless in his first three at-bats — two groundballs and a strikeout against Tim Hudson. But he singled off two different relievers in the late innings. He then went 0-for-4 in his second game.

Ichiro was hitless only once in his next 39 games. He finished the season leading the majors with 242 hits and 52 steals. It remains one of the great rookie seasons of all time.

Tippett never published his full projection for Ichiro’s debut, but he looked it up this month. His model projected a .363 on-base percentage and .449 slugging percentage, an .812 OPS that was close to Ichiro’s actual .838.

“In terms of his overall player value,” Tippett said, “it’s not an outrageously bad projection.”

Its only glaring misses were Ichiro’s batting average and stolen bases, two stats that define very few modern players, but numbers essential to Ichiro’s legacy. His ability to hit and run were, of course, a product of his speed and bat control, but also of his daring, his confidence and his self-awareness.

As he took the field on April 2, 2001, the rest of Major League Baseball was unsure what to make of him, but Ichiro — the pioneer, the iconoclast, the Hall of Famer — knew exactly who he was.

(Top illustration of Ichiro: Tom Hauck / Allsport, Sporting News via Getty Images; Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic)