In the bottom of the eighth inning of the April 15, 2001, game between the Oakland A’s and visiting Seattle Mariners, A’s outfielder Terrence Long bounced a leadoff single up the middle off Aaron Sele. The second batter, Jeremy Giambi, flew out to short center, but the next man up, Ramon Hernandez, put Long in motion with an opposite-field grounder to right field. Presumably liking his chances, Long, after a modest secondary lead, read the moment and was in full gallop before the ball had left the infield. He hit the second-base bag in stride and rounded for third.
Out in right field, the rookie charged Hernandez’s hit, scooped it just outside his left foot, coiled across his body, and uncurled his arm into the throw. What was about to happen was made more unlikely by the fact that the player had just recently entered the game. In the top half of that eighth inning, he pinch-hit for ninth-place hitter Charles Gipson, laced a single off Jim Mecir, took the extra base on Mark McLemore’s single, and scurried home on Mike Cameron’s groundout. Going into the home half of the frame, he stayed in the game in right field, which led to all the above. “You just don’t see a guy throw like that all the way in the air, when it’s cold as hell, when he’s been sitting for seven innings,” teammate Jay Buhner would say after the game.
The heave reached third baseman David Bell on the fly and snapped into the pocket of his glove just below knee level over the middle of the bag — perfect placement for the tag just ahead of Long’s left foot.
We speak, of course, of the singular Ichiro Suzuki, the newly minted Hall of Famer who was one vote short of being the second-ever unanimous inductee in Cooperstown, and what’s become known as “The Throw”:
It’s too convenient to say the above was how Ichiro announced himself to American baseball fans. Coming into that contest in Oakland, Ichiro had 12 hits in his first seven MLB games, and he was five days removed from his first MLB home run (a go-ahead homer to deep right in the 10th inning against Texas). He was already grabbing us by the lapels. Numberless Ichiro signature moments were yet to come — his breaking of George Sisler’s 84-year-old single-season hits record in 2004; his 2005 robbery of Garret Anderson; his inside-the-park home run in the 2007 All-Star Game; his 2009 walk-off homer off Mariano Rivera, who had converted 36 straight opportunities at the time; his 2010 hit against the Blue Jays that made him the first ever to tally at least 200 hits in 10 straight seasons; his 2012 four-hit game against the A’s back in his native Japan; his 3,000th MLB hit (a triple) in 2016; his 27 hits in 19 career postseason games. That’s of course not an exhaustive list.
The Throw, though, happened so soon after his arrival in the U.S. major leagues and seemed to hint at so much of the Ichiro experience to come that it lodges in our minds as reflective of a larger reality. It was a play that provided a strobe-lit glimpse of Ichiro’s broad-based excellence as a player, his richness as an entertainer, and the surprising and even pioneering nature of his success. All of that, all of Ichiro, was writ small within that moment in Oakland. It was a perfect play — one you and I are still talking about a quarter-century on — and it was a moment of quick-twitch explosiveness from a player many of us doubted in advance, a player perhaps generously chronicled at 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds. It was an instance of connoisseur’s baseball that the Mariners, recently deprived of the towering talents of Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez, would reprise again and again on the way to 116 wins that season.
2025 Baseball Hall of Fame voting results: Ichiro Suzuki elected alongside CC Sabathia, Billy Wagner
Matt Snyder
As this unforgettable baseball presence called Ichiro receives MLB’s highest honor, let’s take a moment to look back at his career at the highest level of baseball. My colleague Matt Snyder has already explored Ichiro’s Hall of Fame case through the prism of his statistical attainments, and, yes, our two in-house Hall of Fame voters — Snyder and Mike Axisa — each put Ichiro’s name on their respective ballots for this year. With the numbers amply covered, that leaves two planks of his greatness — how Ichiro did what he did and why it mattered so much.
How he did what he did
We’d be remiss if we didn’t wander into this blessed cornucopia. It wasn’t “just” his career WAR of 60. It was how Ichiro arrived at it, the forking paths he took to get there. It was the extent to which his personality, no less distinct than his playing style, burnished the mythology and legend of Ichiro.
As a player, Ichiro was a “counterprogrammer” of sorts — meaning he was quite a bit different from the prevailing baseball prototypes of the time. Ichiro arrived in MLB at a time when the power game was ascendant, somewhat newly so, and power was accordingly and quite rationally coveted by front offices, often at the expense of other baseball skills. In that 2001 season, when Ichiro won the American League MVP Award as a 27-year-old rookie, he hit eight home runs. The remainder of MLB hitters combined to hit 5,450. Barry Bonds hit 73, the single-season record that still stands. Sammy Sosa hit 64. Luis Gonzalez and A-Rod each topped 50, and a total of 12 hitters (including Phil Nevin) hit 40 or more homers. Teams in 2001 averaged at least a home run per game for just the eighth time in MLB history, and they topped 1.1 homers per game for just the third time ever. Meantime, the decline of the stolen base from peak modern levels in the 1980s continued apace. Anecdotally, defense seemed to be entering a period of de-emphasis across the league as power and on-base skills became the most sought-after merits in position players. Standing athwart all of this was Ichiro.
Physically, he looked like a wispy, glove-only shortstop from a bygone era. Indeed, he was the smallest MVP in terms of physical stature since Joe Morgan in 1976. Somewhat relatedly, he was the first MVP since Pete Rose in 1973 to hit fewer than 10 home runs. Adding to the oddity of it all is that Ichiro manned right field, a position typically the province of those hulking sluggers common to his time. No, he could not compare to those peers when it came to in-game power, but his propensity to amass hits, his standout fielding, his excellence on the bases, and his dogged durability (he made exactly one trip to the injured list in his career) allowed Ichiro to build a many-splendored package of overall value — one that places him among the greats of his times.
Above you’ll note the qualifier “in-game power.” This gets at what’s become a reliable Ichiro subplot over the years — that he had much more pop than he let on. You’ve no doubt encountered variations on “Ichiro could’ve hit more home runs if he wanted to.” True or not, it likely traces back to this repartee between Ichiro and his first manager, Lou Piniella, during his very first spring training. ESPN’s Tommy Tomlinson wrote:
“Pull the ball, son, he said. Being Lou Piniella, he might have used stronger words.
“Ichiro listened and nodded. The next time he came up, he jacked a home run into the right-field bullpen. Piniella met him in the dugout to shake his hand. Ichiro looked at him and said: Happy now?”
The story of Ichiro’s hidden power grew tentacles, which themselves grew. In 2007, when asked why he didn’t hit more home runs, he said: “If I’m allowed to hit .220, I could probably hit 40 (homers). But nobody wants that.”
Ichiro was likely joking to some extent, but his seeming confidence that his lack of power was at heart a matter of personal druthers rather than ability would become part of the Tale of Ichiro. Others, of course, helped that tale along. Ichiro’s batting-practice displays of power became part of the lore and kindled the idea that Ichiro could do what other elite hitters were doing if only he cared to. In the summer of 2016, no less a power authority than Bonds — he of the aforementioned 73 home runs during Ichiro’s rookie campaign — said that Ichiro, who was then 42 years of age, could be Home Run Derby champion if only he desired to be laureled as such. Bonds was at that time Ichiro’s hitting coach with the Marlins, so he spoke with some level of authority. In retirement, Ichiro at age 50 added to the legend by committing this sky-scraping act of hitting vandalism:
Ichiro, though, wasn’t such a hitter, at least after “play ball” was bellowed, and, truly, thank the jurisdictional gods for that. His swing — undertaken only after a long counterclockwise revolution of the bat followed by a liturgical tug of his right sleeve — was a loopy, leaky, slow-seeming, and at times amateurish kind of thing that made each dribbler hugging the line or humpback oppo knock look more improbable than it already was. It was a swing that, for good or ill, once inspired this writer to scrawl a poem about it:
Ichiro’s swing
The front leg bends back like a bough
Before it snaps in a boy’s hands.
The cleats stomp shallow hollows into the clay
As the belt buckle rolls toward sundown.
The elbow strokes the ribs,
The bottom arm locks tetanus tight.
The bat digs for the roots, scatters spadefuls
As though to bury, under
Leans and levers and skylarking,
The rudiments that came before him.
Divorced uncles who brush their teeth in kitchens
Will declare it unfit for emulation —
This three-part harmony of scimitars.
Moments before the conspirator whispered,
Make it look like an accident.
Ichiro’s swing, while it didn’t yield eye-catching power numbers, did afford best-in-class contact and hordes of hits. This is a hitter who batted .350 and racked up 242 hits as a rookie. This is a hitter who, at age 30, out-hit the league batting average by more than 100 points. (Aside: This is a hitter who, at age 35, came to the plate 678 times yet hit into only one double play all year.) Had Ichiro reached the U.S. majors at a more customary age, he might have topped 4,000 hits in MLB — in addition to maybe reaching 700 steals and running his Gold Glove total up to 15 or so. Whatever Ichiro’s swing wasn’t good for, it was good for lots of hits and lots of Ichironess. Perish the thought of losing any of that anywhere along the way.
We’d be remiss if, in the course of this dialogue about the “how” of it all, we didn’t appreciate that all the while Ichiro was a quotesmith of the first order. You’ll no doubt recall that Shohei Ohtani not so long ago owned the viral space by declining to disclose the name of his dog for longer than seemed reasonable. In doing so, though, Ohtani was merely honoring the models of the past. In 2001, Ichiro, not long after he arrived in the U.S., was asked the name of his dog at a press conference. He declined to say. “I do not have the dog’s permission,” Ichiro explained.
Ichiro would later credit his dog, whose name was eventually revealed to be Ikky, with persuading him to remain with the Mariners after his first few seasons in MLB. There were, of course, many more quips, slivers of lucidity, and offhand condemnations of the American Rust Belt. Such as:
“It’s not surprising. At the same time, it’s not that usual. It’s somewhere between usual and surprising,”
And:
“If I’m in a slump, I ask myself for advice.”
And:
“To tell the truth, I’m not excited to go to Cleveland, but we have to. If I ever saw myself saying I’m excited going to Cleveland, I’d punch myself in the face, because I’m lying.”
There’s more — enough to, without exaggeration, fill a 192-page book.
Why it mattered
All these years on and after Ichiro authored so many moments and the prevailing greatness that landed him in the Baseball Hall of Fame, it’s easy to forget the uncertainty and pointed doubts that heralded his arrival in MLB. It’s likewise easy to forget that he blazed a vital trail for the Japanese position players to come after him.
Ichiro was posted for MLB teams after nine seasons in NPB during which he won seven league batting titles and a trio of MVP awards. However, because no position player had ever made the leap from NPB to MLB and because of Ichiro’s unimposing stature and play style that some decision-makers decided wouldn’t translate, the market for his services was much softer than it should’ve been. The Mariners eventually won the bidding with a $13 million posting fee paid to Ichiro’s team in Japan, the Orix Blue Wave, and then a three-year, $14 million pact with the player himself.
The Mets also had serious interest in Ichiro, as did the Dodgers and Angels. In the end, though, Ichiro’s relationship with Jim Colborn, a Mariners scout who had served as Orix’s pitching coach during Ichiro’s tenure with the team, proved pivotal. As well, Ichiro was able to work out with the Mariners during spring training in 1999. While the story goes that Ichiro’s cameo left Piniella unimpressed, it laid a foundation of familiarity that was essential when it came time for recruitment. Also helping matters on the Seattle side is that then principal owner Hiroshi Yamauchi, a native of Kyoto, relished the idea of signing Ichiro to be the first Asian non-pitcher in the U.S. majors and was thus a motivated suitor.
All the while, misgivings across the league were widespread, even within teams in pursuit of Ichiro. “We had this internal debate: What do you expect out of him?” Jim Duquette, at the time the Mets’ assistant general manager, said. “I remember seeing video of the swing, and it was like, ‘Eh, is that going to play?’ You just had no idea.”
It’s easy to criticize this as blinkered thinking, but Ichiro was an unknown because we had no evidence of how an undersized hitter from a foreign league would fare in MLB. And he did have a swing that could charitably be described as “aggressively unorthodox.” Just because the doubts turned out to be wrong doesn’t mean they were unfounded at the time. When the Mariners eventually won the right to negotiate with Ichiro through the posting system, the New York Times couched it as “the right to talk to a player few have seen play.”
Even after signing with the Mariners and flashing his baseball skills — including The Throw that in some ways served as his entry point into the baseball zeitgeist — doubts persisted within his own team. “If I said there wasn’t concern among the team,” Ichiro said of those earliest weeks, “I wouldn’t be telling the truth. There were all sorts of views about my performance among the Mariners players then, not just positive opinions. It took longer than the month of April to gain their trust.”
To be a pioneer does not mean to do something that never would’ve happened without you. It means to do something for the first time and by necessity to wear the yoke of being first. It means that how difficult or easy it is for those who come after you hinges on what you do and how you do it. If Ichiro had not been the first hitter from Asia to appear in the U.S. major leagues, then someone else would’ve. History would have been delayed, though, and preconceptions would’ve persisted for longer. Because Ichiro thrived in defiance of his style and stature, more conventional hitters making the leap — hitters like Hideki Matsui, Seiya Suzuki, and, yes, Ohtani — did so with fewer barriers and doubts. That matters. That still matters.
Rare is the player who becomes known by just a single name. It takes more than “mere” statistical greatness to achieve such cultural renown. It takes importance, and it takes an imprecise and know-it-when-you-see-it je ne sais quoi. Babe had those three things, as did Jackie and Rickey. Ichiro, too. Indeed, Ichiro has been Ichiro since early in his NPB career, when the Blue Wave announced him as such when he came to the plate instead of using his surname, which to their estimations was too common in Japan and thus not evocative enough for a marvel like Ichiro. It stuck, you know.
The proper pronunciation of Ichiro is EE-chee-roh, with an accent on the first syllable. Ichiro, though, is of and for the people, so it’s best to hear his name as though chanted in unison by throngs of fans: I-CHI-RO. Each of three syllables is accented, none more important than the remainder. If you’ll permit an admittedly tortured metaphor, the three accented syllables of his chanted name are the three planks of his greatness — the numbers, the style, the importance — none ultimately more important than the others, at least when it comes to matters of Ichironess. He’s a Hall of Fame because of all of it.
So all together now: I-CHI-RO! I-CHI-RO!
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