Ichiro Saved One Last Surprise For Cooperstown

A Hall of Fame case does not get built in the same way, or out of the same things, as a legend. There are plenty of Hall of Famers who managed to build compelling cases, in the methodical and accumulative way that such cases are built, without throwing off much in the way of mythos along the way. They get plaques, too, and deserve them. They also accrue the same, inevitable sort of legend that every big leaguer attracts on the way up; everyone who ever faced Scott Rolen in high school could and probably will tell you about the experience, just as my former coworker who once served up a 450-foot homer to Orlando Hudson in a college game would invariably bring it up when even a narrow window of opportunity opened. I should be clear that I think this is absolutely the right thing to do. Even a marginal big leaguer would, just in terms of their talent for the game, appear more or less like an alien being to civilians sharing the field with them; by definition, there is no such thing as a prosaic Hall of Famer. But some of them are just kind of Scott Rolen.

Others are different, and of those only one is Ichiro. During a long and remarkable career on two continents, Ichiro made himself maybe the most obvious Hall of Famer of his generation; a legend, which is much larger and more austere than the man himself, grew up around him in turn. The case is the case: Ichiro has more hits than anyone in the history of the sport, with 3,089 of those coming in his 19-year MLB career. His 262 hits in 2004, right around the middle of his 10 straight 200-hit seasons, set a big-league record that feels highly unbreakable; his 242 hits as a rookie are the 10th-highest single-season total in MLB history, and every season between him on that list happened between 1911 and 1930. Ichiro was one of the best hitters in the sport for a long time, and great in a way that very few hitters have ever even really been good. "He kept the bat in the strike zone for so long and was able to manipulate the ball where he wanted," Ryan Vogelsong told The Athletic in 2020. "You’ve seen him shank them into left field, dropping the barrel inside and hitting those humpback liners. Those are bat-control skills you can’t teach."

The uncanniness of this—the rude fact that Ichiro could and would simply do whatever he needed to do against any pitch that any pitcher could throw—is part of where the legend comes from. It is the nature of baseball that even a very good hitter like Ichiro does not have the odds in his favor during an at-bat, with those odds moving from one pitch and situation to the next. The extent to which Ichiro seemed immune to that, and both willing and able to meet and beat basically any pitch on its own terms, was another thing that made him seem like an extraterrestrial. To be that calm about this objectively overwhelming task, to not just behave as if this incredibly complicated thing was really very simple but to make it look that way, felt like a category error. His at-bats looked different than other players' at-bats because he was a better hitter than basically anyone else, but also because Ichiro seemed to be aiming for and doing something very different during them.

That Ichiro is from Japan, and mostly did not communicate with the American media in English, surely did a lot of work here, too. There are, even in the best profiles written about him, a lot of silences left exactly where Ichiro wanted to leave them, and which writers tend to fill in with stuff about the bushido code or Ichiro's brutal and exacting father. But the idea that all this difficult stuff really wasn't that hard for Ichiro was both borne out by watching him and fundamental to the legend. Around Ichiro's retirement in 2019, ESPN's Tim Kurkjian relayed a story from Ichiro's first spring training with the Mariners, in 2001, that begins with him hitting one soft single to left field after another, "as if he were overpowered."

Lou Piniella, the impatient manager of the Mariners, asked him, "Can you do something other than hit it over there?" Ichiro responded, "Yes, I can hit it really hard over there [to right field], if you like." To which Piniella said, "Then hit it really hard over there."

This feels too simple by half, especially as an explanation for how Ichiro hit .350 in his first big-league season, but more than that it scans like one of the stories that would be told about the other, pre-television guys on that single-season hit record list. The game was different then, and so were the standards for what kind of stories people were willing to tell and believe about ballplayers. The idea, then, was to make them appear both bigger and simpler than they probably were, to make ballplayers characters in a big, bright, outsized story. Most people in America would never see any of those players play; only some of them would ever even be described on radio where fans could hear it. That element of imagination was essential to the bigger project because it was the only way that pretty much anyone who cared about baseball would ever experience much of it.

Because of what he kept to himself, and because of how singular and strange his skills were, Ichiro inspired that sort of imagining even in a moment in which more and more was knowable and known about baseball players. You could watch him play and still find yourself doing it. Even Vogelsong, who was being interviewed by The Athletic because he held Ichiro hitless over the course of his career and who was famous for his freakish ability to recall in-game situations, seemed not to know how he'd done it. "You might be able to high-velocity him every once in a while and knock the bat out of his hands, but you always had to be trying to move his feet off the plate a little bit," Vogelsong said.

"You had to go up and down. And when you threw a sinker or changeup to him, it absolutely had to be at the bottom of the strike zone. Because anything up, even a little bit, those are the balls he hammered. Up and away, he shoots it to the 6-hole and it’s a knock. Looking back, I probably threw some of my better changeups to him. Those groundballs were sinkers and changeups, bottom third. Guarantee it. I probably did a good job standing him up, backing him off and keeping him honest. Took a lot of luck, too."

A lot of Ichiro stories revolve around things that he could do very well but mostly chose not to do for reasons of his own. One was that he could hit homers with ease in batting practice, but showed little interest in trying to do it during games; he just preferred to hit his way. Another was that Ichiro could speak English both filthily and well, and frequently did, but just didn't want to do it to the media. (He also reportedly learned to speak Spanish so he could talk shit to Latin players.) My favorite of the Ichiro sub-legends in this case involve the legendary speech, always in English and always hilariously overstated and profane, that he would give to the American League locker room before every All-Star Game. Yahoo Sports wrote about this in 2008, when Ichiro was preparing for his eighth All-Star appearance. (Players were cagey about it, beyond acknowledging that it was real. "I didn't know he knew some of the words he knows," Justin Morneau said.)

There are a couple of secrets being kept in that All-Star speech story, with the English language facility being the least interesting to me. It was known that Ichiro could speak English and chose not to; plenty of players are more comfortable that way. It's the glimpse of the sense of humor that it affords, not just in terms of using dirty words—"we don't really have curse words in Japanese," Ichiro told the Wall Street Journal in 2014, "so I like the fact that the Western languages allow me to say things that I otherwise can't"—but in terms of the absurdity of bringing that wild register to that inconsequential moment. When Ichiro revealed to Bob Costas, in one of his rare English-language interviews, that his favorite English phrase was "August in Kansas City is hotter than two rats in a fucking wool sock," it was funny not just because that is a funny combination of words, but because of how Ichiro sets the reveal up with a series of sighs and straightenings and pauses; he puts a little button on it by saying "I'm a bad teammate" at the end of it. He had the right to keep this secret, too, but the idea that Ichiro was out there messing around with the English language in something like the same ways that he messed around with hitting a baseball was tantalizing.

When Ichiro was inducted to the Hall of Fame on Sunday, it was less noteworthy that he made his speech in English than that he spent much of it doing a comedy routine. The concept, for much of it, was doing something like a version of Michael Jordan's psychotic score-settling Hall of Fame induction speech in a comic mode, with Jordan's undiminished rage at like Bryon Russell shaded into comic overstatement. It was, often, legitimately funny.

In Wright Thompson's 2018 profile of Ichiro for ESPN, he is something of a tragic figure—a brilliant athlete refusing to accept the end of a career, half-imprisoned by the routines and perfectionism that made him the player he was, but which also left him at arm's length from himself and others in his life. "I'm not normal," Ichiro tells Thompson; the editor made it a pull-quote. This is more or less a reasonable diagnosis of someone who is soon going to have to stop doing the things that he has done every day of his life until that point; it is, at any rate, a part of the story that Ichiro chose to show to this particular writer. Thompson writes about it that way: "Deviations can untether him. Retirement remains the biggest deviation of all. Last year, a Miami newspaperman asked what he planned on doing after baseball. 'I think I'll just die,' Ichiro said."

I personally would read this as a joke, but it's dark and terse enough to read any number of other ways. This is also part of what makes a legend: leaving some room for wonder, and the element of surprise.