Depending on who you ask, Ichiro Suzuki is about to break Pete Rose’s Major League Baseball hits record. But Rose himself definitely will not give you that answer.
Suzuki is approaching the 3,000-hit mark in MLB, but he also has 1,278 hits from nine seasons in the Nippon Professional Baseball League in Japan. If you count his numbers from his home country with his 2,977 MLB hits, that puts Suzuki at 4,255 hits, only one hit shy of Rose’s all-time MLB mark.
Rose doesn’t like that Japanese news outlets are reporting about Suzuki as the new “Hit King.”
“It sounds like in Japan they’re trying to make me the Hit Queen,” Rose told USA TODAY Sports on Tuesday. “I’m not trying to take anything away from Ichiro, he’s had a Hall of Fame career, but the next thing you know, they’ll be counting his high-school hits.
“I don’t think you’re going to find anybody with credibility say that Japanese baseball is equivalent to Major League Baseball. There are too many guys that fail here, and then become household names there, like Tuffy Rhodes. How can he not do anything here and hit (a record-tying) 55 home runs (in 2001) over there? It has something to do with the caliber of personnel.”
While no one is saying the NPB is at the same exact level as MLB, it’s definitely incorrect to judge it the way Rose did. And Marlins manager Don Mattingly agreed.
“It’s hard to compare, but it’s a lot of hits no matter how you slice it,” Mattingly said. “We’ve had a number of Japanese players come over and be really successful. To say it’s minor-league and major-league numbers, that’s not quite fair.
“The fact is that he’s going to have 3,000 hits here, and to have all of those hits in Japan, too, tells you how special he is. The hits over there are hits against good quality pitching, basically major league-caliber players, so they’re legitimate for sure.”
What really matters is what Suzuki thinks, and he’s not about to get into the debate.
“I would be happy if people covered it or wrote about it, but I really would not care if it wasn’t a big deal,” Suzuki said. “To be quite honest, I’m just going out and doing what I do. What I care about is my teammates and people close to me celebrating it together, that’s what’s most important to me.”
Thumbnail photo via David Kohl/USA TODAY Sports Images
