As of this writing, the leadoff hitter for the dismal Seattle Mariners is on pace to finish the season with 256 hits. The Major League single season hits record is held by George Sisler, who collected 257 hits in 1920. Since 1930, only one player has surpassed 240 hits in a season: Ichiro, with 242 in 2001 (Darin Erstad hit exactly 240 in 2000, and Wade Boggs did the same in 1985). Even if he doesn't break the single season record, Ichiro is likely to finish with the largest hit total in 75 years - a pretty historic feat.
However, Ichiro has only 28 extra base hits among his 182 total. He does not accumulate many walks. He is simply a tremendous slap hitter with the fastest legs in the game (who also happens to be the best right fielder, too). The question arises: how valuable is Ichiro? How good is he?
In the age of Moneyball, we are told to value guys who get on base and hit a lot of home runs. Ichiro gets on base 40% of the time - good enough for seventh in the AL, but for the major league leader in batting average, seventh is seen as a disappointment. Critics say Ichiro should take more pitches and walk more. But Ichiro likes to hit; try telling baseball players that the point of their game is not to hit the ball, but instead to not make outs.
The statistic most associated with the new values in baseball is OPS: On base plus Slugging. While useful as a crude measure of player value, OPS is deeply flawed for two related reasons. First, the statisticians agree that on base percentage is more important relative to slugging percentage. Second, slugging percentage, due to the way it is calculated, is always higher than on base percentage, so the latter is weighted negatively in the OPS cocktail.
Why is on base percentage so important? Because it represents the ratio between the number of times a player comes to the plate and the number of times he makes an out. Forty percent of the time, Ichiro Suzuki does not make an out. Since outs are the only scarce resourse in baseball, conserving them is tantamount to winning (so goes the theory of baseball espoused by Bill James, Billy Beane and the like). If you never make an out, you score an infinite number of runs.
However, all non-outs are not the same. They fit into two categories: walks and hits, and not all hits are the same, either. The more bases one reaches as a result of their hit, the better. This truism is quantified in slugging percentage, which is the quotient of total bases divided by at bats. While having a disappointing OBP, Ichiro's slugging percentage is a downright mediocre .438 (good for 51st in the league out of 77 everyday players), because he almost exclusively hits singles. His OPS totals .838, which leaves him tied for 30th in the American League, out of the 79 players who qualify.
Since OPS is considered the best statistical estimate of a hitter's value, is it safe to say that Ichiro, in a year where he leads the league in batting average, hits, and stolen bases, is at best in the top 38% of hitters in his own league? Clearly such a conclusion represents a failure to capture the worth of a baseball player in numbers alone. Numbers often contradict other numbers, and Ichiro's potential hit total of 250+ refutes any system that ranks him 30th out of 79 players. As he has said time and again, Ichiro is "very rare." In fact, Ichiro is so rare he shatters any scale previously devised to calculate a ballplayer's worth. In an inhuman age that attempts to quantify everything, this is perhaps Ichiro's greatest accomplishment. He leaps out from the box scores and announces his humanity, his inability to be expressed in numbers alone.
As a means to getting on base, a hit is generally better than a walk. A walk requires a pitcher to consume four pitches; the more pitches he throws to each hitter, the fewer hitters he can face, the more quickly he will tire, and the less effective he will be. However, a hit represents motion. On contact, the hitter can reach extra bases, something not possible from a walk. Additionally, a runner can score from second base on a hit - even a single - while a walk has no potential for his advancement. Perhaps, with enough number crunching, we can determine how much more valuable any given hit is compared to any given walk, and thus can compare the value of batting average to on base percentage to slugging percentage, letting us devise a more accurate metric for player worth. No matter - such a statistical feat would represent the kind of post-hoc rationalization that serves to reinforce what we already know: that Ichiro is one of the game's greatest hitters.
