Ichiro 4000 Hits RT

I'm hoping he falls short the first time he's on the ballot. Just to screw with Japanese baseball which goes to great lengths to try and prevent gaijin players from tying or breaking Japanese baseball records.

 

Jigger Statz: Hall of Famer?

 

Well he wasn't eligible since he only played eight seasons, so no.

 

You mean the greatest franchise in the history of sports doesn't sell out games with the best fans in the world when they aren't winning?

Color me shocked. Probably part of it has to do with the fact that "cheap seats" don't exist in Yankee Stadium.

 

No but Jagger Meister would have been if he wasn't a drunk.

 

Rose, Cobb, Aaron, Statz, Musial, Ichiro.

It's an impressive achievement because Ichiro played a lot of 130-game seasons and, well, playing for 22 seasons at any high level of baseball is pretty damn good. It's not the same as Rose and Cobb getting 4,000, obviously, but it will be on his Hall of Fame plaque.

Two other things about that list - Jigger Statz's numbers are inflated because he played 18 seasons in the Pacific Coast League when they were playing 200-game seasons, and two guys are missing some hits. Hank Aaron's 44 hits in the Negro American League aren't counted, and Ichiro spent most of 1992 and 1993 in the Japanese minors. That's probably another 300 hits. If we're going to count professional hits, we might as well count everything.

 

Aaron also had 324 hits for Eau Claire and Jacksonville in 1952-53.

 

Those are counted on the Baseball Reference list, as are everyone else's minor-league hits. The only things not counted are Aaron's Negro League hits and Ichiro's Japanese minor-league hits. I guess that technically, Cobb's hits for his three months in the 1904 Tennessee-Alabama League are also missing. We could argue about counting a semi-pro league that only existed for one season, but it doesn't matter, since no one has ever found a source of stats from that league.

And, of course, on a list where they are counting hits that Spencer Harris got at the age of 47 in Class D, they didn't bother to count postseason hits.

 

But what about post-retirement hits:

 

More hits than Sadaharu Oh:

 

Nice pull.

 

Ichiro got his 4000 th hit tonight