Ichiro, Grounded

Ichiro Suzuki is a singular talent. He is fast, seeming to fly all over the outfield. He steals bases with great success — 45 while being caught only twice in 2006. He has a legendary cannon for a right arm. And he hits like a machine. He racked up over 2,000 hits in his first nine major league seasons, and was the second fastest to that milestone (to Al Simmons, who reached it in 12 fewer games). He does not hit many home runs or a particularly impressive number of doubles or triples. He piles up his hits by putting the ball on the ground and running to first base. Joe Posnanski recently explored Ichiro’s hitting prowess, coming to the conclusion that he is one of the few truly unique players in history.

What if Ichiro were slow? What type of player would he be if he were not able to knock out so many ground ball hits? For one possible answer to this question, I compared the rate at which Ichiro reached base on ground balls to the American League average. Baseball Reference lists batting average splits by hit trajectory, and I compiled the league numbers from 2003 through 2009. The league statistics for the first two years of Ichiro’s career, 2001 and 2002, differ significantly from the next seven, possibly due to different methods of categorizing ground balls. I omitted those two years, as well as this season’s small sample. During the seven seasons from 2003-2009, American League players consistently reached base at a .240-.245 average on grounders. Ichiro beat the average in every year, with a high of .368 on ground balls in 2007.

To get an idea of what type of player Ichiro would look like without all those extra hits, I normalized his ground ball hit rate to the league average for each season and recalculated his batting totals. This adjustment cost him 42 hits in 2007 and 44 in 2004, and no less than 14 in any of the seven seasons. For simplicity, I removed only singles from his batting line. I then searched for a player with career statistics similar to Ichiro’s adjusted totals and came up with an interesting candidate. The following table displays Ichiro’s statistics over the past seven years (again, discarding 2001 and 2002) without his extra ground ball hits, side by side with Curt Flood’s career averages.

Table: Curt Flood versus Adjusted Ichiro Statistics Per 600 Plate Appearances
	Adj. Ichiro	Curt Flood
Doubles	19	23
Triples	6	4
Home Runs	8	7
Walks	37	38
Strikeouts	56	53
Average	.291	.293
OBP	.338	.342
Slugging	.391	.389
OPS	.729	.732
BABIP	.313	.314

This adjusted version of Ichiro is a near statistical clone of Flood, who played center field in the 1960s for the Cardinals. Flood was also a great fielder, winning gold gloves in each of his last seven full seasons. He is most famous, however, for starting a chain reaction that led to the free agency system when he refused a trade to the Phillies after the 1969 season. It marked the effective end of his career at just 31, as he played only 13 games in a comeback attempt in 1971. Despite now being inextricably linked with baseball labor history and not often mentioned for his playing ability, Flood was actually a surprisingly valuable hitter. He played in the offensively-challenged 1960s and was significantly above average with the bat for most of his career. Ichiro’s adjusted stats, in today’s era of power and on-base percentage, would be far less impressive.

Of course, this is all merely a thought experiment. Ichiro probably does have some control over where he hits the ball, as his New York Times profile explains. FanGraphs’s Jack Moore also explored Ichiro’s propensity to hit grounders to the opposite side of the infield at an abnormal rate. Thus, simply removing some of Ichiro’s hits does not show us the player he would actually be if he were not so fast. If he could not get on base so often on this type of batted ball, it is likely he would adjust his approach and that his numbers would reach a different equilibrium. What removing all of the extra singles does show us is just how much value those ground ball hits supply. Without them, Ichiro’s numbers look fairly pedestrian, especially in the era in which he has played. With them, Ichiro is Ichiro, and he will go down as one of the greatest and most dynamic hitters in baseball history.

This article originally ran at Ball Your Base.