Another Hall of Famer?

I was just wondering about this guy I've been hearing so much about, plays for the Mariners, this Ichiro character. Saw him play once on tv. Looked exciting... I wandered over to baseballreference.com to see if there was anything to the hype.

Holy crap! This guy's awesome!

Baseball Reference really does all the work for you. For example, they compute Bill James' Black Ink Test for you, which assesses the probability that someone will go into the Hall of Fame based on the number of times they lead the league in various offensive categories. On this test Ichiro scores a 32 - the average Hall of Famer scores a 27. How'd he do that? Well for one thing he's been #1 or #2 in hits in the American League every year since he joined the Mariners.

Well, no sophisticated sabermetrician would cast a Hall of Fame vote based on just one indicator, so let's compute James' Gray Ink Test, which is based on how often the player is in the top ten of various indicators. Ichiro looks good here with 100, but is not in the HOF zone yet - average Hall of Famer has 144.

"Oh come on, these are weak preliminaries," I hear you say. "James developed a comprehensive formula for rating Hall of Famers - compute it or GTFO." Um, let's see...add 6, carry the one... Ichiro gets 33.1. The average Hall of Famer (whose career has been completed, of course) is around 50. So Ichiro is on track, but maybe not there.

Of course James did develop a metric for assessing whether active players were likely to meet the above criteria by the end of their careers, the famous HOF Monitor stat. Basically, if you can score 100, you're on your way to the Hall if you can keep performing at this level for a while. Ichiro's at 180.5.

So the James stats say the guy's already on the cusp - he's already done enough that he could be considered a low-range Hall of Famer. Like, if he played in New York or something he'd probably get in eventually. But he'd need to do more to be a lock.

But James' statistics are very generic, and really don't take into account Ichiro's uniqueness as a ballplayer. Most Hall-of-Famers were power hitters in the context of their times, especially in the modern era, and stats based on historical inductions reflect this. But this isn't Harmon Killebrew we're talking about. Ichiro's not an RBI man. He's a guy who can get on base and scoot (top 10 in runs scored every year in the League).

But how good is he? In his original Historical Abstract, James distinguished between peak value (the level of achievement in the best 3- or 4- year stretch of the player's career), and career value, which is the area under the curve. It's obviously too early to compute career value, and that's where most of the HOF stats above are coming from. But the Hall of Fame case is much easier to make if we can say this guy's peak (which we have probably already seen) is exceptionally high.

So, I thought, let's compare him to others of his species. Who are some good speed players we could compare him to? After neutralizing stats, here are the career offensive won/loss percentages (explanation here) of some premier speed players of the past couple decades (all stats neutralized):

• Maury Wills: .481
  
• Willie Wilson: .514
• Willie McGree: .528
• Brett Butler: .587
• Lou Brock: .598*
• Ichiro Suzuki: .616.
• Rickey Henderson: .660*
• Tim Raines: .665+

* Denotes Hall of Famer, + denotes likely Hall of Famer.

So he's right there. He's a very very good baseball player. His game is based on speed, but his accomplishments are genuinely additive to his team's offense. Some aggressive baserunners run themselves in to outs and hurt their team (Steve "Psycho" Lyons: .390). But Ichiro is the real thing. The only knock on him is that he doesn't generate enough power to allow him to rise to the level of a Raines or Henderson. This is not a sin, exactly, but it's a problem. If he played shortstop he'd be a shoo-in, but an outfielder is held to a higher offensive standard. Yes, Ichiro's very good, but probably not quite good enough to be admitted to the Hall solely on the basis of peak performance.

So he needs to clock in some more years of doing the same things - leading the League in hits, making the All-Star team, scoring runs.

The only problem is his performance dropped off noticeably last year (OWP of .559 was the lowest of his career). He's 36...we may be nearing the end of the story.

Still, I can think of three big points in his favor that might get him in even if he falls short on some of the historical criteria:

• He did all this smack in the middle of the steroid era. He managed to be a valuable speed player in the most power-inflated baseball environment of all time.
• He was/is pretty unique - there really is no one else in his generation who has been able to do what he has done.
  
• He had a couple (NINE) years in Japan before he got here, and played very well there, too.
  

If we do it today he gets my vote, but it's a tough call.