Twins manager Paul Molitor has told the story several times through the years. The story of how he and the Mariners tried to make Ichiro Suzuki a pitch-taking, on-base percentage machine in 2004, Molitor's one year as Seattle's hitting coach.
Suzuki tried to embrace the approach — and was batting .255 toward the end of April.
"Shows you how great a hitting coach I was," Molitor said in 2016. "That lasted about three weeks. Then I said, 'Forget everything I told you in spring training.' It wasn't working. And then he took off."
And finished with a record 262 hits. It was Suzuki's fourth year in Major League Baseball, and he was already among its biggest stars. And his star shined brightly throughout a career that ended on Thursday when he transitioned into a role as a special assistant with the Mariners. He didn't say he was retired, leaving open the possibility that he could return to Japan next year for one final victory lap as baseball's greatest international star.
And he did it his way. With a slight leg kick that generated no power. By hitting the ball to all fields then activating his blistering speed, speed that forced infields to shift before shifting was a thing.
He has 3,089 hits in Major League Baseball and 1,278 in the Japanese Leagues for a world record 4,367.
He did not draw a lot of walks. He walked a career high 68 times in 2002, but averaged 43 a year from 2001-2012. There were three seasons in which he actually stole more bases than walked.
He did not strike out. He averaged 68 strikeouts a season during that same time frame.