Major League Baseball great Pete Rose is unimpressed by the looming prospect of seeing his all-time hits record surpassed by Miami Marlins outfielder Ichiro Suzuki.
Suzuki stands just one hit behind Rose’s major-league record of 4,256 hits, a pursuit of history that is being followed avidly in his native Japan.
However, Rose is adamant that the fact that 1,278 of the hits were accumulated in Japan places an asterisk against the total.
Photo: AFP
“It sounds like in Japan, they’re trying to make me the Hit Queen,” Rose told USA Today on Tuesday. “I’m not trying to take anything away from Ichiro, he’s had a Hall of Fame career, but the next thing you know, they’ll be counting his high-school hits. I don’t think you’re going to find anybody with credibility say that Japanese baseball is equivalent to major-league baseball. There are too many guys that fail here, and then become household names there, like Tuffy Rhodes. How can he not do anything here, and hit 55 home runs [in 2001] over there? It has something to do with the caliber of personnel.”
Suzuki, 42, has 2,977 hits in Major League Baseball since arriving at the Seattle Mariners in 2001 from the Orix Blue Wave.
He told USA Today he is indifferent about the buzz in Japan over his hits total.
“I would be happy if people covered it or wrote about it, but I really would not care if it wasn’t a big deal. To be quite honest, I’m just going out and doing what I do,” Suzuki said. “What I care about is my teammates and people close to me celebrating it together, that’s what’s most important to me.”
Marlins manager Don Mattingly took issue with Rose’s suggestion that Japan’s professional baseball league was inferior to MLB.
“It’s hard to compare, but it’s a lot of hits no matter how you slice it,” Mattingly said. “We’ve had a number of Japanese players come over and be really successful. To say it’s minor-league and major-league numbers, that’s not quite fair. The fact is that he’s going to have 3,000 hits here, and to have all of those hits in Japan, too, tells you how special he is. The hits over there are hits against good quality pitching, basically major league-caliber players, so they’re legitimate for sure.”
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