A Hall of Fame case does not get built in the same way, or out of the same things, as a legend. There are plenty of Hall of Famers who managed to build compelling cases, in the methodical and accumulative way that such cases are built, without throwing off much in the way of mythos along the way. They get plaques, too, and deserve them. They also accrue the same, inevitable sort of legend that every big leaguer attracts on the way up; everyone who ever faced Scott Rolen in high school could and probably will tell you about the experience, just as my former coworker who once served up a 450-foot homer to Orlando Hudson in a college game would invariably bring it up when even a narrow window of opportunity opened. I should be clear that I think this is absolutely the right thing to do. Even a marginal big leaguer would, just in terms of their talent for the game, appear more or less like an alien being to civilians sharing the field with them; by definition, there is no such thing as a prosaic Hall of Famer. But some of them are just kind of Scott Rolen.
Others are different, and of those only one is Ichiro. During a long and remarkable career on two continents, Ichiro made himself maybe the most obvious Hall of Famer of his generation; a legend, which is much larger and more austere than the man himself, grew up around him in turn. The case is the case: Ichiro has more hits than anyone in the history of the sport, with 3,089 of those coming in his 19-year MLB career. His 262 hits in 2004, right around the middle of his 10 straight 200-hit seasons, set a big-league record that feels highly unbreakable; his 242 hits as a rookie are the 10th-highest single-season total in MLB history, and every season between him on that list happened between 1911 and 1930. Ichiro was one of the best hitters in the sport for a long time, and great in a way that very few hitters have ever even really been good. "He kept the bat in the strike zone for so long and was able to manipulate the ball where he wanted," Ryan Vogelsong told The Athletic in 2020. "You’ve seen him shank them into left field, dropping the barrel inside and hitting those humpback liners. Those are bat-control skills you can’t teach."
