Ichiro

We're rarely going to mention an AL player (an oxymoron) in this blog, but I've been thinking about Ichiro Suzuki, and the incredible season he had in 2004. 262 hits, .372 BA, but most impressive for a fantasy player with a high average, an incredible 704 AB's.

Those kind of quality at bats have an incredible effect on BA. I ran some figures on the 2004 Pickled Pecklers batting average to see what kind of an effect Ichiro would have had. Our base numbers were:

AB's 6225
Hits 1677
BA .26940

Not very good, but not totally horrible either.

To see the effect of Ichiro, we backed out JD Drew's BA stats and added in Ichiro's. Now Drew had a career year last year, hitting .305 with 518 AB's and 158 hits. Subtracting Drew and adding Ichiro, our team BA went up from .26940 to .27780, over 8 points! That would have been worth 5 points in BA alone.

We took it a step further. We backed out Drew and added Barry Bonds, who hit .362, albeit with only 373 AB's and 135 hits. Our team average only moved up to .27204. So Bonds improved us 2-1/2 points in BA, meaning his 362 wasn't worth that much more than Drew's 305 with more at bats.

Then we went one more step. We backed out Bonds' figures and added Ichiro's. Our BA went up to .27517. Substituting Ichiro for Bonds on our team increased our our BA almost 6 points.

That's the power of 704 quality at bats. I wonder if anyone in major league history has had a higher batting average than Ichiro with at least 704 at bats. My guess is no. What an amazing fantasy stat and season he had.