It’s amazing that, at age 38, this is really the first time we’ve ever asked if we’ve seen the end of Ichiro Suzuki as we’ve come to know him. That’s what happens when you fail to record 200 hits for the first time in your 11 year career, when your .272 average appears on the third page of the Fangraphs leaderboards and when your career 11.0 Ultimate Zone Rating (a fielding metric) drops to -5.7. Is Ichiro done or was last year just one of those seasons we thought Ichiro was immune to?
To answer this question (number 96 in our Top 100 Offseason Questions series), I’ll start with a pretty telling stat, then mix in a few defensive stats and finally finish with my favorite Ichiro-related stat.
Isolated Power (ISO)
Several years ago, before the A’s got good under Billy Beane’s watch, no one really cared that much about on-base percentage (OBP). Then the A’s started winning, people began to realize the value of and/or care about the stat and nowadays it’s commonplace next to a hitter’s batting average, home runs and RBI on in-game player graphics when a batter steps into the box. ISO is where OBP was 10 years ago. People are starting to reference it, but it hasn’t gone mainstream.
ISO is pretty awesome because it does a really good job of looking solely at a player’s power in terms of total bases. Ichiro has a career ISO of .096, not very good by any means by virtue of his tendency to rack up the singles, but he’s actually topped .096 in just one of his last six seasons. This past year he posted a new career low, .064. He also set a new low for home runs with just five. Ichiro’s ISO has been trending down since 2009, but that’s not surprising for a 38 year old.
Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR)
Now, normally I try to constrain my analysis here to just fantasy-related stats, but since our goal here is to evaluate whether or not Ichiro’s skill set has decayed past the point of no return, I’m going to include defensive stats as well. That’s where his -5.7 UZR comes in to play. To see just how out of the ordinary that number is, take a look at Ichiro’s career UZRs:
- Source: Fangraphs.com
That -5.7 UZR was well below his previous career worst of 4.9 back in 2005. If we expand our look at Ichiro’s fielding we also see his ARM rating declining each year since 2006 before a slight improvement this season and his RngR (range rating) falling into the negatives for only the second time. Long story short, Ichiro has been in defensive decline for three or four years now. When players age they begin to lose their quickness. These numbers show that loss of quickness in the field, but 2011 was the first time we saw it at the plate.
Batting Average on Ground Balls
Ichiro is known for two things offensively: his ability to put the bat on the ball and the speed he displays down the first base line. Despite the fact that Ichiro rarely sees pitches in the strike zone anymore, his contact rate remains high and his strikeout rate remains low. He hit ground balls 59.9 percent of the time last season, the second highest rate of his career, but it’s not an insanely high number given his career 56.1 percent ground ball rate. However, for a player that’s losing his quickness, a ground ball rate that high can be lethal.
The chart below shows Ichiro’s stats when he hits ground balls. The stats start in 2002 since that’s when Fangraphs began tracking these numbers.
- Source: Fangraphs.com
Ichiro’s .260 average on ground balls was a new career worst last season. He also set a new career high for times grounding into double plays (11). Combined with his fielding stats above, this is very solid evidence that Ichiro’s all-important speed is rapidly regressing.
The End Is Here
It pains me to write this since I’ve been a fan of Ichiro for as long as I can remember, but we aren’t seeing any more 200-hit seasons from the future Hall of Famer. He did post 40 steals last season, which is a good sign that he’s smart enough on the base paths to still post elite stolen base totals, but gone are the days where he can be counted upon for a .320-plus average and 100 runs. The lack of runs these last few seasons is more an indictment of the Mariners’ anemic offense than Ichiro’s inability to score, but Seattle won’t have a good major league offense again before Ichiro decides to retire.
I do believe that 2011 was a down year even by 38-year-old standards, though. We won’t see Ichiro flirting with an average in the .260s this September, but I’d be a little surprised if he hits .300 again. This is an on-the-spot projection (wait for our inaugural spring draft guide for our real projections) but 85 runs, a half dozen homers, 35 steals and a .285 average are what I expect out of Ichiro this season. It’s not the Ichiro we’ve known for a decade, but it’s not bad as your third fantasy outfielder.
Though I like Ichiro, I have no great attachment but I think your analysis is when accurate misses a key point. Ichiro’s performance will be a random walk around a trend which declines with time. In other words, as he ages his good times won’t be quite as good as they were in his youth and his bad times will be worse than the bad times in his youth. The only thing is last year showed was exactly that. Ichiro has had bad years previously with last year being a little worse than his previous down years. To give you two examples, you say that his zone rating was terrible. True but 2010 was one of his best years. This nearly mirrors the year to year change from 2006 to 2007. Factoring in some skill decline this is by no means then abnormal. Same thing for batting average on groundballs. 2010 was about as close to an “average” Ichiro year as there was. In fact he had a larger year to year decline between 2004 and 2005. If we accept that Ichiro’s performance is a random walk around a given trend and that his skills decline with age, it is more likely that 2011 was simply a down year with a declining skill set. In other words, it was a double whammy rather than an aging ball player who had a good year.
Thanks for the comment, Bat Man. I am willing to acknowledge your point about his zone rating in 2010 and I wholeheartedly agree that 2011 was a down year with a declining skill set. I agree with this point so much that I even said it in the post above (first line, last paragraph): “I do believe that 2011 was a down year even by 38-year-old standards, though.” Perhaps you didn’t get that I was saying that I think Ichiro should improve from 2011. Perhaps I should have been clearer about that. Either way I do still think we are at the point of serious decline because you can see his defensive stats eroding almost yearly with the exception of 2010. If you made me choose whether 2010 was more an “up” year or 2011 was more a “down” year, I’d go with the former (2010 being “up”). For the sake of Mariners fans and those who enjoy watching the game played the right way, I hope 2012 is more like 2010. Again, thanks for reading!
the game played the right way? I seem to remember more than once that this player bunted for a hit with a man on second and 2 outs. Now that is just selfishness or stupidity, take your pick. By advancing the man to third he is making it somewhat easier for him to score on a hit, although there are very few non-infield hits that will score a runner from third that won’t also score him from second. The main thing he is doing is making it much easier to get that third out on a sharply hit ground ball that otherwise would be an infield hit, because now there’s the force at second available. In short he’s getting the hit for himself, since the infield is playing back, and leaving it to the next guy to drive the run in. You can keep this guy, not a team player.