Sometime in the next week or so, Ichiro Suzuki will stroke his 4,000th hit as a professional baseball player. Thanks to our romance with round numbers, this is considered something of a big deal. Ichiro, always different, whether in his batting stance, his sartorial choices or his marvelous way with words, tends not to think this way.

“Every hit is a gift,” he told me in a 2005 interview, and he wasn’t being flip or dismissive. One of the wonders of Ichiro, who himself is one of the wonders of modern baseball, is how the art of hitting means more to him than the numbers themselves. About six months before we spoke, he had broken George Sisler’s single-season record by lashing an inconceivable 262 hits. The entire episode left him nonplussed. He didn’t celebrate. “It was more just, ‘OK,’ ” he said.

To Ichiro, his latest hit, No. 3,994, served more as a reminder that he is getting closer to the end of a career with a finite number of hits in it than to an arbitrary number deemed important because it is less crooked than the rest. He will leave the reveling to others, thank you, and others gladly will partake of it. Hell, some hope they’re directly involved.

“I want him to get the 4,000th hit off me,” Boston Red Sox closer Koji Uehara said. “I’ll throw it down the middle. That way I can leave my name in history.”

Uehara was joking, of course. Well, for the most part. He’s not going to groove Ichiro a fastball like Chan Ho Park did Cal Ripken in the 2001 All-Star game. But Uehara could face Ichiro this weekend, as the Red Sox host the New York Yankees, and five times this season Ichiro has logged six hits over a series of three games. And the mere possibility of one Japanese ballplayer intertwining himself with perhaps the greatest the country ever produced legitimately excited Uehara, even if he is just one year younger than Ichiro, more a contemporary than a minion.

“He’s practically God,” Red Sox reliever Junichi Tazawa said.

Almost every Japanese baseball fan sees Ichiro with that combination of respect, admiration and reverence. From spirit to skills, Ichiro is the archetypal Japanese baseball player, someone who through hard work, repetition and intelligence maximized his physical skills and amalgamated them into what we still see even as he approaches his 40th birthday: A lithe machine built to hit singles, which he’s got more of (2,203) in MLB than all but 16 players – each of whom played at least five years longer in the major leagues than him.

With most, there is little grandeur in the base hit. Ichiro made the single seem much cooler and more productive than it actually was. He always wasn’t overrated or overpaid inasmuch as he was glorified for the wrong reasons. His all-around game – the wizardry in right field, the deftness on the basepaths – was almost as great as his ability to poke base hits to every part of the field. It’s just that a .331 batting average, as Ichiro had in the big leagues through 2010, looks as pretty as it sounds.

Over the last three seasons, it has dipped to .320. His legs have dragged, his infield hits lagged, his power sagged, and he isn’t even a league-average hitter anymore. He’s got nine three-hit games this season; he had 34 in 2004. Though friends believed Ichiro would play well into his 40s, barring a turnaround 2014, his productivity may keep him from regular at-bats, and that marginalization may send him home.

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