Regarding On This Day in Ichiro

If you don’t regularly check our game charts, you may have missed a feature we’ve (usually) been including this year: a celebration of a feat accomplished by Ichiro on that day. The terrific idea from Lou Fish-Sadin complements the Mariners year-long tribute to Ichiro, beginning with his throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at the home opener and culminating with this weekend’s induction of Ichiro into the Mariners Hall of Fame.

Ichiro was a paragon of consistency, as we’ve seen from the fact that he did something spectacular on every calendar day. As the primary researcher for OTD Ichiro, I’ve found out a lot of things that I didn’t know, such as that:

• He has the franchise record for ending the fewest percentage of his plate appearances in a double play;
• At the time of his 37th lead-off home run, that was the sixth-most all time;
• He had a knack for delivering on his bobblehead day; and
• He had the best 60-game stretch for a pure hitter since Ty Cobb.

And I’ve loved digging into his history against great pitchers, like his back-and-forths with his star-crossed opponents, the other 51, Randy Johnson, and his competitor for 2001 Rookie of the Year, CC Sabathia.

But the most remarkable thing about OTD Ichiro has been the number of incredible box scores that have not made it into the series. Seemingly every day, there’s an Ichiro-being-Ichiro 2 for 5 with a stolen base, but that happened on a day with a must-include web gem, late-inning heroic, or memorable quip.

So to kick off induction week, here’s a list of all the OTD Ichiros we’ve had so far. And we’ll publish an updated list at the end of the season—the best stuff is yet to come. The latest entry is today’s:

OTD Ichiro, 2015: He hits his farthest-hit ball of the Statcast era, a 432-foot, game-winning home run off Aaron Nola. It was his also highest career wRC+ for a single game: 1188.