Ichiro amazed me once again last night in the Mariners 3-2 win over the Yankees. He beat out a routine infield ground ball for a base hit late in the game — a typical sight in his career. Then, he did what everyone knows he could do more often if he wanted to: slugging a home run to win the game in the 9th… against Mariano Rivera.

Ichiro, for the most part, is a slap hitter. He might be the only hitter in baseball who can be described as a pure linear hitter, a system of hitting that has been out-of-favor since the mid-1980’s. It was a style of hitting that worked well back then when half the stadiums in baseball featured fast artificial turf. Just hit the ball hard on the ground and it might roll through the infield and past the outfielders and right to the wall. That doesn’t work anymore now that nearly all stadiums are grass, with the exception always being Ichiro. He relishes those ground balls that die on the infield grass because he goes from the batters box to first faster than anyone in the game.

The major downside of linear hitting is the lack of power that comes with it. While it’s true that Ichiro is not a power hitter in the sense that he doesn’t hit 45 home runs every season, he’s shown that he has the ability to take his unique hitting style and use it to hit the ball for power. There are few hitters in baseball who can put balls out of the part more consistently during batting practice than Ichiro. Anyone who’s been to a Mariners game early has seen Ichiro put on a hitting clinic, launching ball after ball into the seats. He doesn’t do it that often in games because he doesn’t want to adjust his swing plane to hit more fly balls. He could gain more home runs, and some believe he could be a 40 home run/year hitter, but he’d lose all those infield hits that he collects during a season. When you’ve got speed like Ichiro, turning that infield single into a run is routine, ho-hum work.

What the Mariners needed last night was not an infield hit from Ichiro. With a runner on first base and two outs, and infield hit would have move the tying run into scoring position, but even assuming the next batter can hit .300 against one of the best relievers in the game (and that’s one hell of an assumption), that still gives the Mariners a less than 1 in 3 chance of being able to tie the game, and even longer odds of winning the game right there in the 9th inning. The Mariners needed Ichiro to hit for power, and he made the adjustment and did it? Does this validate linear hitting? Absolutely not. It just proves that Ichiro possesses superior skills compared to most major league hitters today and probably all major leagues who were linear hitters back in the 70’s and 80’s. Ted Williams, a proponent of the prevailing rotational hitting method used by most hitters in the modern game, hated the linear hitting style with a passion, but I think even he would be impressed with what Ichiro has done with it.

Tags: ichiro, linear hitting, rotational hitting, seattle mariners, ted williams