In Mariners icon Ichiro Suzuki, the Hall of Fame welcomes the best 'Hit King'

The Baseball Hall of Fame had gone actual decades without a plaque for an all-time Hit King, but that streak is finally ending today. Ichiro Suzuki is taking his place in Cooperstown with 4,367 professional hits to his name, which some will argue is the all-time record.

Granted, to frame the discussion in this way is a blatant cop out. It is making a virtue of neutrality. A hotter take would be to just go ahead and label Ichiro the all-time Hit King, whether anyone likes it or not.

I'm not doing so out of respect for Pete Rose. This is perhaps the lone context in which the late Cincinnati Reds icon deserves it, even if he stuck to a life-long pattern of never taking the high road when he chimed in on Ichiro's pursuit of his MLB record 4,256 hits back in 2016.

“It sounds like in Japan," Rose told Bob Nightengale of USA Today, “they’re trying to make me the Hit Queen. I’m not trying to take anything away from Ichiro, he’s had a Hall of Fame career, but the next thing you know, they’ll be counting his high-school hits."

There has never been a hitting machine like Ichiro, even if he isn't the 'Hit King'

Rose, who passed away at the age of 83 last September, was entitled to his opinion, even if it was crude and self-aggrandizing. And there is a kernel of truth to what he said, as to count Ichiro's 1,278 NPB hits and 3,089 MLB hits as the same is to attempt to clarify an inherently blurry line between MLB and all other professional leagues.

If the fairest course of action is to count all officially sanctioned professional hits as the same, then Rose's total leaps to 4,683 by way of the 427 hits he accumulated in the minor leagues. That puts him back ahead of Ichiro in the Hit King rankings, with Ty Cobb barely behind the latter with 4,355. Rose officially passed Cobb on MLB's all-time hits leaderboard in 1985.

At least for now, though, the mic drop is that Ichiro is in the Hall of Fame and Rose is not. And even if this isn't necessarily a choice on the part of the Hall of Fame and its voters, it feels like the right one anyway.

We all have our personal favorite Ichiro stats, and one of mine is that his career average in MLB never again went below .300 after he improved to 3-for-10 in the third game of his first season with the Seattle Mariners in 2001. Even 2,650 games later, it finished at .311.

Ichiro ended his 2001 season with 242 hits to break Lloyd Waner's rookie record of 223 from 1927. In just his fourth season in 2004, he also broke the single-season hit record with 262, passing George Sisler's mark of 257 from 1920. Ichiro later had a 238-hit season in 2007, which is still the most recent time that any hitter has crossed the 230-hit threshold.

Which brings us to probably my second-favorite Ichiro stat. It's really more like a wall of stats, as here are his annual ranks among all-time hits leaders through his first 14 seasons:

• Year 1: 1st
• Year 2: 1st
• Year 3: 2nd
• Year 4: 1st
• Year 5: 1st
• Year 6: 1st
• Year 7: 1st
• Year 8: 1st
• Year 9: 1st
• Year 10: 1st
• Year 11: 1st
• Year 12: 1st
• Year 13: 1st
• Year 14: 1st

The one exception (i.e., Year 3) is because of Waner, who had 678 hits through his first three seasons compared to Ichiro's 662. Yet for his part, Rose doesn't overtake Ichiro on this timeline until Year 15, when he had 2,966 hits to Ichiro's 2,935. That was when Ichiro was ostensibly winding down in his age-41 season in 2015, though he still had 154 more hits in him even then.

The bulk of Ichiro's hits in MLB naturally came in his first 10 seasons, when he did three things annually: make the American League All-Star team, win a Gold Glove and, of course, hit over .300 with 200-plus hits.

Only Ichiro and Rose have ever had 10 such seasons in the majors, and Rose's did not happen consecutively like Ichiro's did. And even if he reached 200 hits in only one of them — the NPB season is shorter than the MLB season — this isn't even counting the years in which Ichiro hit over .300 in Japan.

He did so seven years in a row between 1994 and 2000, a span in which .342 was the lowest his average went in a given season. Add those seasons to his first 10 in the majors, and he experienced a truly epic run in which he hit over .300 for 17 years in a row.

Rose never did anything like that. And if you set the bar at 450 plate appearances per season, even Cobb never did that. Ditto for Tris Speaker and Stan Musial, who are the only other hitters to bat over .300 in as many as 17 major league seasons.

As Ichiro was only 20 years old in that first season for Orix in 1994, there's an unavoidable "What if?" that concerns what he could have done if he had somehow made the leap to MLB straight out of his high school years in Japan. Hypothetically, he could have gotten to 3,000 hits as soon as his 14th season, whereas Rose needed until the 16th out of his 24 seasons to get that far.

We'll obviously never know, but today is nonetheless a day for Mariners fans and Ichiro Suzuki fans the world over to celebrate what we do know. This is that Cooperstown is better today than it was yesterday, as anyone who is curious about what it takes to be a Hit King only needs to seek out Ichiro's plaque.