Ichiro Suzuki, Minnie Miñoso, and the ever expanding 4,000 hit club (and research team)

FEBRUARY 13, 2025 — A dozen years ago, I wrote an article for SABR.org about Ichiro Suzuki’s achievement of reaching the 4,000-hit milestone over the course of his career in Japan and the United States. It was, as it should have been, A Very Big Deal — a genuine source of baseball joy, an acknowledgement of the talented left-handed hitter’s incredible abilities and staying power. What Ichiro accomplished during an illustrious career that landed him in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2025 captured the fans’ imagination.

In the weeks leading up to Ichiro’s historic base hit in the summer of 2013, the anticipatory coverage triggered some moderate controversy. A sizable chunk of Suzuki’s first 4,000 career hits — 1,278 to be exact — were recorded while he was a member of the Orix Blue Wave in Japan’s Pacific League. Some diehard Pete Rose fans (and perhaps some Ty Cobb admirers, too, if such folks exist) pointed out the obvious: Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball is not considered the same caliber as “our” Major League Baseball. No kidding. But that criticism missed the point and deflected from Ichiro’s noteworthy accomplishments. A player who reaches 4,000 hits in any professional baseball environment — in any country, in any era — exists in rarified air. Making this particular point was the goal in writing my original article in 2013.

The 4,000 Hit Club is small, but not as miniscule as many folks may have assumed. Using the Ichiro loophole, where we acknowledge the hits collected in other professional environments and combine them with those from the highest levels, we were opening a new paradigm. It was a new way to appreciate sustained greatness by some of the most accomplished hitters from the game’s history. And by expanding our purview, we have discovered some surprises along the way.

Having made my bones as a member of the Seamheads Negro Leagues research team, rebuilding never-before-seen stats and making them available online, I had been sitting on a curiosity which remained mostly dormant until Suzuki began making headlines. Minnie Miñoso, the hard-hitting Cuban star of the 1950s (and ’60s and ’70s and ’80s and …), was most likely already a member of the all-professional 4,000 Hit Club that Ichiro was on the verge of joining. This fact remained unknown to most baseball fans at the time.

Miñoso began his playing career in the mid-1940s in his native Cuba before coming to the United States to play for the New York Cuban Stars of the Negro National League. After Jackie Robinson knocked down baseball’s racial barrier, Miñoso was signed by Cleveland and did a brief tour of duty in the US minor leagues before making his American League debut in 1949. After winding up his American League career in 1964, the outfielder-third baseman played another ten years in the Mexican League. He was just shy of 50 years old when he stopped playing regularly.

Since Miñoso played year-round for decades in Latin American winter leagues, if one included his totals in those leagues, he would have already cracked the 4,000-hit barrier. In my original article, I had Miñoso credited with 4,073 hits, but this number has gone up considerably thanks to some additional super sleuthing by some baseball friends (more on them momentarily). Minnie Miñoso is now credited with 4,471 career hits, good for fifth place on the all-time list.

Much has changed during the past dozen years. Suzuki was recently elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, falling just one vote shy of becoming the institution’s second unanimous selection. And Miñoso, the longtime fan favorite who had fallen short of Cooperstown on multiple occasions, was finally enshrined in 2022, after a special committee took fresh appraisal of the man’s accomplishments and bestowed the honor. I’m not sure if the SABR article highlighting Miñoso’s 4,000 career hits helped his case, but it probably didn’t hurt.

The other big development since writing the original piece is the scope of the 4,000 Hit Club. Amazingly, in just one decade of research, this exclusive group has now doubled in size. My initial research included just nine players, but today we count no fewer than 18, with a few others coming up just short (for now) pending further research. 

Only one of these new members — Bobby Abreu, who hung up his major-league cleats after the 2014 season — has played any baseball during the last 30 years. The remainder are longtime retirees, some well-known and others more obscure, for whom new base hits have been unearthed. Many of these hits were also compiled in Latin American winter leagues, like Miñoso. These hits push their career totals over the magical 4,000-hit barrier. Hall of Famer Tony Pérez is now part of this club, as is Mexican League home run king Héctor Espino.

How did we get here? Teamwork, that’s how. While Club 4K has doubled in size during the past dozen years, the number of researchers on the case has tripled, as two like-minded baseball obsessives have joined the cause, breathing new life into the pursuit. Adam Darowski, the Executive Director of Design at Baseball-Reference.com, and Von Spalding, an independent researcher from Georgia, have rolled up their sleeves and sussed out new data from playoff series, winter leagues, minor-league All-Star games, and other obscure corners of professional baseball.

Darowski grew up a Red Sox fan, began seriously researching baseball in 2007, and joined SABR in 2013 before landing his dream job with Baseball-Reference a few years later. He became much more interested in learning about the “outsider” history of the game, especially after his involvement with the integration of Negro League stats at Baseball-Reference in 2020, right around the time the segregated associations were designated as “major league.” As detailed in my book Outsider Baseball, outsider baseball is the world of independent professional leagues and teams that operated outside the jurisdiction of Organized Baseball. This includes the Negro leagues and Latin American baseball, plus some outlaw white leagues and independent professional teams such as the Brooklyn Bushwicks.

Darowski started an Outsider Baseball podcast and later turned heads with his groundbreaking research into the 25th Infantry Wreckers baseball club from Hawaii. The Wreckers were a famous all-Black military team during the World War I era that featured several future Negro League stars, including future Hall of Famer Bullet Joe Rogan, ace infielder Dobie Moore, and star slugger Oscar “Heavy” Johnson. Darowski built an online website to house the stats he compiled for these obscure teams and players. Eventually, his research morphed into a personal quest to add to the All-Time Hit List (as well as All-Time Win List for pitchers), focusing heavily on the unrecognized greats from the Negro Leagues and Latin America.

Spalding grew up in Richmond, Indiana, a small town located about an hour north of Cincinnati, where he listened to Reds games on the radio and watched the Chicago Cubs on WGN. A split allegiance emerged where his two favorite players were Ryne Sandberg and Barry Larkin. His favorite out-of-towners included Nolan Ryan and Paul Molitor. His earliest baseball memory was Game One of the 1988 World Series. Spalding was rooting for the A’s, but when Kirk Gibson limped to the plate, he inexplicably turned to his parents and said, “He’s going to hit a home run here.” And the rest is history.

About two years ago, Spalding began his own research journey, attempting to compile a global leaderboard featuring every player who has collected more than 3,000 career hits, 500 home runs, 300 wins, and 3,000 strikeouts. Combing through historic newspapers and other resources, Spalding has been successful at rebuilding fragmentary minor-league data and uncovering hard-to-find Latin American playoff series and winter league numbers. He and Darowski eventually connected and the three of us have shared our research with each other.

So where does the 4,000 Hit Club list stand today? Here is the all-time leaderboard, as of early 2025:

Where will the next dozen years lead? Who might join the 4,000 Hit Club in the not-so-distant future? Let’s all agree to check back in in 2037!

SABR member SCOTT SIMKUS created a Negro League card set for the Strat-O-Matic Game Company in 2009. His first book, “Outsider Baseball: The Weird World of Hardball on the Fringe,” was published in 2014. A member of the award-winning Seamheads Negro Leagues Database team, Simkus’s statistical research is now part of the official Major League record.