Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) and Major League Baseball (MLB) star Ichiro SUZUKI -- who helped the Japan National Team win the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classics -- will apply his legendary skill-set and experience to coach high school baseball in his native country.
The Japan Student Baseball Association is making an exception for SUZUKI, considering the former superstar is an instructor for the MLB Seattle Mariners and the rules don't allow professionals to coach in amateur baseball in Japan.
"High school baseball is baseball, MLB is a contest. It's mainly about how far you can hit the ball and that's hardly baseball," SUZUKI recently said. "High school baseball is very exciting. I hope that I can give something back to the baseball world."
SUZUKI went through a formal Japanese education as a coach in late 2019 and was certified in February 2020.
The school where SUZUKI will serve as a temporary coach has not been disclosed. According to the daily Asahi Shimbun, it has won the National High School Baseball Championship at least once.
SUZUKI has 4,367 hits combining his NPB (1,278 over 9 seasons for the Oryx Blue Wave) and MLB (3,089 over 19 seasons for the Seattle Mariners, New York Yankees and Miami Marlins) careers.
Only 32 players achieved 3,000 career hits in the history of MLB. Two of them surpassed the 4,000 milestone: Pete ROSE at 4,256 and Ty COBB at 4,191.
There's only one player in the history of NPB who surpassed the 3,000-hit milestone: Isao HARIMOTO, who reached 3,085.
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