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What makes Ichiro Suzuki the most important MLB player of the 21st century

Despite his outstanding numbers, they don't even begin to tell the full story of his impact on the sport of baseball.

Seattle Mariners v Oakland Athletics | Masterpress/GettyImages

Baseball is often seen as a quantitative sport. Thanks to the popularity of Moneyball, Sabermetrics, and Statcast, we often find ourselves boiling down players and their careers into a bottomless pile of numbers.

OPS, xwOBA, DRS, UZR, SIERA – the list of funky metrics to define an aspect of an individual's performance is nearly endless and more come out with each passing year.