There’s a debate Japanese baseball has been dancing around for years: can Shohei Ohtani‘s 2024 season — 54 home runs, 59 stolen bases, a 1.036 OPS, the first 50-50 player in MLB history — actually push Ichiro Suzuki off the throne as the greatest Japanese player to ever play in the big leagues? A tweet from @hitotonoya1_00 that racked up 392,000 impressions laid out a historical Japanese MLB «Best Nine» and put the numbers right on the table. Those numbers deserve a straight answer.
The Best Nine: Four Seasons That Speak for Themselves
The «Best Nine» concept comes from NPB, where the best player at each position is honored every season. Applied to Japanese players in MLB history, the ranking selects each player’s single best individual campaign. Four entries are visible in the tweet, and they’re more than enough to get the debate going.
- Ichiro Suzuki, RF — 2004 Seattle Mariners: .372 average, 262 hits — an MLB record that shattered George Sisler’s mark set in 1920 — and an .869 OPS.
- Shohei Ohtani, DH — 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers: .310 average, 54 home runs, 130 RBI, 59 stolen bases, 1.036 OPS.
- Hideki Matsui, LF — 2004 New York Yankees: .298 average, 37 home runs, American League All-Star selection.
- Seiya Suzuki, CF — 2026 Chicago Cubs: .270 average, 26 home runs, 86 RBI, .841 OPS — the best offensive season of his MLB career.
The tweet cuts off before positions five through nine. We’re not going to invent them. What we can do is dig into what’s already on the table.
The Ohtani Case: The Most Dominant Season Any Japanese Player Has Ever Had
Putting Ohtani’s 2024 in context takes just one number: an OPS+ of 190, meaning he hit 90% better than the league average that year. His 9.2 bWAR translates to nearly ten wins above a replacement-level hitter. He became the first player in MLB history to finish a season with 50-or-more home runs and 50-or-more stolen bases — he did it with 54 and 59 — and he won the National League MVP award unanimously.
Ichiro’s 2004 is extraordinary in its own right. His .372 average led the league, and the 262 hits broke a record that had stood for 84 years. But his highest-WAR season wasn’t actually 2004 — it was 2001, his MLB debut year, when he won both the MVP and Rookie of the Year with a 7.8 bWAR. The Best Nine picks 2004 for the raw batting numbers, and that makes sense: it’s Ichiro’s most visually stunning season. Still, when you look at total value, Ohtani’s 2024 — 9.2 WAR as a pure hitter alone, not even counting his mound work in previous years — is statistically the highest peak any Japanese player has ever reached in a single MLB campaign.
Matsui built a rock-solid career — 175 home runs, 760 RBI, a 118 career OPS+ and the 2009 World Series MVP — but he never had an individual season that could compete with Ichiro or Ohtani in total value.
Seiya Suzuki 2026: The Freshest Entry in the Conversation
The most recent addition to the Best Nine is also the most surprising. Seiya Suzuki closed the 2026 regular season hitting .270/.368/.473 with an .841 OPS, 26 home runs and 86 RBI in 545 at-bats — his best offensive campaign since joining the Cubs. His average exit velocity of 88.6 mph and a 10.7% Barrel rate explain why his power finally caught up to the contact skills he’s always had.
Over five MLB seasons, Suzuki now has 113 home runs and a .269 career average. He’s not in the same historical conversation as Ichiro or Ohtani — not yet — but his spot on the Best Nine confirms that Japanese talent in MLB is a living, breathing current, not just a nostalgic footnote.
The Verdict
The broader debate over who is the greatest Japanese player in MLB history doesn’t have a clean answer, because Ichiro and Ohtani are measuring completely different things. Ichiro redefined what a contact hitter and baserunner could be over an entire decade. Ohtani is a phenomenon modern sports had never seen before.
But the question of which Japanese player had the single most dominant season? That one’s settled. A 1.036 OPS, the first 50-50 in history, a unanimous MVP. The 2024 numbers speak for themselves.
