"In this most brutal of Mariners seasons, Ichiro is that rarest of commodities — a player actually doing his job.

While the team crashes and burns around him, he just keeps pounding out his hits, the usual mixture of exquisitely placed line drives and maddeningly slow rollers that can't quite be converted into outs.

For the 10th straight year, Ichiro has reached 200 hits, a standard of excellence that can be written down in ink each February. Heck, you can etch it on a plaque and send it to Cooperstown.

His metronome-steady output has reached the iconic status of a Seattle archetype — the rain, the coffee, the flying fish at the Pike Place Market, and Ichiro's 200 hits.

With his fifth-inning single Thursday in Toronto off Blue Jays starter Shawn Hill, Ichiro matched Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader, with 10 seasons of 200 safeties. No one in baseball history had ever had 10 in a row, until now. No one, in fact, had gone nine straight until Ichiro. No American League player has ever had more than nine 200-hit seasons in their career, with Ichiro leaving no less than Ty Cobb in his wake.

Furthermore, Cobb needed 24 seasons to record his nine years of 200 hits, and book-ended them in an 18-year span (1907-24). Rose also played for 24 years, and achieved his 10 years of 200 hits in a 15-season stretch (1965-79)."